Tilting at Windmills

...Palm Beach...

...He is both skilled and tactful...

...Perhaps, but a new magazine has decided that the envelope copy that will persuade potential subscribers to open their direct-mail solicitations is, in very large type, “CLASS,” and beneath it: “A charter invitation to a magazine that’s got it and wants to help you get it, too...

...It may still be a danger, but at least Ronald Reagan has done what he could reasonably do to avert It...

...The people down below usually know more about what’s going on in places like Dixon, Illinois, than the people at the top...

...The defense budget must be seen not only in terms of what we must defend against but what we have to defend...

...AT&T may have come up with a whole new approach...

...Even Chicago, New York, and San Francisco have only one...

...Federal employees are falling behind...

...He spent a good part of the next day, the press reported, talking with these men about their views of the war...

...When Reed last looked into the comparability issue for us, he found only manufacturing and retail firms with more than 250 employees were surveyed, eliminating 96 percent of the manufacturing and 98 percent of the retail firms...

...Hoffman goes on to solemnly inform his reader that “federal law requires that government salaries be comparable with those for similar jobs in the private sector...

...What caused the court to free him...

...The defendant testified that he had not seen any television set until he noticed one, nearby, as the officers approached him...

...The federal deficit is soaring...

...The Times also ran an excellent long article under the headline “Deteriorating Public Facilities Are Held a Threat to the Nation’s Economy...

...It’s unlikely that the appropriation will have passed by the time you read this, so this is another reason to write your congressman, now...

...f i e New York Times is doing a lot better than the Democrats...

...Charles Peters...

...It turned out she was a government employee...

...One possible explanation occurred to me one night at dinner with two prominent Post editors...

...The lawyers hadn’t even won the case, but the court ruled they had made “a substantial contribution to the interpretation of the act...

...Beverly Hills...

...but we also tell you the good about the career government service...

...Think about this one for a while...

...On the eve of a scheduled subcommittee vote last month, Florio bowed to the wishes of the food industry interests in his district, led by Campbell Soup Co., and withdrew his proxy in support of a measure to require that foods be labeled for sodium content...

...This lack is, I believe, true of almost all the great newspapers and newsmagazines...

...It failed to give the slightest hint that some of the publications receiving the non-profit subsidy, which is paid for by the taxpayers, are among the nation’s richest the National Geographic and the Smithsonian, for example...

...This would then trigger alarms to which they would rush to respond in time to loot the premises before the owner arrived, You can just see the cops standing around filling out reports, saying “You really need better security...

...So are many of the other people who work at the Post...

...The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia recently awarded $90,000 in fees to lawyers for the Sierra Club in a suit brought under the Environmental Protection Act...

...Another student mentioned D o I worry too much about snobber...

...Still, Coram saw three of the four F16s miss their targets, two by more than half a mile...

...The outside jobs surveyed match only 23 percent of the federal jobs-or job descriptions...

...The dentist had admitted guilt...

...Behind this kind of nonsense is a culture of the judicial system that makes the legal process a challenging game in which lawyers vie with one another to discover clever new grounds for getting criminals off the hook, and judges, forgetting their duty to protect the public from crime, join in the spirit of the sport by rewarding the clever lawyers with reversals...

...Buried in the article was one of those details Washington Monthly readers relish: One of the cops, Jack Myers, was caught red-handed carrying cash and merchandise from a store...

...Both happen to be by David Hoffman, who is on the whole an excellent reporter...

...Among the less confidence-inspiring aspects of the system is that the surveys of private sector pay and the initial recommendation for pay increases are made by government employees themselves, who are, after all, the potential beneficiaries of the process...

...The evidence it could have provided was not even used in court because the guilty plea made it unnecessary...

...It’s Republican...

...Jerry Solomon, who is sponsoring a Volunteering in Government Act...

...Another argument often made is that elderly social security recipients are needier than the rest of the population...

...Dobryn in gives Americans a very misleading idea of what most Soviet diplomats are like...

...I welcome the attack that thoughtful economists and business writers have begun to make on the inflated salaries of corporate executives...

...Now, anyone with a shred of sophistication about the federal service knows these job descriptions are among the masterworks of modern fiction, endowing the average file clerk, to paraphrase a veteran bureaucrat, Leonard Reed, with responsibilities before which a Harvard M.B.A...

...They are telling our readers that we were wrong (“the statement is unfounded”) in saying that Campbell lobbied to block legislation requiring sodium content labeling...

...It seems the officers would rush to the scene of a reported break-in and steal on their own before making their reports...

...The doubling up was ordered by the White House’s new master of perks, a 26-yearold named John Rogers, who reports to James Baker and is fast becoming the most disliked man on the White House staff...

...His advances were such that the undercover woman investigator posing as a patient had to be rescued at the last minute by detectives...

...Reflecting the conventional liberal assumption that if profit is evil, non-profit must be virtuous, the piece reeked of bias in favor of the subsidy...

...The president had the outside ‘wise men’ come in to sift through the government and talk to those who might give them some advice in terms of advising him...

...James J. Florio to do as the jingle advises and ‘remember the soup.’ It was industry lobbying at its most sophisticated: low-key, light handed, lightning-quick, behind the scenes, constituent“From the start, the name of based, and targeted at a single swing legislator who held a key vote on a touchy consumer issue...

...Among the absurdities she cites is the $ I .4 million a year Archie McCardell was paid as he led International Harvester to the brink of bankruptcy...

...The fees were enough to cover, at those high-for-even-Wall Street rates, 6,041 hours, or 755 lawyer days...

...Campbell does have a good record of sodium labeling its own soups, but it obviously does not want laws that might require not only the sodium contents but the health consequences of those contents revealed as well...

...while older, simpler or combat proven weapons provided accurate and dependable firepower...

...Why not, indeed, is the answer of Rep...

...The court didn’t disagree with the jury’s findings: “This evidence was certainly sufficient for a jury to convict appellant of the crime of burglary...

...If you doubt me, consider two recent cases in which a convicted felon was freed by New York appellate courts...

...The more we take from the common wealth for its defense, the smaller it becomes...

...When action was slack, they would create their own opportunities by throwing a brick through a store window...

...Hoffman’s report headlined, “Reagan Asks Lesser Raise in U.S...

...Urge your congressman to support it...

...Except for a handful of programs, the federal government is prohibited from accepting the services of unpaid volunteers...

...The diplomat said, ‘How could they leave without a visa...

...She got $100,000...

...Recalling $100 bills to change their color or discontinue them would enable the government to identify and catch the drug pushers, gamblers, and other tax evaders who deal almost exclusively in cash and who, if the government required an exchange, would either have to come forward or lose their ill-gotten gains...

...Obviously both news organizations and aspiring journalists must think about how to acquire real government experience so that at least some of the people observing from the outside can do so with an insider’s understanding...

...Now, from the president’s viewpoint, raw data is sometimes essential information...

...One example: percent of America had never heard of Philip Habib...

...Cease fretting, counseled Wilson...

...W e may tell you the bad...

...These are the people who know the facts about places like El Salvador that could turn into new Vietnams...

...But 40 percent of the landlords have failed to comply...

...What all this adds up to is that we should focus our economic help on the poor as a group, including the elderly, not on the elderly as a group, including the well-off...

...1 hate to spoil that anecdote by saying I don’t really think the wives’ self-interest is the explanation...

...Professor William Baumol of Princeton, who received $41,775 of that sum, told The New York Times: “The normal pattern has been for the company to ask me to testify...

...When he was interrogated at police headquarters, he requested, and was paid, overtime for the hours of interrogation...

...It altered the target area,” according to the General Accounting Office, “by emplacing aluminum reflectors in a precise geometrical pattern to insure that the target had a distinctive radar signature...

...There are many factors, the most important of which is the editors’ lack of experience in their own government, the kind of experience that would give them a feel for the rituals of the bureaucracy, its institutional imperative, its confidence games...

...I had innocently been discussing how most federal workers were overpaid-with salaries in the $50,000 range common for jobs that had less responsibility than a supermarket manager’s-when I began to detect steam escaping from the nostrils of the wife of one of the editors, who was seated next to me...

...So when you’re walking down Broadway, remember to keep your eyes looking up (and your hand on your wallet...

...The deputy ambassador replied: ‘‘ ‘You Jews are all alike, you Ambassador Anatoly always want to get on top of everybody.’ “One student brought up the repression of the Ukrainian Catholic church...

...White House assistants should be in constant touch with the George Carvers and the Phil Habibs...

...1 doubt very much if, for example, the government is going to be able to afford the immense cost of health care for the aged-remember what Phil Keisling predicted would happen in veterans’ hospitals alone-without the help of a large number of volunteers...

...The survey compares what the government accountant’s job description says he does with what the private accountant actually does...

...Last year AT&T and the affiliated companies of the Bell system spent $3.5 million in fees to professors and consultants...

...If you have faith in civil service tests, ponder what is happening to 76 provisional youth counselors who were hired by the state of New York during the period between June 1975 and October 1981, when no civil service test was given for the job...

...Southampton...

...The nation’s total resources being limited, it is necessary to consider what is being given up to meet the threat...

...The White House has become sensitive to the effect of this kind of news in an election year and is cutting back its own travel expenses...

...T he August issue of California magazine has an article called “The Burglar Cops of Hollywood...

...the others are so ham handed that they constitute our secret weapon in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the world...

...A military announcer introduced the F16 as having “the best avionics and bomb delivery system available today,” and this magazine believes it is clearly more desirable than the F18...

...Even more maddening was Mr...

...Guess what city is affluent enough to have two...

...Other new allies for old Washington Monthly causes: Jane Bryant Quinn in Newsweek attacked bloated military pensions, for which our unfunded indebtedness is now $590 billion and which encourage people to spend more years on pensions than they do on active duty...

...This ignores the tax break they get that the rest of us don’t and the fact that most of their homes are fully paid for, relieving them of what is the major financial burden for the rest of us...

...On August I 1 its lead editorial was entitled, “Link Social Security to Need...

...The story proceeded to recite that Reagan was recommending a four-percent pay raise “instead of the 18.47-percent increase that a study found would be required to match comparable pay levels in the private sector...

...Because he would have been the tenth ‘yes’ vote on the 20-member House subcommittee on health and the environment, his move effectively killed the bill...

...It simply didn’t like the idea of the prosecutor calling the burglar a liar even if it agreed he was one...

...I would tell them what I was prepared to say, and if they thought it was appropriate, 1 testified-if not, I did not testify...

...Each has one Elizabeth Arden salon...

...The fatal defect in the state’s case, according to the judge, was that the camera was installed seven days after the warrant authorizing it had expired...

...He found that “expensive high technology weapons either failed or operated far below their advertised capabilities...

...The speaker: none other than Caspar Weinberger when he was wearing another hat as budget director in the early seventies...

...By buying them all up first...

...Next time remember this fact: the average social security recipient is paid back his entire life’s contribution within two years after retirement...

...The failure to explore this other side of the comparability story has, to the best of my knowledge, been true of the Post since the comparability act was passed in 1962...

...And, according to a study prepared for the American Economics Association by John B. Shoven of Stanford and Michael Hurd of SUNY-Stony Brook, the aged on a per capita basis are fiscally as well-off as or better off than the rest of us...

...The article then quotes a government employees’ union leader: “We don’t like it worth a damn...

...the higher officials retain their single rooms...

...But Washington Monthly readers had read about him over 13 years ago...

...According to a newsletter published by the North American Telephone Association, an organization of AT&T competitors, AT&T is denying those competitors access to expert witnesses to testify before congressional committees and regulatory bodies...

...Washington...

...Even if the reporters are innocent, why don’t at least some of the editors of its news sections know enough about the government to guide the reporters toward the right questions...

...Their problem is not lack of talent...

...When you’re discussing social security reform with senior citizens, you often hear the “I’ve paid for it” argument...

...No, the dentist had been filmed in the act by a camera that investigators had installed in the ceiling of his office...

...According to the General Accounting Office, the jobs surveyed “contain disproportionate numbers of jobs which were highly paid in the private sector...

...They are threatened with dismissal because they failed or received poor grades on the October test...

...The Fortune article that received our Monthly Journalism Award in this issue was followed by an excellent series by Linda Grant in the Los Angeles Times...

...In a similar triumph of civil service mentality, George Collatos has just asked for and received the first installment of his retirement pension from the city of Boston, even though he resigned from his job just two days before he was convicted of extortion...

...Wilson says Joseph Addabbo, chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee concerned with defense spending, is predicting that he can get at least $I 1 billion removed from the bill...

...her lawyers, $2 million...

...would quail...

...In one the court voided the guilty plea of a Brooklyn dentist who admitted he had sexually abused a patient...

...And they talked to three or four young men like George Carver and Phil Habib, who was an expert at the State Department on Vietnam, and the next day, when these wise men reported to the president, he said something like, ‘With whom did you talk?’ Whereupon he insisted that these same men, whom he’d not been able to spend much time with before but who had been providing a lot of the raw material for the intelligence evaluations, be brought to see him...

...A friend recently wrote me describing a visit to Oxford last year by the deputy Soviet ambassador in London: “One student documented some of the repression against Jews in the Soviet Union...

...What difference does it make when the camera was installed...

...The TOW missile, which is supposed to have a 90-percent kill probability, missed its target during two launches from the ground and two from Cobra helicopters at less than half the missile’s claimed range...

...It didn’t quite come out for our call to revive the WPA, but the Times’ heart is clearly in the right place...

...Last, but far from least, also ignored by the comparability survey is that the average federal employee has much greater job security (even with the Reagan RIFs) and a much more generous retirement plan than his private sector counterpart...

...The extortion was carried out in the course of his performance of his public duties...

...that his family had fled from Lithuania after most had been massacred by the Soviets...

...One such case was a story by George Wilson that came when many of us were moaning about the gigantic defense budget that had sailed through Congress in August...

...After a couple of people were killed, the city council enacted an ordinance requiring land lords to have their buildings inspected...

...If the officers were telling the truth, as the jury had a right to conclude, the defendant was indeed a liar...

...Two police officers testified they had seen the defendant leaving an apartment building carrying a television set...

...The Pentagon doesn’t get the money to spend until the appropriation bill is passed...

...A federal judge awarded the fees based on an hourly rate of $240 for one firm and $375 for another...

...The comparison is not made on the basis of comparing say, what an accountant in government does against what an accountant in private industry does...

...By the way, have you heard how the army got the Pershing I1 missile to hit the target...

...The story about show the president came to the conclusion to reverse the military escalation in Vietnam is a very good example...

...The two exceptions are Meg Greenfield on the editorial page, who occasionally expresses skepticism of the case for ever-increasing federal salaries and pensions, and Mike Causey, who, even though he writes a column in the paper’s back pages called “Federal Diary” that is procivil service, does have the integrity to acknowledge now and then the holes in the civil servants’ case...

...The diplomat replied that ‘the Ukranian Catholics were fascists and Hitlerites.’ He did not explain why the repression continues 36 years after the war...

...If the appellate courts aren’t making the streets of New York sufficiently dangerous for you, there’s another hazard to contend with: crumbling masonry facades that fall on pedestrians...

...There remains the question of why the rest of the Post is so resolutely ignorant about such central facts of life in the city it covers...

...And the Internal Revenue Service, of all people, has come out in favor of our ten-year-old proposal to call in the big bills...

...That was merely an authorization bill...

...My fear is that the Reagan White House is in touch with the Philip Habibs of today, the people at the top of the career service, but not with the people down below-the Philip Habibs as they were I3 years ago...

...Moyers’s advice is equally important on the domestic side...

...Here is what happened, as described by Paul Taylor of The Washington Post: the game was to get Rep...

...Their take was modest indeed, compared to that of the lawyers who represented Shyamala Hajender in her sex discrimination case against the University of Minnesota...

...Yet some of the counselors, according to The New York Times, had performed well enough to be promoted to supervisory jobs and others have worked for years without receiving a complaint...

...I ’m mad at the Campbell Soup Company...

...In case you missed it, The Progressive’s April issue contained a marvelous article called “The Party’s Over in Dixon, Ill.,” describing what Reaganomics has done to the president’s hometown...

...Two articles that appeared last summer were perfect examples of the kind of bland, un-self-critical liberalism that constitutes the point of view of so many of the stories in The Washington Post...

...At no point in his story does Hoffman suggest that there is the slightest question about the way the government determines comparability...

...Another New York appellate court overturned the burglary conviction of a man who had a record of 21 arrests and ten convictions because the prosecutor had called him a liar during the trial...

...For example, Reed notes, a GS-14, of whom there are 55,000 in the federal service, may spend his day leafing through old reports and looking out the window, while his job description says he has “extensive and frequent contacts with key officials and top management of the same and other government agencies, state agencies, private industry, and other groups in an effort to resolve different viewpoints regarding key matters of management and organization...

...I: e Reagan administration, in its dedicated search for ways to cut the budget, somehow managed to rack up a 66percent increase in first-class air travel last year...

...Occasionally one finds World War I1 and Korean War veterans-of course, almost none of the editors are Vietnam veterans-who understand the military bureaucracy, but they seldom realize how similar the games are on the civilian side...

...This is outrageous...

...I’d say maybe 30 percent of our people are unemployed now,” one union official told the author, Mary Williams...

...As Congress continues to avoid the great debate that must take place on social security, the Democrats are displaying their statesmanship with a television ad featuring scissors clipping away at a social security card and a voice saying, “It isn’t fair...

...Ronald Reagan’s September speech on the Palestinians may have spared this country a frightening onslaught of terrorism...

...If I criticize 7he Washington Post for its failures, I should praise it when it does show sophistication in its coverage of the government...

...Had vicious cops coerced a confession from an innocent man...

...But there are, to put the matter as gently as possible, several questions to be asked...

...As a staff officer, 1 spent more time with the younger staff officers, my counterparts in the large departments, who were each day sifting information and intelligence that did not always get to the president...

...It is the blinders they wear...

...And in the end it all came together...

...Judges so much enjoy watching the game of law played that they are willing to have the rest of us pay for it...

...In our first issue, in February 1969, Bill Moyers described how Lyndon Johnson was persuaded to abandon the escalation in Vietnam : “For much of his information, the president depended on his line officers, his cabinet...

...The trial took 11 weeks...

...Why not accept free help...

...Not long ago Robert Coram of The Atlanta Journal went to Fort Bragg to watch a public demonstration of army and air force weapons...

...Incidentally, of all those tested in October, 76 percent of the whites got a passing grade, but only 40 percent of the Hispanics and 34 percent of the blacks...

...But the belt tightening is completely consistent with other Reagan policies: the lower-level staff is being asked to double up in hotel rooms...

...So was the wife of the other editor...

...On the other hand, the A-IO and F-4 planes and the M-47 antitank missile all were on target...

...The first article was about postal subsidies for non-profit organizations...

...I n the new book, Reagan’s Ruling Class, written by Ronald Brownstein and Nina Easton, associates of Ralph Nader, here is what one high administration official is quoted as saying about defense spending: “The identification of a threat to security does not automatically require an expenditure in the defense budget to neutralize it...

...After its defeat in Lebanon, it seemed clear that terrorism was the only remaining outlet for the wild frustration and anger in the ranks of the PLO...