Comment
Comment Launch and Leave So-called smart bombs are no longer smart enough to carry out the death wishes of the U.S. military. "In a move to boost American capacity to wage modern warfare," Reuters...
...The relinquishing of the tax code as a tool of economic and social policy will only feed the most narrow and short-sighted impulses of the private sector...
...But a change can provide a signal, a symbol, a time for reflection...
...Amid the tax-reform euphoria, it should be remembered that not every provision in the tax code is a loophole, not every intervention in the marketplace a blunder...
...This worked reasonably well as long as the courts were liberal, but it was always—at bottom—a democratic end run...
...You're identified immediately as a V.I.P.," says the recent mail solicitation...
...Both men appear to be savvy, personable, conservative ideologues who know how to shape their interpretation of the facts of a case to achieve the desired result in a legally respectable manner...
...Some recent Presidential press conferences, as augmented, amended, or simply overridden by the White House press office, have yielded no fewer than four conflicting interpretations of current U.S...
...Launch and leave is also an apt term for the dizzying array of contradictory pronouncements on the arms race emanating these days from the Reagan Administration...
...For the most part, wealthy corporations and individuals will no longer be able to slither past the tax collector...
...Guilty as Charged There was a time—and probably still is—when membership in the National Lawyers Guild meant immortalization in the FBI's files...
...For the present, nothing can be done about the Court...
...Just three months prior to suffering spinal meningitis, the House had stood up to Reagan and denied him the aid...
...Still, Betty Ann Marsee could not convince a jury in Oklahoma City that the U.S...
...This is Ronald Reagan's signal triumph: His ritual prayers to the free market have been answered by Congress, which seems to have accepted the President's notion—echoed fervently by Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey—that the market is the most efficient and rational way to allocate resources...
...The demonstrators were protesting visits to Australian ports by nuclear-armed ships...
...The only thing that has changed is the Democratic Party...
...In Glendale, California, twenty-three-year-old Javier Gonzales Alvaredo was shot and killed by three police officers while aiming a television remote-control device at an automobile...
...The group also says, "We're definitely in the 1980s...
...If a precedent were to be set barring from high office those who tell lies and are indifferent to human life, the nations of the world would have few statesmen and no heads of state...
...11 On May 9, 1986, the Ohio Women Take Back the Night March visited the Stag's Book Store in Columbus...
...Brown's parishioners responded by burning record albums, cassettes, and other rock and country paraphernelia—all the while singing "Oh, How I Love Jesus...
...Should they do so, we will certainly take this into account...
...It was beautiful...
...But the legislation leaves a great deal to be desired...
...Casey has not read the galleys of the book, though the day before his inquiries an employee of the National Security Agency called Random House asking for a set of proofs...
...We should use it to think seriously about how to effect social justice and protect our freedoms without relying on the courts to the extent that we have in recent decades...
...Tobacco Road While insurance companies have been shedding crocodile tears over the size of product-liability awards, one noxious industry has managed to protect itself just fine in the courtroom...
...Government no longer talks about barring him from this country, the Soviets defended him all along, and even the government of Israel has sent Austria its felicitations...
...Now that the benches have gone conservative, filing a lawsuit may be the last form of action we should take...
...Remnants of difference do surface now and again, especially on domestic policy, but for the most part political debate has been parched and flattened...
...The U.S...
...To be sure, the elimination of taxes for those below the poverty line ranks as the most positive aspect in the entire package...
...There is, after all, no hard proof that Waldheim ever took direct part in Nazi atrocities...
...minimum taxes would be instituted to ensure payment of a sizable bill...
...Provisions of the tax law have long been viewed as ways of restructuring the economy— by granting incentives for certain forms of investment and disincentives for others...
...The Soviet State, like ours, has done its best to discredit its domestic critics...
...A Censor is a Censor Notes from the Front: H The "Number Nine" award goes to the Reverend Jim Brown of South Point, Ohio, who told seventy-five teen-agers that the theme song "A Horse Is a Horse" from the old "Mr...
...When in doubt, do it their way," is the motto...
...But the Administration's policymakers understand that at least some attention must be paid to world opinion, and that even Americans yearn for relief from the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon...
...Tobacco manufacturers have never lost a product-liability suit, and the way things are going, that record may stand for some time...
...The prices of all tobacco stocks rose on the news," The Wall Street Journal reported...
...Fifty-one Democrats, including the ever-craven Les As-pin, jumped ship to hand Reagan his victory...
...That means merchants' preferential treatment, and the courtesies afforded to successful people like you...
...H CIA Director William J. Casey telephoned Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh to warn him that his forthcoming book about Korean Air Lines Eight 007, The Target is Destroyed, may be in violation of Federal law...
...From aid to the rebels in Angola and Afghanistan through support for El Salvador to cheerleading the bombing of Tripoli, the Democrats have fallen in line...
...What we are witnessing, beneath the hype and hoopla, is the gradual abandonment of the concept of progressive, or graduated, income taxation...
...The U.S...
...The Air Force calls the process "launch and leave...
...And in any case, the changeover is no watershed: Trading Burger for Scalia hardly amounts to an ideological revolution...
...Each MasterCard will carry the "NLG" imprint...
...What changed in the interim...
...A day later, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger announced that the United States was "no longer bound" by the terms of SALT II...
...policy...
...The poster is "not a communication of anything of value," Guarino says, adding that a section of the state's penal code prohibits distribution of material "that the average adult Californian would find inappropriate for a minor...
...The contra vote reveals the terrible costs entailed in the atrophy of democracy, for the United States is once again embarked on an unpopular, undeclared war, whose casualties may mount into the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, before the American public will at last be heard...
...The quaint notion that a vibrant opposition party enriches the political system seems to have gone out of style with hopscotch...
...The officers said they thought it was a gun...
...Ed" television show actually praises Satan when the song is played backwards...
...For instance, under the Senate bill, an individual who earns $30,000 and an individual who earns $ 1 million would both be assessed at an income tax rate of 27 per cent...
...Rather than hash out tough political fights in the legislatures, city halls, and town councils across the country, activists went directly to the courts to redress grievances...
...Instead, much of the coverage has focused on when and whether Reagan and Gorbachev will hold their next tete-a-tete...
...He added that almost half the farmers in America have no debt 'other than the credit-card debt the wife ran up at the department store.' But now the Soviet Union has proposed to stop...
...The positions of the two parties are now virtually indistinguishable on issues of foreign policy, and the Democrats have planned it that way...
...Certainly not the actions of the contras themselves, who continue to score high marks for brutality...
...And certainly not the Sandinistas, who, despite the full-barreled bombast of the Reagan Administration, have not threatened a single acre of U.S...
...The Soviet Union, like the United States, has been willing and able to expand nuclear arsenals to a catastrophic extent without worrying about the meaningless "limits" imposed by SALT II...
...The Guild, after all, has been agitating for social change since it was founded in 1937...
...The man who went by Khadafy, Khadafi, Gaddhafi, Quad-afy, Quadafi, and Qaddafi finally transliterated his name for Westerners, revealing himself to be none other than Moammar Gadhafi...
...He complained, in a speech a few years ago, that he was weary of the view that the Constitution is nothing but the Bill of Rights...
...Two weeks after that, following some further waffling at a Presidential press conference, White House spokesman Larry Speakes declared, "The SALT Treaty no longer exists...
...Nor, in our view, is there any occasion to waste time mourning the loss of the unratified SALT II treaty, which we have considered all along as a license to perpetuate the arms race...
...Launch and leave, and hope that something you've said will turn out to be on target...
...Unlike cigarettes, smokeless tobacco products are not required to carry health warnings, though the U.S...
...Progressives have feared for close to a decade that the Supreme Court would be captured by the Right...
...We'll probably never know, unless Americans can persuade their government to respond seriously to what seems to be a serious attempt at bringing the mad momentum under control...
...response...
...With just one Gad-hafi to contend with, maybe Ronald Reagan's paranoia will be more responsive to treatment...
...Joseph Strauss used fire hoses to repel antinuclear demonstrators in small boats and surfboards when the vessel docked recently in Sydney, Australia...
...The Senate bill would do away with the current fourteen tax brackets for individuals and replace them with just two...
...Off the hook again, the tobacco firms puffed away on their profits...
...The other laudable feature of the reform legislation is the establishment of a minimum tax...
...The latest case to come to trial was a suit brought by Betty Ann Marsee, who accused the U.S...
...Although he could not see what was happening, he could hear tearing and dumping of books and the crushing of plaster as whole sets of shelving were ripped off the walls____The whole event took about two minutes____As I left, I looked around and saw that there was nothing left standing in that book store...
...Tobacco Company of causing the death of her son, Sean, a high-school track star who began using the company's snuff when he was thirteen and died of cancer six years later...
...Loomis says Casey told him "that the law said we could not publish material about communications intelligence and that it was his job to uphold the law...
...This will lift a galling weight off the shoulders of some six million penurious citizens...
...And that's why the official spokesmen have tripped all over themselves in attempting to rationalize and redeem their ineluctable commitment to a perpetual arms race...
...Tobacco jumped $4.25 to $40.25...
...With the contra vote, it has lost its last freckle of identity, its last eyelash of dignity...
...victims of our economic system should not be doubly penalized...
...But little evidence has been put forward to support such speculation, and there is no reason to suppose that closet peaceniks have somehow burrowed their way into Reagan's inner circle...
...The Last Freckle Few acts of public cowardice can compare with the recent abject decision by the House of Representatives to go merrily along with President Reagan's predatory policy of arming the contras, who are trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua...
...I personally think right now is a pretty good time to get started in farming,' Earl Butz told a recent meeting of the Kansas Bankers Association...
...media, in their typical eagerness to parrot the Government line when it comes to matters of "national security," have given the public little basis for understanding the scope of the Soviet initiatives or the inadequacy of the U.S...
...Is it a serious proposal or merely a rhetorical exercise designed to take advantage of the Reagan Administration's obvious obstreperousness...
...School authorities say the polygraph gives students a chance to clear themselves of charges ranging from drug abuse to cursing at teachers...
...they wanted to go for a swim...
...The Constitution as a whole," he said, "is a charter...
...Reliance on the courts was a shortcut that is finally catching up with us...
...Certainly not the opinion of the American people, who have consistently opposed aid to the contras by margins of more than two to one...
...Rich people, obviously, would pay less tax as the top rate declines drastically—from 50 per cent to 27 per cent under the Senate plan or from 50 per cent to 38 per cent under the House plan...
...H The leader and vocalist of the rock group, the Dead Kennedys, along with four others, was charged in Los Angeles with distributing harmful matter to minors for including a sexually explicit poster with their album Frankenchrist...
...We may be witnessing the last real opportunity to halt the slide toward nuclear holocaust...
...Tobacco Company was responsible for her son's death...
...But an FBI dossier doesn't seem to carry much clout, so the Guild is now offering its ranks a special membership premium—the Gold MasterCard...
...The Russians, like the Americans, have been eager participants in the mad momentum of the arms race, succumbing to the lunatic logic that there is no point in merely destroying the planet once when you can destroy it five, ten, twenty times...
...I will never forget how satisfying it felt to hear glass snap under my feet...
...according to conservative columnist William Safire, he is "the worst enemy of free speech in America today...
...Because of its responsiveness, the Warren Court may have made things too easy for progressives, allowing us to forget that filing a lawsuit is not the Comment only form of action we can take...
...And later that afternoon, in a feeble attempt to have the last word, Reagan mumbled, "We are going to try to replace it with a better deal...
...Not one book, not one 'girly' picture remained on those walls...
...And that opportunity is slipping away...
...What we are witnessing, rather, is an inept and even embarrassed effort at coping with the most effective Soviet peace offensive since the beginning of the Cold War...
...The President's choices will almost certainly be confirmed...
...The contra issue is just the latest in a series of foreign-policy capitulations by the Democrats...
...nuclear "superiority...
...Several tobacco analysts said they believe the stocks are still undervalued and will continue to rise...
...With Mikhail Gorbachev's ascension to the top position in the Soviet leadership, the Kremlin has submitted one arms-limitation initiative after another, and none of them can be characterized as a mere launch-and-leave gesture...
...Whether Reagan and Gorbachev hold another Comment summit meeting this year or next or never will not matter very much when the history of this century is written...
...Most Americans have no idea how great a welcome these overtures have received around the world, or how bitter the disappointment has been at the lack of American reciprocation...
...Tax Retreat With members of Congress slapping themselves on the back or choking up and going teary-eyed over the passage of tax-reform legislation, maybe it's time to take a close look at just how progressive the much-ballyhooed tax overhaul really is...
...Not much...
...Timmons was shot to death by a sheriffs deputy moonlighting as a security guard...
...Birds of a Feather low that Kurt Waldheim has been elected president of Austria, the uproar over his Nazi past is rapidly subsiding...
...The unilateral Soviet ban on nuclear testing still stands, despite repeated rebuffs from Washington and repeated underground explosions in Nevada...
...Launch and leave...
...Rehnquist has spent much of his fourteen-year tenure on the Court in right-wing dissent, when he wasn't in a right-wing majority...
...They weren't blown overboard by Reagan's rhetoric...
...Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, has noted that the risk of cheek and gum cancer may be fifty times greater for snuff users than for those who don't consume tobacco...
...Unfortunately, the powers of the market, like those of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Wizard of Oz, are greatly exaggerated...
...The Soviet economy, like ours, has been subjected to strains and distortions because of the monstrous sums squandered on weaponry and military intervention...
...The President, who agrees heartily with the notion that his court appointments, and not legislative initiatives, are the key to advancing his social agenda, has chosen well for his purposes...
...Casey also called Robert Loomis, Hersh's editor at Random House, to convey the same message...
...The names remained to be filled in, but the result was expected all along...
...This is the first time I know of we've ever done this," says Deputy City Attorney Michael Guarino...
...Just as the tax bill marks a retreat from pro-gressivity, so too does it mark a retreat from economic planning...
...It counsels radicalism on the picket line and in the courtroom...
...Thus tax simplification walks hand in hand with deregulation...
...The Russians have sweetened their proposals at the Geneva talks, despite the absence of any substantive response from Reagan's negotiating team...
...The Unmasked Man He used to be everywhere at the same time, traveling under several clever aliases...
...Some mass-media commentators have suggested that all this confusion reflects a profound division within the Reagan Administration—a confrontation between Presidential advisers who favor serious arms-reduction negotiations with the Soviet Union and others who want a damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead race for U.S...
...The new Autonomous Guided Bomb (AGB), scheduled to undergo testing this summer and enter final development next year, will be released as far as ten miles from its target, allowing the pilot to retreat to safety...
...These crude groupings would place citizens with widely differing incomes in the same category...
...The bank that issues the credit card has no investments in South Africa, the Guild hastens to add...
...which created a national government and empowered it to limit not only the authority of states but the liberties of individuals...
...It was a calculated decision to abandon certain anti-interventionist positions of the Democratic Party and join up for the new anti-communist crusades...
...Court of Last Resort It was only a matter of time...
...So Ronald Reagan's elevation of William Rehnquist to Chief Justice and his selection of Antonin Scalia to fill the vacancy created by Warren Burger's retirement come as no great shock...
...In New York Stock Exchange composite trading, U.S...
...The 221-to-209 vote to provide $100 million in mostly military aid to the contras reversed one of the few noble deeds the House had performed in the last six years...
...The House version would establish four brackets...
...territory...
...This obsequiousness is transforming the nature of our democracy...
...In a move to boost American capacity to wage modern warfare," Reuters reported from Washington on June 17, "the Air Force is pressing development of a new computerized 'brilliant bomb' that seeks out its own target without pilot guidance...
...There is no such thing as excess profits anymore, but the new tax law would make unemployment benefits taxable income...
...Left to its own devices, the market can produce grave economic and social turmoil: Consider gas-guzzling and lead-belching automobiles, decaying steel mills and fleeing capital, belly-up farms and burgeoning debt...
...Scalia offers more of the same...
...One can understand why other governments are eager to forgive and forget...
...In a May 27 statement, President Reagan said, "Of course, since we will remain in technical compliance with the terms of the'expired SALT II Treaty for some months, I continue to hope that the Soviet Union will use this time to take the constructive steps necessary to alter the current situation...
...Sailors aboard the destroyer U.S.S...
...Like most of his compatriots, he merely watched with equanimity while monstrous crimes were committed, and has been lying about it ever since...
...In Bartow, Florida, some 350 students in grades seven through twelve have been subjected to lie-detector tests in the last five years...
...A man inside tried to hold the door shut, but one of the women pulled and he let go," reports a member of the "Sisters of Justice...
...The tax reformers virtually wash their hands of this function, eliminating most of the provisions designed to rationalize the economy...
...In Fort Worth, Texas, forty-one-year-old Lawrence Timmons argued with employees of a hamburger joint who told him they were out of large buns...
Vol. 50 • August 1986 • No. 8
