COMMENT

...rather, it would put regulation on a wholly scientific footing, taking all the guesswork and all the political pressure out of the process...

...It discredited the armed services, made recruiting more difficult, and dampened military expenditures...

...Apparently, the students at Hazelwood East High School had learned their lesson even before the Supreme Court slapped them down...

...There are constant disputes between epidemiologists, who spot correlations between various chemicals and cancer, and biochemists and molecular biologists, who try to identify the process by which a substance may cause disease...

...citizens and groups, taking photographs of peace demonstrators, recording their license-plate numbers, and infiltrating their meetings...

...Many liberals have shown a distressing readiness to go along with the Reagan line that if the Sandinistas don't accept the Central American peace plan, the contras deserve U.S...

...The Administration wants to put its proposal in place with the next fiscal year...

...But landlords have always hated rent control, and landlords—not tenants—are Ronald Reagan's natural constituency...

...Now, with the possible exception of twenty-four-hour news and sports, it is just one more staple of television junk food...

...When viewers pay for particular programs, most of their contributions should go directly to the producers of those shows...

...National Renew recently provided the perfect cover story in the form of a complicated piece of mathematical mumbo-jumbo known as regression analysis—no pun intended—which demonstrates that "the single most important cause of homelessness in America is rent control...

...For even such a poor student as Ronald Reagan, the lesson seems to have sunk in...

...Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense for most of Reagan's years, was the chief fundraiser for the military-industrial complex...

...Methodological and, yes, even economic and political biases figure in these arguments...

...Under Ruckelshaus and his successor, the new EPA has made "scientific" regulation its battle cry...

...For committing such a grave offense, Reagan assigned the Central Intelligence Agency to wage a secret war against Nicaragua, gathering, financing, and training thousands of contra troops...

...The groups placed under FBI surveillance ranged from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Maryknoll Sisters in Chicago, and the United Automobile Workers in Cleveland...

...Vietnam was humiliating...

...Even after the Nicaraguan government has taken extraordinary steps toward conciliation, Reagan continues to issue lies with unblinking conscience...

...The new level, one-tenth of that set in 1984, has aroused grave concern among some scientists...

...Marc Cantor, who heads MacroMind, Inc., a Chicago firm that devises computer animation programs, told a computer trade magazine that 'there's a $50 million animation budget on SDI alone.' ample, the EPA has drastically reduced its estimate of the level of risk in arsenic, a chemical widely used in pesticides...

...A President who can't see straight is in a position to inflict a great deal of harm...

...Despite Sylvester Stallone's finest efforts, the American people remember the human costs of defending the U.S...

...Perhaps it should now be adopted as the official motto of American education...

...A telling example is the EPA's recent conclusion that its "risk assessments" have been too crude...

...Government has conducted 919 nuclear weapons tests, reports the Natural Resources Defense Council—an average of one U.S...

...He and the top brass did not want to drag the Pentagon into another quagmire...

...In this context of scientific uncertainty, researchers must obviously persist in their search for a better understanding of the causes, prevention, and cure of illness...

...Ever vigilant in its defense of the rich against the depredations of the rest of us, the Office of Management and Budget has decided to stop giving Federal housing aid to cities with rent-control laws...

...In the 1960s, Hoover spied on U.S...

...For the last five years, the FBI has spied on hundreds of U.S...

...Whatever happened to the New Federalism...

...Reagan's recent request for $36 million in aid for the contras represents his last feeble effort to fulfill his fantasy of toppling the government in Managua...

...Yes—politics of a much better kind than the politics that govern it now...

...Cable is uniquely equipped to advance the ideal of free speech and create an open marketplace of ideas," Les Brown, editor of Channels magazine, noted several years ago...

...This new insight serves as the rationale for sweeping changes in the regulatory process...

...In a case called Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District—a case involving a student's right to wear a black armband to show how he felt about the war—the Court held that the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech extends to students as well as to other human beings...

...the globe is not a Parker Brothers board game, and the United States doesn't own the table...

...So Ronald Reagan reappointed William Ruck-elshaus, the first head of EPA, who promised to restore the integrity of the agency...

...Does that mean injecting politics into the process...

...Early in the Reagan Administration, Burford made a name for herself by singlehandedly trying to gut a host of controls over various toxic chemicals...

...Jumper Cable The advent of cable television promised new vistas of entertainment, education, and participation for the viewing public...

...Early this year, the agency announced that its scientists now know much more than they did before about how certain toxic substances enter the body and cause cancer...

...Even so insensitive a politician as New York Mayor Ed Koch has noted, "If we were required to do away with rent control, I honestly believe that there would be people thrown out on the street, not people who are in abject poverty, but middle-class people who could not afford to pay the rent...

...Unless the FCC defines cable as a common carrier, like the telephone system, and regulates it accordingly, the Supreme Court ruled, it must allow the cable companies complete freedom to determine what runs on their stations...

...The lesson is, Don't make waves...

...The problem dates back to 1979, when the Supreme Court struck down a Federal Communications Commission regulation mandating access by public groups to cable systems...

...Fortunately, we won't have to sit through another State of the Union message that contains such twaddle as this: "Let us be for the people of Nicaragua what Lafayette, Pulaski, and Von Steuben were for our forefathers and the cause of American independence...

...But it need not remain that way...

...They were wrong...

...Channels should be made available to all producers for a reasonable fee on a first-come first-served basis...

...She cut the EPA's research staff and did her best to undermine the scientific basis for regulating potentially hazardous substances...

...Unless the Sandinistas do something phenomenally foolish—say, install Soviet missiles on their soil—the odds are Reagan will leave office before Daniel Ortega does...

...To hardly anyone's surprise, the scientific approach has turned out to be nothing more than deregulation in a new guise...

...It doesn't take a genius to see through this bogus argument...

...The answer is Vietnam...

...They discovered that the pain of losing a family member in a meaningless misadventure abroad is not like a bad sunburn that goes away...

...While the Presidential dodderings have become almost pathetic, the willingness of Congress to entertain contra aid is nothing short of disgraceful...

...Hazelwood authorizes a fourth R in the schools: repression...

...Such realities confound the Right and those who march under the banner of Cold War liberalism...

...I didn't come to Washington to preside over the communization of Central America," he bellowed in late January, doing one of the poorest Winston Churchill imitations in memory...

...In the case before the Court, the offending student newspaper's articles dealt with teen-age pregnancy and divorce—obviously topics about which adolescents shouldn't trouble their little minds...

...But regulatory responsibility is much too important to be left entirely to the judgment of scientists...

...For them, the globe is not round but flat, with the Soviet Union on one end and the United States on the other...

...Public-opinion polls showed that most Americans wanted to regulate suspected carcinogens, and even industry was concerned that total deregulation might invite costly lawsuits and more stringent state or local regulation...

...Even the dilatory Congress now in session ought to be able to act by autumn to stop the OMB...

...This amounts to blatant discrimination against cities that protect renters from being gouged...

...J. Edgar Hoover would be proud...

...In 1969, when authorities everywhere from the White House down to the tiniest school district were trying to stem a rising tide of protest against the criminal war America was waging in Vietnam, the Supreme Court struck a remarakble blow for freedom...

...In Hazelwood, the Court has rolled back that landmark decision, holding instead that school officials can ban any speech they have reason to feel may be "inconsistent" with the school's "basic educational mission...

...But when it came to involving U.S...

...citizens involved in civil-rights demonstrations and antiwar protests...

...For what...

...Viewers should be able to pay for their access to particular channels or even programs on those channels...

...Environmentalist Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of the Natural Systems at Queens College in New York, challenges the contention that "we have progressed to the point of understanding cancer so well that we can change our standards...

...And it raises a question: Why hasn't Reagan been able to succeed in this chief foreign-policy objective...

...When NBC News asked what effects the ruling might have, the young editor said none at all, because "we don't do anything controversial...

...It was a ruling that affirmed the fundamental tenets of democracy...

...About $200 million in rental-rehabilitation funds are at stake, and some 200 cities—including New York, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—will lose their aid if OMB has its way...

...Presumably, school authorities will have no difficulty banning any but the most bland speech under the Court's new, vague guidelines...

...Congress can block the plan, if it will...

...As Reagan's time winds down, it becomes less and less likely that he will succeed in overthrowing the Nicaraguan government...

...This, the OMB says, is a "symbolic step" to make the point that rent control is "counterproductive...

...The problem is, Nicaragua was never ours to lose, just as China was not ours to lose four decades ago...

...When he died, many said domestic surveillance would be interred with him...

...This myopia has afflicted Ronald Wilson Reagan, who for the life of him just can't see past this Manichean illusion...

...And yet it is doing its utmost to be spared having to provide outlets for free speech— and doing so shamelessly in the name of the First Amendment...

...Yet the Senators and Representatives can hardly bring themselves to stand up against it...

...The Pentagon learned a lesson, too...

...That must be galling for the leader of the most powerful country in the world...

...For seven years, Reagan has tried to pin every conceivable transgression on Nicaragua, but that country's real sin was choosing to operate its social and economic system in a fashion different from ours...

...EPA's 'Scientific' Charade Does anyone remember Anne Gorsuch Burford and her friends at the Environmental Protection Agency...

...Comment The Nicaraguan Obsession Meldrim Thomson, the conservative former governor of New Hampshire, says 'a helping hand from Uncle Sam' could swiftly establish democracy in Haiti: 'We should have sent the Marines in to conduct a free election.' Who lost Nicaragua...

...empire...

...This violation of civil rights occurred under the tenure of FBI Director William Webster...

...nuclear explosion every seventeen days over the last forty-two years...

...Cable has not delivered...

...To letting state and local governments decide policy for themselves without interference from Washington...

...Now, far gone into his final term, Reagan cannot drop his ideological blinders or depart from his script...

...G-Men at it Again JEdgar Hoover lives...

...The recent EPA actions demonstrate once again that neither governmental nor corporate "experts" can be trusted to hand down life-and-death decisions without the participation of an informed citizenry...

...In fact, the regulation of carcinogens and other toxins in the work places and foods of human beings has never been based on precise, "objective" standards...

...It could also bring consumer sovereignty out of the textbooks and into the living room...

...Vietnam taught limits...

...troops in combat situations abroad, Weinberger turned dovish...

...support...

...Federal authorities should rise to the challenge, identify cable as a common carrier, and reinstitute price controls for cable systems...

...Certainly the $36 million won't accomplish the task, and ten times that amount wouldn't...

...On the basis of the new information, for exSince July 1945, the U.S...

...Reagan's ploy to put in escrow the $3.6 million of the aid that is for lethal weaponry may or may not prevail...

...The agency pledged that it would neither deregulate nor politicize its protective responsibilities...

...And, since the Administration is proposing to do this unilaterally by regulation, not statute, no Congressional approval is needed...

...And he persuaded the United States Congress to supply hundreds of millions of dollars to these contras...

...His sleazy tactics have been reincarnated at the Bureau, this time to spy on Americans who oppose Ronald Reagan's policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua...

...Reagan rewarded Webster by appointing him to be Director of Central Intelligence, and the Senate confirmed him, 94-to-l...

...The American people have demonstrated, in poll after poll, that they do not want aid to the contras...

...But he has prevailed already by setting the terms of the argument...

...The Rent-Gouger's Friend More fuzzy thinking from the Reagan Administration...

...After Burford and her notorious aide, Rita Lav-elle, had gone on to better things, the Reagan Administration got smarter...

...The Fourth R Of all the comments, pro and con, uttered in response to the Supreme Court's appalling decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the high-school press-freedom case, none was so depressing as the statement of a student-editor at the Missouri school where the case originated five years ago...

...Cable is fast becoming a national mode of communication, with forty-three million American households now wired...

...it stays, and stings, even two decades later...

...In this way, the media could be operated not only for us, but by us...

...For killing people...

...So perhaps the new OMB rule was inevitable, awaiting only the proper disguise...

...Despite the cliches of diplomacy, nations are not pawns or possessions...

...If there is reason to believe that a given substance is dangerous, the degree of risk society wants to assume is essentially a matter for public debate and political decision...

...Such a system would nourish a diversity of views and bring substance to the vacuous airwaves...

...That question is sure to be a staple item on any right-wing diet this year and for many years to come...

...As a result, thousands of Nicaraguans have been killed, and that country's economy lies in shambles...

...Generals don't like that...

...And he continues to depict the contras as modern-day counterparts of the founders of the American Republic...