TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...many of Montoya's rambled to the point of incoherence as he seemed to be imitating the late character actor, Raymond Walburn, playing a drunken senator...

...Foundation Chairman Jack Abramoff also happens to head the College Republican National Committee, and that other College Republicans were helping to stage the Grenada extravaganza...

...hat on, he's nonpartisan' "No such identity crisis afflicts the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), which bills itself as a conservative public-interest group...

...This rationale seemed to evaporate, however, when the ACSH filed a friend-of-thecourt brief in a 1982 lawsuit brought by the Formaldehyde Institute...

...So is the main authority he cites in favor of testing, Bernard R. Gifford, the dean of the graduate school of education at the University of California at Berkeley...

...But, ego or not, he meets the most important test for a modern labor leader— the ability to begin to acknowledge where the workers have to change as well as where management must improve...

...Speaking of medicine, did you know that, according to The New York Times, "about 28 percent of the nation's $75 billion yearly Medicare budget now goes to maintaining people in their last year of life, and the bulk of that is spent during the last month...

...At Eskimo Point, a community that itself had suffered from starvation two decades ago, 1,100 people raised almost $7,000 donating their own clothes and furniture...

...There seem to be a lot of college freshmen out there who are ready and willing to follow Mr...

...Instead of expressing his faith in the company by using the option to buy its shares, he took $1.1 million in cash...

...The man must have an enormous ego to have his union pay to run his column each week in The New York Times...

...Federal officials recently called the ad 'seriously misleading .' "During last October's first anniversary of the U.S...

...A few phone calls revealed that U.S.A...

...It turns out that the ACSH's legal brief was paid for by Georgia-Pacific Co., a leading manufacturer of formaldehyde and a member of the Formaldehyde Institute...

...invasion of Grenada, nationwide ceremonies and campus rallies were sponsored by the U.S.A...

...Recently HUD found that the City of Baltimore had improperly spent $250,000 in federal grants...

...It recently cropped up at the IRS, and the result was a very unpleasant experience for almost 10,000 businesses...

...Rejecting Reagan's "patriotism consisting merely of nationalistic flag-waving, public relations, symbolism, and military interventionism," Hart said: "Genuine patriotism must appeal to the deep sense in all of us...that there is a higher purpose for a great nation than...

...They had my heartfelt support...

...At least a third of the group's funding comes from food, chemical, and petroleum companies—from Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical to Eli Lilly and Shell Oil—that have an interest in the products that ACSH keeps defending...

...Most, as Albert Shanker points out, are probably too easy...

...I grew up in West Virginia during the Depression...

...He took $163,091 in bonuses from his company in 1984, a year in which it suffered a loss of $54 million...

...He even inspired the first clear statement of the scandal I have ever seen written by a reporter for The Washington Post— or for any other leading newspaper for that matter: "These are the essential statistics to know about the military retirement system: the average person retires at age 42 at half-pay, and the program will cost taxpayers $18.3 billion next year...

...Cultural bias is always a danger...

...This had the effect, as the company's prices became less competitive and its market share declined, of reducing employment opportunities...

...Of course, the ad doesn't say that health officials have been warning for two years that giving aspirin to certain sick children increases their chances of contracting Reye's Syndrome...

...And, during the sixties and seventies, I and the other editors of this magazine became increasingly critical of the growing tendency of unions to demand wage increases without regard to productivity increases...

...This, of course, does not mean that all current testing programs are perfect...

...The most heartening story I have heard in a long time is about the response of the Canadian Eskimos, called Inuit, to the plight of the hungry in Ethiopia...

...An example, name unknown, is the AID official who 19 years ago insisted upon moving ahead with research for a malaria vaccine at a time when the respectable consensus was that it couldn't be produced...

...The suit succeeded in overturning a federal ban on insulation made with formaldehyde, a suspected carcinogen...

...If Hart makes his message concrete in other ways, by challenging people not only to serve their community and their country but to surrender government benefits they don't need and to share more generously with those who do need, I believe he could lead the party to victory in 1988...

...It appears that the organizers are coming out of the closet, boldly calling a spade a spade, and daring the IRS to do anything about it...

...I don't believe he asked a single question that had not already been covered by his colleagues...

...Why is it that these techniques never seem to be available to you and me...

...One final word on tax-deductible conferences...

...We've also sent him to Thailand, Pakistan, Egypt, France, Mexico, Peru, Japan, Bolivia, Spain, Morocco, Israel, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland...

...Lewis also had a stock option...

...Sometimes there seemed to be almost a conscious collusion between workers, managers, and stockholders to pay higher wages, salaries, and dividends without regard to the long-range health of their company or the nation's economy...

...The rigorous medical curriculum includes Jerusalem (the Old and New Cities), the Pyramids, the Sphinx, Luxor, Karnak, the Acropolis, and a cruise to Hydra and Poros...

...But I'm suspicious of the how-to-teach test, which could be a way to perpetuate the meaningless methodology courses that have corrupted teacher education for so long...

...A lot of people—see "Letters," for example—think The Washington Monthly is anti-union...

...The sponsor is the Committee on the Care of Children...

...self-interest, materialism and selfishness...

...But its director, Elizabeth M. Whelan, challenges the notion that her group is beholden to its financial backers...

...One of the reasons I was attracted to John and Robert Kennedy in the late fifties was their fight against union corruption...

...But Raspberry and Gifford are willing to face the fact that, if poor black children are to get the education that can lift them out of the ghetto, they must have good teachers, black or white...

...The sheriffs closest competition for our official Traveler of the Month Award is the outgoing attorney general, William French Smith, who in January prepared himself for retirement by taking a taxpayer-financed trip to Rome...

...Such is the case with the state of New York's freedom of information law...

...Foundation is what's known in I.R.S...

...jargon as a `501/C3' organization, meaning that its tax-exempt status can be yanked if it engages in partisan politics...

...Georgia-Pacific paid its Washington law firm $40,000 to write a 45-page brief, which ACSH then submitted under its name to a federal appeals court...

...A nother example of courage in support of teacher testing is provided by William Raspberry, a columnist for The Washington Post...

...This is light years better than the totally defensive position taken by the National Education Association...

...This is one more illustration of why we must get rid of the , system of tort liability that has people running to a lawyer every time they think they have been injured...

...Jobless people who had no money to give contributed soapstone carvings, embroidered parkas, and sealskin boots to be auctioned at fund-raising events...

...To large and prosperous businesses, such threats cause little alarm...

...A spokesman for Abramoff explained the arrangement: 'When he has his College Republican hat on, he's partisan...

...Our Metaphor of the Month Award goes to Tom Kenworthy of The Washington Post, who described the scene in the office of Governor Harry Hughes of Maryland as he was preparing to sign a popular bill for which the many politicians anxious to share in the credit were maneuvering for positions in camera range: "Comptroller Louis L. Goldstein and state Senator Frank Shore—both noted for their ability to make the most of photo opportunities— competed for territory like basketball players working for a rebound...

...Today, Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is my favorite...

...This suggests that allowing more time—except, of course, for jobs for which reading speed is truly relevant—might be a major step in increasing the fairness of testing generally...

...Foundation...

...Connoisseurs of the great legends of junketing will be delighted to learn that the name of the county commissioner who rebuked the sheriff by saying, "To put a 26-day trip to Hawaii on your training budget is absolutely absurd and appalling," is Michael Kinsley...

...It is not...

...Then Shanker supports a two- or three-year internship to determine whether the teacher can actually deliver in the classroom...

...But we also have our bureaucratic Walter Reuthers, public servants for whom we have intense admiration...

...It issues a steady stream of reports contending that saccharin does not cause cancer, that the pesticide EDB is safe, that there is no proven link between heart disease and a diet high in fat and cholesterol...

...But I was never blindly uncritical of organized labor...

...Well, that sounds pretty stern, you say...

...The hidden cost that can't be estimated is all the unnecessary tests and treatment prescribed by doctors who want to build a record that will look good in court if they are sued...

...Just as we sometimes seem anti-union because we are critical of some union practices, we also can seem anti-bureaucrat when we expose the latest misdeeds of government agencies...

...If you have to get into trouble with a federal agency, I suggest you choose the Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...Now the effort he initiated is, according to Science magazine, close to success...

...At least this is the case with the Middle Atlantic State Correctional Association, which headlines the announcement of its 47th Annual Conference, "PLAN YOUR VACATION NOW...

...They just call up their lawyers and accountants and say straighten this thing out...

...Hart took the first step to transform this appealing rhetoric into reality by coming out for "a new system of national service— including both military and non-military opportunities— [that] will ask young Americans to return some of the advantages and investments they have received from our society...

...According to an AMA report called "Professional Liability in the 80's," 60 percent of all American obstetricians/ gynecologists have been sued, 20 percent of them three or more times...

...But for a small businessman struggling to keep his head above water, it can produce instant panic...

...D avid Stockman deserves high praise for taking on the scandalous military retirement system...

...Recently Kurtz wrote about the groups in Washington with innocent, objective, or even uplifting and patriotic names that mask dubious purposes: "Take the Committee for Energy Awareness, which launched a $30-million advertising and lobbying campaign in 1983 to promote the safety of nuclear power...

...L ast month I wrote about a problem widespread throughout the federal government—the malfunctioning computer...

...What happened is that this short-term selfishness hurt the company and ultimately the workers themselves, who lost their own jobs as the market share continued to decline...

...Only when licensing boards are open to—and dominated by—a cross section of the public will the public's and not the profession's interest be protected...

...Lewis's example...

...The best solution to the problem of unaccountable government is giving political authorities who can be fired by the people the authority to fire subordinates who are derelict in their duties...

...But until that reform is made—and I fear the day is distant—the possibility of a year in the slammer might do wonders for bureaucratic performance...

...This winter the Tennessee Bar Association is holding a symposium in where else but Ellmau, Austria, "one of the most magnificent skiing resort areas in the world...

...They, both the AFL-CIO and the United Mine Workers, supported me when I ran for the state legislature...

...Shanker is now advocating a national teachers examination that would meet the issue of competence head-on by testing, first, the prospective teacher's knowledge of his subject, and second, his knowledge of how to teach it...

...In the short term, a no-fault compensation system to take care of the injured may be the answer...

...There is, of course, one tax dodge that is rapidly becoming a favorite of the middle class...

...Raspberry is black...

...The result was that the IRS dispatched four threatening letters to each of the companies, with warmly reassuring words like "final notice," "proceed with enforcement," "levy upon your properties," "federal tax liens," and "public notice to your creditors...

...What its slick, low-key television ads failed to mention is that the group gets more than half its funding from 50 utilities, some of which have billed their unsuspecting customers for the media blitz...

...There's a happier tax situation over at General Dynamics...

...In either case, no-fault or national health service, malpractice should be punished by license withdrawal in which other physicians would participate but not govern...

...Both men deserve praise for their courage because the group most hurt by testing is black teachers...

...The decision will cost the Journal $40,000 in advertising revenue annually...

...It seems General Dynamics uses an accounting system that permits it to report losses to the IRS while reporting profits to its shareholders...

...Unfortunately, last year, after sounding as if he was going to issue the clarion call, he began to try to outMondale Mondale in his appeal to the special interests...

...During this year the 'Rifts University School of Medicine plans to hold its Fourth International Medical Seminar, which requires participants to visit Egypt, Israel, and Greece...

...Gene I. Maeroff of The New York Times recently pointed out that this bias can take surprising forms, as a study of ninth graders at Wingate High School in Brooklyn revealed: "The study shows that, when the time limits for tests are eased, the students are capable of reading and understanding work on a higher level than would be presumed from their scores on timed, standardized tests...

...These companies had paid their third quarter taxes for 1984 but the payments did not get on the right computer...

...Consider the reason that, according to the Tracy, California Press, the Tracy Community Memorial Hospital decided to award its emergency-room staffing contract to Spectrum Emergency, Inc.: "They felt Spectrum, with a larger nationwide organization, had more expertise in marketing and public relations, areas that are becoming more important in the operation of emergency-care facilities...

...It is, of course, our old friend the tax-deductible vacation masquerading as a conference or convention...

...This has led the district attorney of Nassau County to propose an amendment that would make it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail or a fine, to knowingly respond falsely to a freedom of information request...

...Charles Peters...

...We admire unions like the one at Weirton Steel that accepted a wage cut in return for stock in their company...

...It seems to me that we ought to consider more such penalties for willfully unresponsive behavior by bureaucrats at all levels of government...

...H ow does a hospital go about deciding how to staff its emergency room...

...I f you have attended many congressional hearings, you will sympathize with Senator Strom Thurmond's complaint to a Washington Times reporter that committee members were absent so frequently that they did not realize they were repeating questions that had already been asked: "Yesterday and today, too, we've had duplication after duplication—not only duplicating what was brought out last year but even yesterday and today we've had duplications...

...Yet, for the same period, the company has reported profits of more than $2 billion...

...A lot of laws that sound good are really paper tigers because they contain no enforcement power...

...At a recent Continuing Legal Education seminar, Jay Foonberg, an attorney from Beverly Hills, California, offered this advice: "Bombard your clients with paper....One for the court, one for me, and one for the client who pays the fee...

...That was the lead sentence of an article by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, whose reporting shows a sophistication about Washington's institutions that 1 wish were shared by more of his colleagues...

...When he has his U.S.A...

...B ack to unions...

...Well, almost never...

...S peaking of greedy managers, consider Jerome Lewis, chairman of the PetroLewis Corporation...

...It has not paid any federal income tax since 1972...

...This is the third trip we've paid for Smith to take to Italy...

...The tape itself was defective and we had a problem with the header...

...What's more, this development will have been an act of generosity by the American people, who do not suffer from the disease, to the rest of the world, particularly the poorer nations, where malaria is most widespread...

...But now the other shoe falls, and, as the Baltimore Sun explains, it falls gently indeed: "The order says, essentially, that as long as Baltimore repays the $250,000, the city can then have the money back to use for other projects that are allowed by the rules...

...Recently there has been a new public service ad that begins: 'Stay tuned for a medical bulletin on Reye's Syndrome.' The announcer assures us there's no proof that any drug causes this potentially fatal disease in children...

...Typically poor themselves, the Inuit have," reports the Portland Oregonian, "raised at least $60,000 or many times more per person than the Canadian average...

...According to a survey conducted by UCLA and the American Council on Education, the percentage of freshmen who say a "very important" reason for attending college is to make money has risen from 49.9 percent in 1971 to 66.7 percent last year...

...The moral decision that Time and The New Republic (see David Owen's article on page 48) and all the major newspapers refuse to make— to reject cigarette advertising—has been made by Fred Vandegrift and Harris Rayl, the publisher and editor of the Salina, (Kansas) Journal...

...Rayl explains: "Because the advertising encourages smoking and smoking damages health and even kills people, we couldn't keep printing the advertising...

...In the long run, I think the only solution is a national health service that would take care of these injuries along with the rest of the nation's health needs at fees set by the government...

...But my favorite is the case of Dick Kienast, the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, who charged a 26-day trip to Hawaii to his office's training budget...

...Even if his assets aren't seized, as they apparently were not in these cases, a heart—and a business— failure can result...

...Unions were desperately needed...

...The AMA says medical malpractice claims are adding $15 billion to the nation's health costs...

...The union workers were in effect "pulling up the ladder," taking care of themselves at the expense of future job seekers...

...Our Truer Words Were Never Spoken Award goes to Michael Ledeen, who had this to say in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal: "After having served as a special adviser to the secretary of state from 1981 to 1982, I can guarantee that both the State Department and the Pentagon are probably twice their necessary size...

...I saw the miserable conditions in which most miners lived and worked...

...HUD ordered the city to repay the money immediately...

...We were trying to correct information from hard disk to computer tape," one IRS spokesman explained to UPI...

...It was blacks and other minorities who gained the most from the extra time...

...Their plant is flourishing with a profit of $60.6 million for 1984, and, unlike a lot of other steelworkers, those Weirton workers still have jobs...

...This is not surprising since the U.S.A...

...My greatest heroes in the labor movement were John L. Lewis, as he was in the thirties, roaring defiance of the coal barons, and Walter Reuther, with his profound understanding that labor had to be ready to sacrifice to get a stagnant industry moving...

...I refer, of course, to the questions one could understand...

...Remember Senator Joseph Montoya during the Watergate hearings...

...Soon we will have a vaccine against a disease that afflicts 300 million people a year and causes two to four million deaths...

...Nor does it mention that the Committee on the Care of Children was organized with aspirinindustry funding that was channeled through another group, the International Science Exchange...

...Samuel Smith, another lawyer from Miami, Florida, agreed: "To keep your client happy, send them copies of everything as a testament to your work...

...Officials can simply deny they have the information sought, and nothing can be done about it...

...The lawyer and accountant he called have to be paid, and, if he has no profits, the deductibility of their fees, which is such a comfort to the better-heeled, will be of no help at all to him...

...They insisted it was not designed to aid President Reagan's reelection...