Tilting at Windmills

...One Japanese trade official, Kazuo Wakasugi, has said that if we do, "there would be no benefit for Japan to remain a member of the free world...

...The truth about the plight of the savings and loan industry could not have been revealed more dramatically than by the announcement by the Metropolitan Banking Savings and Loan League that its annual meeting, instead of the usual three days at the luxurious Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, will be at a local hotel and last for two hours...

...Time's eightpage cover story on social security in its May 24 issue, although unimaginative in its proposals, was a step in the right direction...

...William Dickinson, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee...

...The item in the story that fascinated me the most was buried in the second column, so you might have missed it...

...it was Vietnam...

...Still, I think, as with the Christmas Eve reading of Dickens, we can all benefit from retelling stories that illustrate important truths...

...Weinberger and his deputy, Frank Carlucci, are my leading candidates for the title of Most Cynical Member of the Reagan administration...

...This threat is one of the two reasons we have let Japan get away with its outrageous trade practices and its equally outrageous failure to pay its fair share of our common defense...

...Instead, as the country is in danger of plunging into a depression that could be devastating, the headlines and nightly news have been dominated by the Falkland Islands and the Hinckley trial...

...I'm sure I'll get more letters complaining about my position on prayer than I got about my discussion of Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth, and there were a lot of them (some will appear in "Letters" next month...

...They both deserve to enjoy, so I can understand their impatience...

...In our February issue we talked about how liberals should stop scorning and start reaching out to people who take their religion seriously...

...The reason I was interested in Miss Jackson is that, while she was playing tennis, she was collecting unemployment compensation...

...This is information the public needs...

...The media makes the decisions of what events to cover and what not to cover, what to report briefly and what to examine thoroughly...

...The association, whose membership includes 540 defense contractors, gave Rep...

...Such plants are key to the proliferation issue because they can provide direct access to materials that can be used for weapons...

...Based on a valid insight— that most violent criminals have psychological problems—the liberals' proposed remedies ignore the fact that most of these psychological problems are of such severity that they could not be cured by teams of brilliant psychiatrists working around the clock on each convict...

...Dickinson its 1982 Defense Industry Award, $10,000, and a gold medal, for his "support of strong national defense...

...If you have decided you want to vacation in Honolulu, the service will, for a modest fee, find just the Spinal Seminar at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel that will make the trip tax deductible...

...For more on Meese see Who's Who in this issue...

...So why have they consistently refused to concede that there is any fat in the defense budget...

...I felt I understood but I did not think I could ever explain what I understood...

...Charles Peters...

...And, while it hasn't been nearly thorough enough in its appraisal of the 1983 defense budget, press coverage of defense issues generally has improved vastly in the last few years...

...But all is not lost...

...And I can't hate them for what they are doing now...

...The resulting condensation of facts can be seriously misleading...

...As a result nearly twice as many aircraft are handled per controller and the cost of operation has fallen by over 33 percent...

...For example, as Jonathan Alter points out in his article beginning on page 12, the crucial role of the Federal Reserve is almost never explained...

...The effect has been to limit the makeup of inspection teams to individuals from `friendly' countries...

...Perhaps those of you who have opposed our proposal to deny the rich the benefits of the government's various income maintenance programs will now repent your error and join our great crusade...

...If that happens we would probably join the communist bloc...

...The problem is that today it is getting protection from neither, and for that, liberal approaches to bail, parole, and insanity must bear a large part of the blame...

...This remarkable saving in costs and improvement in efficiency was made possible by one simple management change: smoothing out the traffic flow to eliminate the peak time periods (e.g., flights bunched around 5 p.m...

...It is called Physician's Medical Conference Service...

...For example, one of their reasons for objecting to the appointment of Gregory J. Newell as an assistant secretary of state is that he has no college degree...

...There has been a dramatic breakthrough in the culture of the expense account...

...Nukes are like handguns—no amount of control can ever put the genie completely back in the bottle...

...Drew a line at his feet...

...They are given free liquor with their dinner...

...Though IAEA inspectors are competent to check the light-water power reactors that were once the norm, they aren't very good with the reprocessing and enrichment plants that have increased in recent years...

...As the latter award is being announced, the cameras will be hard pressed to show the faces of all the congressmen who have every right to be looking expectantly toward the podium...

...Jurors in Colorado Springs are also enjoying the good life...

...IAEA inspectors do not have unlimited access on their inspections...

...Both the food-to-alcohol ratio and the amount of the latter that was put away suggest that there must have been an urgent summons for black coffee before the jurors resumed their deliberations the next morning...

...Much of it is not sensitive enough to detect losses of nuclear material that might have been diverted to bombs...

...The short-term memory of those of us who have reached or passed our fifties is such that we can repeat or have repeated to us any anecdote that is more than six months old and it will come with all the freshness of a spring flower...

...Speaking of your heroes turning into the bad guys, what about Harrison Wellford, one of Ralph Nader's great crusaders against industrial threats to health and the environment...

...By the way, did you know that in Canada income tax applies to social security benefits...

...It is—you guessed it—exactly one third the size of our state department, indeed, the entire Japanese government has but 506,000 employees...

...Israelis waited centuries for their promised land...

...According to Business Week, it was 4.8 percent for American companies...

...Another Japanese secret is that they scorn short-term profit...

...I guess nothing is worrying me more these days than those "time constraints of daily newspaper and television reports...

...The Air Traffic Control System has been able to accommodate approximately 83 percent of prestrike traffic with 42 percent of its prestrike work force...

...That recent report by a citizens' task force on the FAA's management, while deservedly critical in many respects, contained some amazing information on what has been accomplished since the PATCO strike...

...The change was made under the pressure of necessity after Reagan fired the striking controllers, but it could have been made anytime and is thus dramatic evidence of what could be done to cut the cost of government and improve its efficiency...

...Caspar Weinberger, who says he just can't find any way to cut the defense budget, recently ran up a $3,659.77 bill in two nights at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia...

...One does from time to time detect a certain rolling of the eyes among one's younger associates...

...The District police force launched a campaign against career criminals and within a week had arrested 24 persons who each had an average of five felony arrests on their records...

...My concern is simply that they not become a monomaniacal obsession—shutting liberals off from other problems that have high potential for doing us serious harm...

...The march of progress continues...

...It is called the International Atomic Energy Agency...

...The new ambassador to France, Griffin Galbraith, is a close friend not of the present president of France, but of his predecessor, who is detested by the incumbent...

...For all those who scorn my proposal to embargo Japanese products, let me tell you that Taiwan has done just that...

...If not a campaign contribution from a corporate PAC, there will be a paid speaking engagement before a trade association—or an award like that recently presented by the American Defense Preparedness Association to Rep...

...The Wall Street Journal not long ago carried an article about one such island of the wealthy, Bronxville, New York...

...Those of you who remember Senator Bob Packwood's remarks about the irrelevance of the president's anecdotes will be interested in these paragraphs toward the end of Howell Raines's report in The New York Times of Reagan's visit to Fort Wayne, a town with a jobless rate of 13.7 percent: "In a speech earlier that day, he said he was touched by the `suffering behind the statistics.' But when he addressed the elderly flood refugees in the gym at the Precious Blood School, he...

...I rise to the defense of Ann Landers in the case of recycled letters...

...The most absurd example is the amount of your viewing time that the networks have squandered on pictures of Margaret Thatcher getting into and out of automobiles in front of 10 Downing Street...

...He had been sentenced to seven to 21 years in Lorton Reformatory on his last conviction and was paroled after serving the minimum sentence...

...Many thought my comments meant I was indifferent to nuclear dangers...

...The problem is that this laudable venture into equal opportunity employment has produced some lamentable results in the new edition—"mankind," for example, has become "humankind," and "countryman" is "country dweller...

...He's now the head of a Washington law firm that represents the asbestos industry, one of the most dangerous of them all...

...Shortly before, a Rufus Adams was convicted of murdering a woman by twisting a garrote around her neck and stabbing her more than a dozen times...

...It described a Miss Leslie Jackson, whose parents provide her with a comfortable home, a Mazda sports cars, and a membership in the exclusive Field Club, where she plays tennis clad in an outfit by Ralph Lauren...

...That concern must, I suspect, be a permanent part of our lives...

...But the story does remind me of those trips to Bar Harbor, Maine, for which it was reported the secretary was using government planes last summer...

...Before the week was out, most of the 24 arrested were also out—on bail—ready to strike again...

...To one reader who has threatened to kill himself if I ever told the Briggs story again, let me hasten to add that I really have a legitimate excuse this time...

...The restaurants are imaginary, but the receipts look authentic...

...According to The New York Times, the average profit margin for Japanese companies was 1.12 percent last year...

...The competition is keen, of course, but these are two men who, because of their extensive experience in government, including service in places like the OMB and the CIA, had to know about the budgetinflating techniques that are traditionally practiced by government agencies and traditionally practiced most outrageously by the Pentagon...

...I also derived little comfort from Judith Miller's report in The New York Times of May 9 that "installations in Western Europe used for 'storing American nuclear warheads continue to be vulnerable to assault by terrorists...

...He recently told a Washington gathering that he opposed the progressive income tax as "immoral...

...The embargo does not apply to all items—but it does cut Japanese imports by over 25 percent...

...Wellford worked in the public interest for years for peanuts...

...I trembled when I read, in a Reuters story dated March 17, "Iran is to start importing nuclear technology again" and when I saw a report in the May 13 Washington Post predicting Argentina will have the bomb soon...

...Worse still is the media's refusal to take on important issues relating to the budget and the economy...

...The key factor here, as we have pointed out before, Ann, is that American corporations get most of their financing from stockholders who want dividends and the profits that produce them, while Japanese companies get most of theirs from banks that lend them money for the long-term...

...Similarly, the elimination of scheduled decreases in income taxes are invariably expressed in the headlines as proposed "tax increases" or "tax raises," creating understandable anxiety on the part of the average taxpayer...

...Once during the war, while Dugger was interviewing Johnson at the White House, the president suddenly started reciting: " 'Surrender or die!' `Men what will you do?' "And Travis, great Travis, drew sword quick and strong...

...Some of the criticism appears justified...

...On a recent evening, according to The Rocky Mountain News, the food bill for one jury came to $79.68 and the liquor bill to $133.05...

...One example: The large Ford dealerships owned by one of his closest friends, Holmes Tuttle, are located in parts of the Sun Belt— Arizona and Orange County, California—that remain islands of prosperity in a country drifting toward depression...

...Reagan's mind was the fact that in the G.E...

...Thus a nation with a population half the size of ours manages to make do with a bureaucracy that is less than one fifth our own...

...Probably the most dismaying fact of all is the powerlessness of the agency that is supposed to be the watchdog of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty...

...I admired the Israelis and I admired Wellford...

...On the morning before The Sheffield was sunk, Drew Middleton's story in The New York Times began, "British naval sources say the Argentinians have shown a significant lack of understanding of the power and accuracy of air-launched missiles...

...Reagan's ambassadorial appointments have come under fire from the Foreign Service Association...

...And the chairman of Sony has said, according to The Washington Post's Hobart Rowen, that "if Japan's industrial power were to be switched to the other side, the balance would be altered...

...Ronnie Dugger does just that in his new book, The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson—he says LBJ once told the National Security Council, "Hell, Vietnam is just like the Alamo...

...A man in Pennsylvania is now selling blank restaurant receipts...

...He was Lyndon Johnson...

...I. F. Stone predicts that the next move of the Israelis on the West Bank will be to require the Arabs to wear special identification badges—perhaps a yellow crescent...

...The other reason we have hesitated to crack down on the Japanese is the fear of being called racists...

...Charlotte Jarvis, a D.C...

...Briggs found that the remaining third constituted the most efficient embassy he had ever known...

...This provision has evolved into a wholesale rejection of inspectors on grounds of politics or nationality...

...While I can easily see how the custom of my youth, requiring children to recite the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of school, was offensive to non-believers, I can see no reason to oppose a few minutes of silent meditation...

...offered a rambling anecdote about a speech he once made as company spokesman in a General Electric Company plant in Owensboro, Kentucky...

...Another danger is that a nuclear freeze, once attained, would have the same effect as the achievement of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, namely, to defuse for years thereafter concern about nuclear dangers...

...Have you heard about the latest service being offered them...

...There are other people like the friends of Ronald Reagan whose lives are unscathed by the recession...

...The decisions it has been making this spring have been dismayingly bad...

...All the Taiwanese ask is that Japan open its domestic market to Taiwanese goods...

...Weinberger's friends...

...A final note on those who are savoring life to its fullest...

...Well, that should disappear now—after all, the Taiwanese are oriental too...

...As regular readers know, one of my favorites concerns the time the Czechs got mad at our thenAmbassador Ellis 0. Briggs and ordered two thirds of our embassy staff to return to the United States...

...Nineteen of the arrests were made on the basis of outstanding felony warrants, five because the accused were observed in the actual commission of crime...

...What they care about is expanding their share of the market so that they can achieve long-term growth...

...Society deserves to be protected from the insane just as much as it deserves protection from the "sane" criminal...

...that had both required and strained a much larger staff...

...The time and space constraints of daily newspaper and television reports are such that it is difficult to convey the peculiar flavor of such Reagan anecdotes...

...Its ad reads, "Want to mix business with pleasure...

...This is, in ludicrous extreme the typical liberal attitude toward violent crime...

...In this frenetic world, we could all stand a few moments of quiet reflection each day...

...Here's a new service that helps you find the right medically-related conference to suit your professional and [the emphasis is in the ad] recreational needs...

...During such a period those who want to pray can pray and those who don't want to pray can think about baseball (which indeed I often managed to do while reciting the Lord's Prayer) or anything else, sectarian or non-sectarian, they want to think about...

...Proposals to eliminate planned increases in social security are presented to the public as social security cuts, and panic among the elderly is the result...

...Jack Anderson got hold of a confidential General Accounting Office report that showed the IAEA's weaknesses: "—Politically motivated `safeguards' allow any signatory nation to reject individual inspectors arbitrarily...

...In addition the rate of operating errors has been reduced by 36 percent...

...In 1975 I was in San Antonio and, like most tourists, made the ritual visit to the Alamo...

...Another group that continues to do well is doctors...

...Roger's Thesaurus has hired a woman as its editor...

...The Los Angeles Times may have the real reason Reagan doesn't seem to care about the recession— it isn't affecting his old friends in the Kitchen Cabinet...

...I should note that my source for this information is The West Virginia Democrat, a publication whose objectivity may seem questionable in the eyes of some of Mr...

...So it's not that I don't share your nuclear anxieties...

...The next step will surely be the Lobbyists Academy Award Night, with eloquent, even touching presentations to and acceptance speeches by "the senator who has done the most for the drug industry in 1982" or "the congressman who has given a lifetime of service to the dairy lobby...

...Will you come...

...The Japanese are beginning to fear we might do the same...

...Even if a truly neutral inspector is allowed onto an IAEA team, there is still little chance that illegal activity will be discovered...

...Since Taiwan is Japan's fifth largest market, according to The New York Times, this should give the Japanese something to think about...

...Not, however, if Ed Meese has his way...

...The connecting link in Mr...

...On the same day, by the way, the Associated Press reported, on the basis of testimony by Eugene V. Rostow, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, that "there is a feeling in many parts of the administration" in favor of testing nuclear weapons above 150 kilitons—which just happens to be the limit we agreed to in a treaty negotiated several years ago...

...Finally, the IAEA doesn't have the necessary expertise to check out the most dangerous kinds of nuclear facilities...

...Since most violent criminals are insane to some considerable degree, insanity should be no defense...

...It is nothing but blackmail and should be ignored by us...

...After I had spent an hour or so absorbing the atmosphere of the place, I said •to myself, "My God, this is why he did it...

...plant and in the flood victims' shelter, he spoke from atop a cafeteria table...

...For that explanation alone his book will become essential for those who want to understand both Johnson and the war...

...council member and candidate for mayor has this solution for such repeat criminals: "They have psychological problems, so I have budgeted money for a full-time psychiatrist at Lorton...

...Joseph Reed, the new ambassador to Morocco, demonstrated his perception of the currents sweeping through Islam by urging the Carter administration to admit the Shah...

...The technical equipment available to IAEA teams if often inadequate...

...But I can't admire what they are doing now...

...Adams was free on parole at the time of the murder—free even though in a criminal career that began in 1963 he has been convicted of two armed rapes, two armed robberies, and assault with a dangerous weapon...

...Far from it...

...I see the school prayer issue as one way of doing that...

...I have just learned the size of the Japanese foreign ministry, known to be among the worlds' most efficient...

...Will you go?' " 'I die with my wounded, in the Alamo...

...The most soft-headed of all the soft-hearted ideas about crime is that insanity should be defense...

...But some of the criticism reflects the kind of snobbery that makes the members of the Foreign Service Association themselves so unattractive to many people abroad...

...If ours did, the deficit could be reduced by $12 billion this year...

...The effectiveness of our system of criminal justice is suggested by a couple of episodes that occurred in Washington recently...

...But doctors and friends of Ronald Reagan aren't the only people living it up...

...And since the income tax is progressive, of course the burden would fall on those who could afford to pay...