Tilting At Windmills

...The problem is that I admire Gary Hart and I tend to have high expectations of those I admire...

...There should, of course, be work requirements so that people don't use the compensation to avoid working...

...All of you who have ever hired a consultant will surely feel the warm glow of recognition upon hearing these recommendations by a consultant to the University of the District of Columbia: hire more consultants, have more meetings, and engage a "facilitator" to conduct "workshops...

...Nowhere during the five-or six-minute segment was the intellectual emptiness of most education courses mentioned...

...Why didn't Grayson hear something like that...

...Why not take it away from them and extend the benefits of those who are in need...

...In Dallas, the Delta pilot was told to slow down so that he wouldn't land on the heels of the plane ahead of him...

...Craven was too strong a word...

...These have all been gratefully received by the American medical community...

...The Times article, written by Bill Keller, whose book . review appears on page 62 of this issue, also questions whether the Navy has neglected building some of the ships it needs, such as "amphibious ships to deliver marines to far-off battle zones, mine-sweeping ships, and antisubmarine helicopters...

...Neither can childless women...

...It seems this kind of thing happens enough that, according the Journal, the Social Security Administration has instituted what it calls a "mass-loss procedure...

...The quaintest of all may be those associated with cataract surgery...

...This means there are a lot of desperate people...

...This could be as damaging to America as the British class system, by disparaging economically creative hard work, was to Britain...

...It was Gary Hart complaining about my description in a recent issue of a speech he gave to the National Education Association...

...Now comes CBS in the form of a report by Eric Engberg on Dan Rather's September 5 Evening News with another terrible idea: "The pool of education graduates...

...See, for example, Robert M. Kaus's article on Hart in September 1981 and our conclusion to the material on the 1984 campaign in this issue...

...Today in Washington and New York it's better to know the right movies, artists, dance companies, and restaurants...

...You can do better than that...

...They are forced to work free...

...Joe Crowley's plane was landing around 5 p.m., the Delta jet around 6. Another possible solution— forgive me, Joe—is to forbid private planes to use busy airports at rush hour...

...The Navy has not conducted a "wall-to-wall" inventory at its supply centers in more than 20 years...

...When we were about 500 feet from touching down on the main runway, the voice of an air traffic controller came over the plane's radio ordering us to switch to another runway...

...Either solution would, by the way, help reduce the strain on controllers who are most in danger of getting rattled when the traffic becomes fast and furious...

...Another million miles are rated only "fair...

...This would be a good story for the Post to look into...

...In Washington, Charles 0. Starrett, the boss who punished a whistleblower for telling the truth, has himself been fired by the Pentagon upon the recommendation of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which had investigated the whistleblower's case...

...no one struggles to save prized possessions...

...I am appalled by the arguments against workfare...

...When I hear talk from my conservative friends about further tax cuts, I think they're out of their minds...

...Instead the education degree was accepted as a kind of Good Housekeeping seal, guaranteeing quality...

...I was flying into Washington's National Airport in a small private plane piloted by my friend, Joe Crowley...

...This is the most common surgical procedure paid for by Medicare...

...Men who have exhausted their benefits can't get welfare in most states...

...Can't you hear what they would have said to you, "These dedicated men and women are entitled to their privacy—we just can't go around handing their names out to anyone...

...But when Ellison Grayson of Arlington, Virginia, asked the Department of Defense to give him the names and addresses of 1.4 million servicemen, he got them in two weeks...

...The fact that people close to the mayor are crooks (his former girlfriend was getting out of jail as his exwife was going in, both for crimes committed while close to him) may not be conclusive as to his own guilt, but it certainly is suggestive of certain lines of inquiry that reporters might profitably pursue...

...When I read about the crash of that Delta jet in Dallas, I immediately recalled a similar experience of my own...

...The good news in a recent report is that there are now 6,056 black elected officials in the United States...

...I n West Los Angeles, a new health spa, complete with sauna and jacuzzi has just opened...

...A typical sentence from the consultant's report: "One of the most difficult tasks facing the unit is the determination of information needs, thus providing decision framework for deployment and evaluation analyses...

...Inducements," according to a report of the House Select Committee on Aging, "have ranged from outright payments of cash to physicians in the form of $50 deposits in Cayman Island accounts for each lens purchased, to 'free stock' in the manufacturers, keys to resort condominiums, yachts, cars, and houses, trips to Colorado, Europe, etc...

...Almost every day a story appears about some action of the District government that has a pronounced tip-of-theiceberg feel...

...It will be performed on 1.2 million people this year...

...This is the sober warning of two thoughtful articles that appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times...

...It should be the rule...

...In the Department of Public Works of Charleston, West Virginia 120 people were employed at the beginning of 1983 who are still there today...

...The hell they are...

...Consider highways and bridges...

...In 1983 112 were registered Democrats...

...Recently, it was discovered that Iranian agents had gained access to the Navy's $36 billion inventory of weapons and equipment...

...Indeed, it seems to me that the District's government is a veritable treasure trove of potentially revealing news stories...

...If it were your community, would you agree or disagree with him...

...The government relies on the applicant's "selfcertification...

...What was the basis for the certification...

...Either, of course, may be the explanation...

...The results were: 59.3 percent agreed, 27.4 percent disagreed, and 13.3 percent were undecided...

...Charles Peters...

...There were no children...

...This meant that when the wind shear drove him downwards he didn't have enough speed to remain airborne...

...Well, it seems he was working for the Reagan-Bush Campaign Committee in the 1984 election...

...What none of the stories that I read about the event pointed out was that this wreck—and my close call— could have been prevented if controllers did not have to land so many planes so fast...

...But there is also the slightest possibility that the change was related to the 1983 mayoral election in which the voters of Charleston chose the Republican candidate over the Democratic incumbent...

...One fact most outsiders don't know about the government: federal job applicants who want to work as stenographers and secretaries are not given typing and shorthand tests...

...Didn't anyone on the staff of the Evening News know better...

...Did everyone start watching The McLaughlin Report...

...A test in which there was no smoke, no fire, no panic for fear of death...

...Accountability in such cases has been rare in American life...

...Not long ago a friend sent me a clipping from the Atlanta Journal that began, "Social Security Administration officials in Atlanta now think as many as 4,000 July checks are missing...

...This may explain why you haven't gotten that letter of apology the IRS owes you...

...What happened to cause this dramatic change in political philosophy...

...Last month I pointed out that Robert MacNeil's implied endorsement of across-theboard salary increases would only encourage bad teachers as well as the good to stay in the system...

...Three-fourths of the country's bridges are more than 50 years old...

...Or did they join the Conservative Book Club...

...Grayson," according to Aaron Epstein of the KnightRidder papers, "said he turned the tapes over to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which he said paid $1,442 to cover government expenses—about one-fiftieth the cost of similar targeted mailing lists on the commercial market...

...The reason for the change was that a jet was coming in behind us, and if we both tried to land on the first runway, it might have been a tight squeeze...

...for `medical' skiing seminars and large payments for phony `consultant work...

...The problem with all this is that we're creating a social system in which consuming with good taste is the highest value...

...Knowing the right restaurants has become so important that The New York Times now gives its restaurant critic $60,000 a year in expense money so that he can be sure to keep its readers up to date on this crucial information...

...It's punishing people for being poor, says one Georgia legislator...

...Approximately 210,000 miles of highway are rated as in "poor" or "very poor" shape by state transportation officials...

...Best, Gary...

...And finally, test passengers—unlike airline travelers—are all sober...

...Why, with so many well-paid employees, do District residents have to wait in line for four hours to get their cars inspected...

...I do not ordinarily believe in exulting in the misfortunes of others, but there are certain kinds of guys who have always gotten away with it who have, at least in the last year, been getting their just deserts...

...The flight attendants knew where to expect every bottleneck because of special training they received in the three days before the test...

...I was scared, plenty scared...

...I believe, by the way, that the same requirements should apply to all welfare recipients who do not have pre-school children...

...This means they sometimes come in for severe criticism in these pages...

...In terms of low quality employees, it is a close call in Washington as to whether the General Services Administration, the Labor Department, or the Small Business Administration deserves the prize...

...The bad news is that this is only 1.2 percent of the total...

...Nor was there the slightest hint that a liberal arts graduate with a strong substantive major and teaching aptitude might actually be preferable to an education major...

...Speaking of government employees, we've already told you that their number has grown under Reagan...

...What does the Washington lawyer do with all that money he makes...

...They're getting welfare payments, and, if they can work for them, they should...

...True, but this one is for dogs...

...Another study compared nine cities in the amount of private money given to the arts...

...My guess is that we're going to have to raise taxes, not just because of the deficit, but because of such vastly expensive tasks that loom before us as cleaning up toxic wastes and rebuilding the nation's infrastructure...

...Today 105 are registered as Republicans...

...In Chicago, a judge found three corporate officials guilty of murder in the death of an employee whom they knowingly permitted, along with other workers, to be exposed to cyanide fumes in their workplace...

...It didn't seem to me that there was nearly enough time or room to do what was asked...

...I f you have ever tried to get information from the federal government, you have probably invested anywhere from six months to a lifetime in the undertaking...

...The result, according to the Associated Press is that "more than $2 billion the federal government will pay for cataract surgery this year will be wasted because of kickbacks to doctors, unnecessary operations, and overcharges...

...But Joe managed to pull it off, and we landed safely...

...Marie Cuomo and Bruce Babbitt, whom I also admire, will probably encounter similar treatment as they, too, come closer to the presidency, which I think they will in the next few years...

...Did you know that almost two-thirds of this country's unemployed receive no unemployment compensation...

...No one can type it...

...But in terms of sold-out cynicism, the Federal Aviation Administration is the clear winner...

...I could not believe what I was hearing...

...An investigation of how this happened revealed, according to the Los Angeles Times, that almost any item in the military inventory can be ordered by anyone with access to the supply system's computers simply by entering a national stock number...

...No check is made on the legitimacy of orders received by the supply center...

...The total number of local, state, and federal employees now stands at 16,436,000...

...California is full of health spas with saunas and jacuzzis...

...must grow...

...John Lehman has committed the Navy to a shipbuilding program of such a size that we will not be able to afford the bases, the manpower, the maintenance, and the munitions it will require...

...For example, the FAA has certified that a Boeing 757 can be evacuated in 90 seconds in the event of an accident...

...Naturally, the manufacturers of these lenses have sought to persuade surgeons to use their products...

...This means spreading out flight arrivals and departures so that they aren't all bunched between 8 and 9 in the morning and 5 and 6 in the afternoon...

...As H. Josef Hebert of the Associated Press points out about such a test: "No one is fatigued after hours of travel...

...It used to be that you could rise socially by giving charity balls...

...A recent study compared charitable giving in Washington with that in six other metropolitan areas...

...There is no question in my own mind that Lehman has been wrong in his emphasis on giant aircraft carriers and battleships...

...Most of the "passengers" were Boeing employees...

...Because I grew up in West Virginia and understand how tough life has been for its people and how little they have shared in the prosperity that has been the rule in the rest of the country since 1940, I could only weep when I read this poll that appeared last month in The Charleston Gazette: "The mayor of South Charleston has said he would welcome a plant that makes toxic chemicals in his community because of the jobs and tax revenues it would bring...

...Washington came in seventh...

...Pennsylvania, by contrast, has just 380.2 or roughly half the number of the District...

...The loan, according to a news story, "will come from community block grant funds that are supposed to be used to provide jobs, low and moderate income housing, and development in economically depressed areas of the city...

...In Philadelphia, a federal grand jury has indicted a top General Electric official and two former high-ranking GE managers on charges of defrauding the Pentagon on a nuclear-warhead systems contract...

...At the same time, all states still allow unemployment compensation to be paid to people who don't need it...

...The reason is that in both Washington and New York taste has become the dominant definer of class...

...Just recently there was the account of how the deputy mayor had approved a $500,000 lowinterest loan to finance the construction of a luxury hotel...

...The District's employees receive an average monthly salary of $2,338...

...Not long ago I got a note: "Dear Charlie— `Craven?' Really...

...One of the leaders in the public employee field is the District of Columbia, which now has 762.9 employees— just local, not counting federal—for each 10,000 residents...

...From time to time we have pointed out some of the quainter ethical practices of American physicians...

...But did you know that the number of state and local employees is also growing...

...What kind of news is that, you ask...

...And that's just the civilians...

...Those Cayman Island banks are going to have to build bigger vaults...

...If Fido has been lying around eating all day, you can send him to the Doggery, which will, according to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, "take off extra pounds, build muscles, relax aching joints, and recommend an individually tailored diet...

...During the surgery, a plastic lens is implanted in the eye...

...He buys the right car, vacations in the right place, and hangs the right paintings on his walls...

...There were no people over 60...

...The speech was not as courageous as I would have liked, but it was still better than most politicians would have made...

...New York was not included in either study, but my guess is that it would have scored much as Washington did...

...This time Washington came in second...

...This means people, instead of giving, are focusing on acquiring...