LETTERS
LETTERS No Way to Treat a Lady "Tilting at Windmills" (July-August) frets because the National Organization for Women (NOW) wants the same kind of representation as the cigarette and handgun...
...Noah's proposals have some merit, but they will not have much effect except as a supplement to effective campaign reform...
...Otherwise, Noah argues that "past pitfalls" show campaign finance reform won't work...
...patents...
...It is also true that land-grant railroads received alternating sections of land along their rights-of-way...
...The Fair Political Practices Commission in California has been releasing digestible summaries of campaign reports to the press with great success for almost ten years...
...citizens last year received the lowest number of U.S...
...patents since 1964...
...LUCILLE G. NATKINS Great Neck, New York Pardon me, your slip is showing...
...patents granted to U.S...
...The present system, which limits each single contribution but places no overall limit, intensifies the problem by forcing the candidate to tap more sources...
...Rowse that we are accepting ads from the companies involved only if the ads are not for leverage contracts...
...But the general thought is a good one...
...In 1983 six of the nine corporations that received the largest number of U.S...
...As for our editorial coverage, we alerted our readers, in February that the CFTC was proposing new rules for leverage contracts, and we named the four companies the CFTC has had complaints about...
...They also pay property taxes on those rights-of-way, which no highway operator does...
...In your May report ["Who's Who in the Administration"] you state: "Two of the most powerful members of the White House staff are reliably reported to have been engaging in extramarital affairs with female White House employees ." Perhaps the sentence should read: "Two of the most powerful male members...
...Corruption in Congress would decline dramatically if an effective system of public financing, or overall limits on special interest contributions, or both, were adopted...
...I explained to Mr...
...The typos were apparent to your readers...
...In our zeal to defend those who were wronged by McCarthy's smears, we botched the third name: it's Frederick Fisher, not Kenyon...
...We don't have longrange arrangements with them...
...The number ,of U.S...
...Rowe's proposed "Nobel for Applied Engineer"the Inventor of the Year Award, to the inventor with the best invention patented or first commercially available during the year...
...Von Braun was the epitome of the practical engineer Rowe admires, for it was under his guidance that the V-bombs that smashed into London were developed...
...It works wonderfully...
...Alexander is indeed a respected scholar, but Noah neglects to point out that Alexander writes pro-PAC propaganda for the big business Public Affairs Council...
...Isn't the "single issue" of full political, economic, and social rights for one half the population just a tad more valid and important than the unrestricted right to manufacture, sell, and carry Saturday night specials...
...We have turned down thousands of dollars in revenue for ads we thought were unsuitable, even though they appear in other reputable publications...
...The factual errors may not have been...
...Herbert Wamsley is executive director of Intellectual Property Owners, Inc...
...Somehow I doubt it...
...How about it, Lana...
...Your comment that we were continuing to run some "presumably because of a long-range contract" was unfounded...
...That is, unless you don't want to consider Cabinet positions powerful...
...LOU H. SILBERMAN Tucson, Arizona Jonathan Rowe is right that America needs more R & D that can be put to practical use...
...I compliment you on your solid and well-balanced article...
...At the same time, our foreign competitors are making more patentable inventions...
...Let us hope that America's leading inventors can attain the same status as Nobel prize winners...
...Keep Following the Money Timothy Noah ("Don't Follow the Money," JulyAugust) does a disservice by dismissing the idea of campaign finance reform...
...HERBERT C. WAMSLEY Washington, D.C...
...Or perhaps you are implying a (horrors) homosexual affair...
...Noah cites Herbert Alexander as describing the issue as "phony...
...There have been no ITT or dairy scandals in the White House since the reforms were passed...
...Indeed, the proposal for free television ads is a form of subsidy to candidates...
...If we agree to provide the commercial highway users with comparable land grants, will they also agree to provide the government with the same discount on freight and passenger rates...
...Will The Washington Monthly never cease dismissing women's concerns as "single issues...
...DENNIS A. DUTTERER Washington, D.C...
...When there is a female vicepresident of the U.S., I'm sure The Washington Monthly will report rumors about her as a "powerful female...
...I told Mr...
...citizens declined from 24 per 100,000 citizens in 1963 to 15 per 100,000 last year-less than half what it was at the turn of the century...
...patents as General Motors and Ford combined...
...patents were foreign controlled, compared with only one of the top nine in 1973...
...His proposal that stations be required to make free time available is a reasonable condition on the broadcast license, but if the goal is campaign finance reform it may be just as well not to provoke such powerful political opposition on what is basically a peripheral issue...
...It's "a terrible idea...if organizations like NOW imitate the National Rifle Association .. . and threaten to oppose all candidates who do not give them unquestioning support [because] to have the courage to vote his convictions, a congressman has to believe that his constituents will vote for him on his overall records, not on the basis of his stand on a single issue...
...Or don't the two dozen-odd women in Congress have the same worries as their male counterparts...
...LETTERS No Way to Treat a Lady "Tilting at Windmills" (July-August) frets because the National Organization for Women (NOW) wants the same kind of representation as the cigarette and handgun lobbies, two of the most powerful in Washington...
...In Congress the situation has gotten worse because the essential reforms were not adopted...
...Nissan Motor in 1983 received about the same number of U.S...
...Rowse we had writers working on an article on safe ways to buy gold (with warnings about leverage contracts) and another one on how readers who've been burned by these deals can seek reparations...
...At Intellectual Property Owners, Inc., a nonprofit association representing people who own patents, trademarks, and copyrights, we are deeply concerned about the steady decline in the number of patentable inventions made by U.S...
...It is too bad that Rowe's instructive article was marred by the ubiquitous anti-intellectualism posing as anti-elitism that is a trademark of The Washington Monthly...
...Fifteen years ago foreign nationals received 20 percent of U.S...
...The proposal to run lists of contributors in local newspapers is naive-who will read the lists...
...And isn't it also about time for The Washington Monthly to use inclusive nouns (representatives, not congressmen) and pronouns (their/them, not his/him) so that one sentence will not have six masculine references...
...He is wrong...
...in 1983 the figure was over 40 percent...
...Will Batts commit herself to support property-tax assessments on the enormous amount of land which we have paved over for the highway users' benefit...
...There you go again...
...The paragraph quoting me in your article about ads for leverage contracts managed to trip up your proofreader and writer...
...Railroads do not depend on a government-owned right-of-way, but pay for the maintenance of their rails out of their profits...
...P. L. McKINNON Rock Island, Illinois Futures Shock As a former general counsel of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission I read with great interest your recent article, " 'It Must Be Legitimate, Thelma, They Advertise in The Wall Street Journal,' " [Arthur Rowse] that appeared in the June issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Our association is sponsoring an award similar to Mr...
...This year's inventor of the year is Robert E. Fischell of Johns Hopkins University...
...The Federal Election Commission could do the same, if Congress had not designed it to be as ineffective as possible...
...DAVID L. DAVIES San Bernardino, California Editor's Note: In the July-August "Letters" we replied to a challenge by William Francis Freehoff of Kingsport, Tennessee that we name "one-just one-person whom Senator Joe McCarthy said was a communist who was notin fact-a communist" by naming three: Dorothy Kenyon, Reed Harris, and Frederick Kenyon...
...We put a hold on all leverage ads, not "some," as you reported...
...The only full reform package that has been adopted at the federal level applies to presidential elections...
...Land-grant railroads carried government business at half the commercial rates until World War II...
...His continued hostility to reform is hardly evidence for Noah's claim that "many thoughtful people" are coming to the view that reform cannot work...
...DANIEL H. LOWENSTEIN Los Angeles, California Rails v. Roads-Part Two Lana Batts' letter in the June issue concerning highway finance and the trucking industry notes, truly enough, that railroad companies pay no federal diesel fuel tax...
...Why should they...
...Nobel Intentions To mention von Braun, the director of the Peenemunde rocket development facility in Hitler's Germany, in the same sentence with Einstein, Fermi, and Teller, all refugees from the Nazi terror, suggests that Jonathan Rowe ["Nobel Fever: Why the Engineers Left the Shop Floor," June] had better go back to school for a history lesson...
...While I do not share all of your views-for example I am not familiar with 8,000 as the number of "unregistered leverage houses and `bucket shops' "-I believe you tell a story that has been often overlooked...
...We also omitted the name of the most famous victim, Owen Lattimore...
...No amount of screening can protect readers from their own bad judgment, but we take seriously the trust our readers place in what they see in Changing Times...
...Marjorie White is editor of Changing Times...
...MARJORIE WHITE Washington, D.C...
...citizens...
Vol. 16 • August 1984 • No. 8
