Tilting at windmills
Tilting at windmills One concern about Carter's proposed budget cuts is that even their minimal effect on inflation won't be felt until next year. Another is that they will come in the wrong...
...God bless The New York Times...
...Good old Montgomery Ward...
...The District of Columbia Bar is sponsoring a conference on "Federal Grant Litigation," candidly subtitled "Biting the Hand That Feeds You...
...They bring in $7 for every dollar the government spends on them...
...For too long we have acted like their big brother...
...But that doesn't justify the government's continuing effort to exploit them...
...and when Carter won in Iowa, they were ready to discover that Kennedy was reborn...
...It was his $25,000 contribution to CREEP-donated in cash, not in a phone booth but on a Florida golf coursethat helped finance the break-in at the Democratic National Committee...
...Bittman, you will remember, is one of the handful of Watergate figures, mostly lawyers, who evaded incarceration...
...Who, then would be hurt if the Russians cut off the oil...
...find yourself vaguely troubled by .those special courses on improving scholastic aptitUde scores, you may have similar feelings about an organization called the Grantsmanship Center...
...This is the kind of onthe- ground reality that the global thinkers back in Washington almost always miss...
...Court of Appeals has suspended an FTC rule that allowed the advertising of prices and services by people who prescribe and sell eyeglasses...
...Why, then, did they not deem the Carter victories decisive...
...I'm curious as to how a freedom-in this case to advertise-can be called regulation...
...According to Elias Castillo of the San Jose Mercury News, who uncovered the story, Ward's resold the Firestone 500s under its own brand name...
...In an editorial entitled "Finding Suckers for Savings Bonds," it has given respectable sanction to an ancient cause of this magazine: "Uncle Sam has a new deal for savers-gullible savers, that is...
...In addition to getting Bittman off, Miller also kept Richard Kleindienst out of jail when there was as good a perjury case against him as you'll ever see...
...Surely the wrong reason is oil...
...If the Treasury wants to build rather than erode confidence in government, it should offer competitive rates or get out of the business of peddling bonds to small savers...
...The catch was that in prior engagements with the Communist armies, the Generalissimo's forces had a batting average of around .150...
...The Treasury Department has raised the annual interest paid on Series EE U.S...
...Yet the political reporters treated his victory, if not as a downright defeat, as a disappointing showing...
...Nor, a federal court recently ruled, should we have suspected anything when he proceeded to plead Howard Hunt guilty and keep him quiet, just as the White House wantedat least we have been kept from confirming our suspicions by Bittman's successful plea of the statute of limitations, that great recourse of the innocent, against a charge of legal malpractice...
...Just as the true football fan longs for the game to go into overtime, the true political reporter secretly wishes for a deadlock in the Electoral College...
...The New York Times recently ran a photograph of Manhattan office buildings at night...
...Their change of bias is, I'm sure, less calculated than mine, but the result is the same...
...My guess is that it is because they view political campaigns the same way I watch football games...
...The Japanese and the Western Europeans...
...The potential saving is illustrated by HUD, which last year spent 47.2 percent of its annual budget in the last two months of the fiscal year...
...The findings are many, but the least cheering are these: • Being well-off financially was valued in 1979 by 28 percent more men and 77 percent more women than in 1969...
...Charles Peters...
...So why should we behave differently...
...T he current discussion about removing restraints on the CIA also reminds me of the 1950s, when the talk was about unleashing Chiang Kai Shek, and the image evoked was of an efficient military machine straining at its shackles, ready to leap across the Formosa Strait and devastate the Reds...
...Well, guess who got caught reselling the recalled tires in its San Francisco Bay area stores...
...Unless the Redskins are involved, I root for the team that is behind-until it moves ahead, that is...
...Who else would have moved the briefcase away from the Fuhrer the precise distance necessary to let him escape unharmed...
...If they don't care about saving energy, they should at least care about saving their own cash...
...With strict rationing, and a serious program to develop the resources of the Western hemisphere, we could get along without the Middle East...
...But it is still the fundamental assumption of our respectable foreign policy thinkers at a time when we can't afford it any longer...
...William o. Bittman has escaped again...
...And that is what I think reporters want from a political campaign...
...And think for a momentcan you name even three major actions of the CIA that were both wise and effective...
...But let's do it for the right reasons...
...The reason is, as government insiders know, that the greatest waste occurs during the last quarter, when bureaucrats desperately shovel out this year's appropriation in order to justify their budget request for next year...
...Of this we can have no doubt...
...The tenants or the landlords, after all, will have to pay those ever-higher electric bills...
...Savings Bonds from 6Y2 to 7 percent-provided the bonds are held a full II years...
...Pakistan is obviously angling for a better deal, but my advice to the administration is take the rejection and run...
...Recently, a California contractor was fined because his employees were not required to wear life jackets while working on a bridge, even though he pointed out that the bridge crossed a dry river bed...
...Perhaps the inspector reasoned that life jackets would cushion the fall...
...The long success of the savings bond con game suggests that a sucker is indeed born every minute...
...It promises "a stepby- step guide to fighting grant termination or cutback" and offers to explain the developing field of "the grantee's right to a hearing before a federal agency...
...Remember those Firestone 500 tires that were so dangerously defective they had to be recalled...
...During that time safe- 10 ty inspectors have visited only two percent of the area's construction sites...
...It publishes a four-color magazine that promises to tell "how the country's most successful grant seekers got that way," and "how to write better proposals," and "how funding sources review proposals and make grants...
...While their flaws may have been exaggerated by the typical film of World War II, it is safe to say that the Japanese have not always acted with benign regard to our national interests...
...The reason for my deplorable lack of constancy is that, above all else, I want the game to be interesting...
...Carter should· require that government expenditures in the last quarter of this fiscal year not exceed the average of those in the three preceeding quarters...
...Andreas turned up last month on the guest list for the black-tie White House dinner in honor of West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt...
...A survey reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education compares the goals and attitudes of college freshmen in 1969 and 1979...
...Tilting at windmills One concern about Carter's proposed budget cuts is that even their minimal effect on inflation won't be felt until next year...
...Let's continue to protect them from being nuked by the Russians, but only if they pay their fair share of the costs and give us the same trading privileges we've given them...
...Another is that they will come in the wrong places, eliminating essential spending instead of waste...
...Aid to Pakistan might help Russia rather than deter it, for Pakistan would probably use its increased military strength, as it has so often in the past, against the Baluchi and Ptishtun tribesmen whose help we need in Afghanistan...
...If they've ever been to Pakistan, it was to only two or three cities, where they never came near the tribesmen who straddle the Pakistan-Afghanistan border...
...The Times complained about the waste of energy...
...Developing a philosophy of life was chosen by 36 percent fewer women and 35 percent fewer men...
...I was curious about the waste of money...
...Our money goes into providing them with a nuclear umbrella, while theirs goes into more modern plants to produce the cars, steel, and television sets that are destroying American industries...
...Efforts in behalf of worker safety can be ludicrous...
...In another triumph for the consumer, the U.S...
...In this respect, no country is more outrageous than Japan...
...Baluchistan is, in fact, what stands between the Russians in Kabul and the Arabian Sea...
...In case your problem isn't getting a grant but keeping one that the government is threatening to cut off, there is another source of help...
...Do remember to call William Miller if you are ever caught with the gun in your hand, a body on the floor, and your pockets overflowing with jewels and greenbacks...
...In early March came the news that Pakistan had rejected our offer of $400 million in military aid...
...We have to take Russian expansionism seriously, and it may be necessary, for solid historical principles, to take a stand in the Middle East...
...There is always the argument that it's better to assassinate a Hitler than to fight a World War...
...Three months ago these same reporters were predicting that Kennedy would sweep New· England...
...That attitude made sense in the 19508 when we were richer and stronger than anyone else...
...But don't think the Democrats sit around nursing grudges...
...If the government is making a grant to you-giving you something not yours by legal right-why shouldn't it be able to stop without having to go through a costly legal hearing, further enriching the members of the D.C...
...We have become the Pass-Along Society, with an increasingly accepted solution to inflation that says, instead of trying to control costs just pass them along-in this case from landlord to tenant to the tenants' customers...
...I have a solution to both problems...
...The situation at the CIA is not unsimilar, only its average may be a bit lower...
...Keeping up with public affairs was chosen by 33 percent fewer women and 18 percent fewer men...
...n the final returns from Maine, Carter led Kennedy by 7.8 percent...
...With so much money wasted in the government every day, why isn't more spent on IRS audits...
...If it was night, you may be wondering, how could you see them...
...If oil is what's at stake, let them fight the Russians if they want to...
...That sounds persuasive, but my guess is that if we'd had the CIA in the thirties, it would have tried to assassinate not Hitler, but Marshall Tito, General DeGaulle, and Count von Stauffenberg...
...But then I realized that most Americans have stopped trying to control costs...
...You would have had a hard time even finding the last result in The Washington Post, which in its morning-after report of the Massachusetts and Vermont primaries, devoted 31 paragraphs to Kennedy's victory and three to Carter's...
...The reasoning of the court is that the FTC was taking over the states' regulatory functions...
...That doesn't sound half bad, unless you know that any corner bank is offering 9.85 percent on amounts as small as $500...
...When it seemed that Kennedy would blow Carter out of the park, they became sympathetic to the president...
...He had, of course, not suspected a thing when he was told to pick up $25,000 cash left in a phone booth by one of CREEP's bagmen...
...Then I give my support to the other team, switching sides thereafter as often as the lead changes...
...The other side of the story comes from Virginia, where there now have been 14 worker deaths in the construction industry in the last two years...
...By 1944, of course, when von Stauffenberg carried his bomb-filled briefcase into a meeting with Hitler, the CIA's parent agency, the OSS, was in action...
...Carter also defeated Kennedy by 11 percent in New Hampshire, and by almost 3 to 1 in Vermont...
...If you thought the double-dipping scandal had been stopped, consider this fact: The government spends over $100 million a year paying double pensions to people who retire on disability from one federal job and then get another from which they later also retire...
...f you...
...Maybe Jimmy Stewart will make a commercial for Ward's explaining how it has acted in the spirit of good old Harvey Firestone by discovering a loophole in the law that permits the resale...
...The reason is that they were ablaze with lights...
...And Miller was the lawyer who, in the pardon negotiations with the Ford White House, represented Richard M. Nixon...
...Our "allies" have let us bankrupt ourselves paying for their defense, while they smugly lecture us about the need to get our economic house in order...
...Recall its wrong predictions-that the Shah was secure in 1978, that Vietnam would not collapse in the spring of 1975, that war would 8 not break out in the Middle East in the fall of 1973-and the grotesque mixture of evil and clownishness that characterized its assassination attempts...
...Speaking of Watergateor speaking of $25,000 cash-remember Dwayne Andreas...
...Yes," I can hear Stewart saying, "old Harvey would have liked that...
Vol. 12 • April 1980 • No. 2
