Tilting at Windmills

...After a lifetime of avoiding it, Mary McGrory finally got called for jury duty last month...

...My guess is yes...

...Fire the rude and lazy...

...Presser's shyness was induced by testimony that he had taken a cash bribe to permit certain firms to operate the following scam: "The firms"—according to Klose—"took fees of 7 to 10 percent of the gross payroll for a company's drivers and negotiated a cheaper labor contract with the connivance of the local leadership and the blessings of corrupt national or regional Teamster officials?' As one witness put it, "Everybody benefitted except the union members...

...His The Social Tranformation of American Medicine won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft Prize...

...Her mother, who was over seventy, clerked in a dress shop...

...Each year, a series of headlines proclaiming rising American indignation at unfair trade practices is followed by a story that says "Japanese Premier Pledges Trade Reform" or something of that sort...

...The exemption applies regardless of whether the information is shown to have a bearing on national security and regardless of whether the source of the information is a newspaper or magazine in general circulation...

...In addition, the regulars were always bringing guests...

...An example of the spectacular results if the entire plan is passed and implemented: "Japan would buy four more Grumman E2C's, a small propeller-driven radar plane, bringing its total to 12 of the aircraft...

...The ambitious lawyer knows the way to get ahead is to make affluent clients think they can't live without him...

...Speaking of Major Hoople, he was one of that great group of comic characters that emerged in the twenties—the incompetent confidence man, the bumbling hustler, the comic side of Willy Loman...

...person who might be going to the supermarket and should run in a prominent place in a general news section...

...The answer was yes, and "there's a return train to Washington later that day...

...Here is how Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times describes it: "Under the ruling, information the agency says it needs to 'perform its statutory duties with respect to foreign intelligence' is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act...

...Have you heard about Harvard's refusal of tenure to Paul Starr...

...When I talk to people like Mary about their dominant impression of their fellow jurors, the words fair, conscientious, and common sense are repeated again and again...

...Room and Board"—do any of you remember Major Hoople?was the name of a popular comic strip of the twenties and thirties...

...But Chapter 11 should not inspire panic...

...So I called Amtrak...

...Speaking of Pud's funeral, it reminded me of the great wisdom of Virginia's liquor laws before the sixties, when hard drink was first permitted...

...The increase in expenditures would not be immediate but spread out over five years...

...P ud's death reminded me of the demise of an American institution whose enormous social value has gone unappreciated—the boarding house...

...As I rode south through Manassas, Culpepper, and Charlottesville, I relaxed in what Pud and I would have called the dining car but Amtrak calls the lounge...

...It was hard to get drunk...

...This was civilized...

...One was about UPI's financial troubles...

...I suspect bureaucratic turf wars, which are fiercer at the Post than at any government agency, are a greater factor...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS The invitation recited that six famous Republicans "invite you to join them for a reception honoring Congressman Hal Daub for his appointment to the House Ways and Means Committee and to celebrate his birthday...

...Why...

...To its left and above it was "Hutton Barred From Some Business," and to its right, on the lower left hand corner of page three was "What Stocks Did...

...My candidate for The Most Unsurprising Headline of the year goes to this recent one from The Washington Post's Real Estate section: Builders Oppose Tax Reform, Want All Breaks to Stay...

...For example, I was recently sent a brochure advertising a book called DWI Defense Forms that features: "Motion to strike prior convictions—author John A. Tarantino attacks the sticky problem of priors with an artfully drafted memorandum of law...

...In Cuomo's case, that circle of trust does not extend, I am told, beyond his own family...

...The second story was about a recall of Land O'Lakes turkeys...

...He has had, as The Washington Post's Jay Mathews and The New Republic's Mickey Kaus have pointed out, the courage to stand up to the powerful California Teacher's Association...

...Curiously enough this is often accompanied by strong proIsrael sentiments...

...Pud was a cashier in a restaurant...

...When employees and people doing business with a company read that it is going bankrupt, they panic...

...Lawyers also use form books which they purchase from legal publishing firms...

...You can't run the United States government without having the help of a lot of people you know and trust...

...She decided to let the United States Senate know her feelings, and sent letters to each of the hundred senators...

...My guess is no...

...After the death of her mother, Pud moved to one of these establishments...

...Since they were obviously not "sources" in the ordinary sense—they were not Russian dissidents slipping us Soviet missile plans—the court appears to have given the CIA the broadest kind of authority to withold information from the public...

...Burden" When we reach the details of the story, it develops that the word "plans" is used advisedly in the headline...

...I thought about David Stockman's campaign to abolish Amtrak...

...Starr's enemies want to make the social sciences "scientific", emphasizing quantifiable studies and surveys...

...The bill honors "all Americans whose ancestors came from a foreign country...

...I agree...

...It was his membership on the leading tax-writing committee...

...In the twenty or so trials I participated in while I was practicing law, the jury was never wrong...

...The New York Times on the other hand had no trouble getting it right: "UPI Authorized to Seek Protection From Creditors...

...On the related issue of social security that is not needed, Roger Simon, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, recently wrote about a woman who decided she didn't need the cost-of-living increase that she had gotten with her last social security check...

...But, finally, remember that whatever the cost, there is an almost unbelievable contrast between the friendly interaction of old and young on Amtrak and the cold hostility of the Eastern shuttle...

...W ho gets unemployment compensation...

...Back for a moment to our friends at the bar...

...But neither should be more important to the Post's editors than protecting the consumer...

...We can free ourselves from this mental trap by thinking for a moment how sublime it would be if we only had to subsidize the defense budget instead of paying the whole thing...

...Fields and Groucho Marx...

...The result is that decisions just don't get made...

...They really ought to be ashamed...

...If you have not yet begun to question the quality of higher education in America, consider the five bestselling magazines in college bookstores: Cosmopolitan, People, Playboy, Glamour, and Vogue...

...Daniel Bell says, "A man of outstanding abilities has been rejected...

...Her name was Ella Anderson—I called her Pud...

...The court bought the CIA's argument that the researchers were "intelligence sources...

...You do not have to be one of his unqualified admirers to realize that he is light years ahead of most sociologists in perceptiveness and writing ability...

...Their apartment was decorated with photographs of Confederate generals...

...Their work, while occasionally useful, is uniformly dreary and customarily devoted to subjects of the most marginal relevance to the pressing problems of society...

...Yet the practice continues...

...This doesn't mean all services should be subsidized, or that those that are should all be subsidized to the same degree—some are clearly more worthy than others—or that we should be indifferent to the cost of the service that is "subsidized...

...That is not the case today, as I learned drinking martinis while waiting for the train back to Washington...

...There are certain things a society can decide it wants— e.g...

...There are, at the other extreme of these professions, great bullshit artists whose lectures and articles are entertaining, but embarrassingly devoid of either hard evidence or rigorous thought...

...Senator Gary Hart's craven performance before the National Education Association convention in 1983, where he told the NEA exactly what it wanted to hear, that disheartened many of his potential supporters...

...If the widow was respectable, it was, in otherwise prudish times, perfectly permissable for single men and women to live in the same boarding house—separate bedrooms, of course...

...The Kingfish on Amos and Andy was another of them, as were the characters played by W.C...

...Its author, Evan Cornog, reports: "One veteran observer noted that Cuomo 'has very few advisors,' and 'doesn't give his staff the authority to make decisions,' Another official complains that even some of Cuomo's highest ranking aides 'frequently don't know where the governor is' on important policy questions...

...good postal or rail service, or the survival of the family farm...

...The story fades from the papers...

...If this is not ghoulish enough for you, consider what followed in the story—a report by Philip Shabecoff in The New York Times: "Under the formula the budget office proposed, the officials said, regulations would always appear mathematically to be more costly than the benefits they produced...

...On the other hand, someone who had low wages while working—like, say, a department store clerk— might get half that amount even though he or she desperately needed more...

...Sometimes, a firm develops its own forms...

...Senator Alfonse D'Amato has come close to achieving that goal with a bill that would make September 15th "Ethnic American Day...

...Among the items listed in the seminar agenda are "Putting potential clients in a buying mood" and "Building client loyalty and dependency...

...I knew I had to go, and to get there I thought of the railroads that she had loved, because of her father, almost as much as she did the old South...

...The proposal has not been adopted by the Diet, or even presented to it...

...His argument relies on the fact that "subsidy" has become a dirty word...

...This, it would seem, is news for the average...

...The latter represents the sickest aspect of the practice of law...

...For example, the Land O'Lakes turkeys may have contained metal fragments...

...Discreetly placed in the lower left-hand corner were the words "$250.00 per person...

...Too many congressmen, aware of this fact, seek committee assignments not on the basis of knowledge about or belief in the importance of the committee's work but in its potential for attracting campaign contributions...

...As Americans were beginning to protest that they were bearing too much of the cost of Japan's defense while Japan was prospering, this headline appeared in The Washington Post: "Japan Plans New Outlays For Defense...

...You can be sure it wasn't Daub's birthday that was inspiring people to pay $250.00...

...The columnist's conclusion: "I think it's right up there with the town meeting as one of the great experiences in a democracy...

...Now, I suspect that same technique is being applied to defense expenditures...

...When one has to draft a new will from scratch, the profit is not likely to be great...

...In one respect, at least, he could teach Washington's Gary Hart a lesson...

...Rainmaking is not their only approach to the problem of revenue enhancement...

...Before my parents were married, my father had lived in one and taken his meals there...

...And you might dine once or twice a week at other houses so that your circle of friends could steadily broaden and the likelihood of your meeting Mr...

...He may not even admit that much the next time he's asked to testify...

...Politicians dream of drafting legislation that will command the support of almost everyone and offend almost no one...

...Higher Spending To Ease U.S...

...Or it may—as in the case of Amtrak—get individuals who benefit from it to share part of the load...

...In the fifties, you could get only wine and beer in a restaurant...

...Some, of course, are deserving...

...The company continues to operate, and pays its employees and its creditors— only it is protected by the court from creditors who greedily try to get more than their fair share of the money available to pay them or who try to get paid faster than the company has resources to do...

...The use of legal forms is another...

...The absurdity of this kind of thing has even been pointed out by the Post's own ombudsman...

...If your circle of trust is small—with Jimmy Carter it did not extend beyond six people: his wife, Jody Powell, Hamilton Jordan, Frank Moore, Stuart Eisenstadt, and his secretary Susan Cough—you are likely to govern as Carter did, with little impact on the vast machinery of Washington...

...Her father had been an engineer on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad but had died in the days before pensions and social security...

...If, however, one can draw on tried and true paragraphs that have served other testators well, time is saved and revenues increase...

...Despite the fact that press critics have explained that Chapter 11 proceedings do not mean that a company is bankrupt, the Post ran the UPI story under -the headline "United Press International Files for Bankruptcy...

...Yes," the clerk replied, "but it only runs three times a week ." I said "Does it run Wednesday (the day of Pud's funeral...

...Some suspect the Post is trying to placate its advertisers...

...Kuehl also found an assistant director who made $75,000 a year and an actress who made $77,000 drawing compensation, as was a "casting director who used his unemployment benefits to pay his rent while he jetted off to Great Britain during a two-month hiatus from his duties...

...For all my friends in the bar who feel I'm sometimes too severe in my criticism of lawyers, I offer the following evidence of the profession's high-mindedness...

...Of course there are some lemons, but on the whole my experience with juries has been like my experience with the Army in World War II and in the public schools of Charleston, West Virginia, giving me a bed-rock faith in democracy that my friends who haven't had such experiences lack...

...It advertises a "practical, shirt-sleeved seminar" on how "you can successfully market your professional services...

...If you ate dinner with someone every day and sang songs or played bridge in the parlor together or just sat around the front porch chatting, you got to know them in a way that is almost impossible amidst the near-hysteria of the singles bar...

...The liberal friends of the neoconservative Jew may be less likely to automatically favor Israel but they are more likely to like him...

...Customers flee, and the reports of bankruptcy may become a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...Almost everyone who bothered to reply, about one third of the senators," wrote Simon, "assured her that they would fight to the death to keep her social security benefits high and increasing...

...It is "now being circulated within Japan's Defense Agency...

...On the last occasion, April 23, according to Kevin Klose of The Washington Post, he "refused to answer questions, invoking constitutional protections against self-incrimination 15 times...

...As a result of their devotion to the South and my parents' to the Democratic party, I grew up with two heroes that might seem inconsistent to some— Robert E. Lee and Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...When are we going to end this insanity and start paying compensation on the basis of need and nothing else...

...Usually, they were operated by a widow whose only source of income was the home she was left on her husband's death...

...If that isn't enough for you, Shabecoff continues, "the budget office also said that the value of a human life should be discounted by 10 percent a year in cases where asbestos-related diseases might remain dormant for a long time...

...But there are others, as the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner's Claudia Kuelil found out when she interviewed the people standing in line at the state unemployment office in Hollywood: "The middle-aged actor beamed with affable complacency as he revealed that he earns about one hundred thousand dollars a year....The man standing behind him, a director of television said he earns in excess of $50,000 a year...

...Called "boilerplate," they can be summoned up by a push of a button on a word processor and, in the case of those used for filings before federal agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, can often produce staggering fees for minimal effort...

...In the post World War II years, the comic view of the world that made this character possible seems to have retreated, if not disappeared...

...Recently in this space I mentioned the strong antisemitic streak among country club conservatives...

...Jackie Presser...

...Stockman says Amtrak is wrong because it is subsidized...

...What kind of people are they...

...He manipulates their fears and insecurities until they are firmly in the habit of consulting him before they go to the bathroom...

...Another terrible decision by the Supreme Court: This one says the CIA does not have to disclose the names, of researchers who participated in a CIA study of the control of human behavior, in which mind altering drugs were administered without the subject's knowledge...

...The special social role boarding houses played was that they offered single men and women a place to meet and get to know one another under natural circumstances...

...Every time I get to thinking maybe Stockman is okay after all, a story like this appears: "Environmental protection Agency officials said today that they had been pressed by the Office of Management and Budget to weigh the dollar value of human life when considering how to regulate asbestos...

...Critics have contended that the Business section, where the Post runs recall stories, seems a bizarre place to attract the attention of the public...

...Pud died last month...

...Motions to suppress breath test results—five separate sets of motions, memoranda, affidavits, orders, and checklists are provided, each covering a different ground for suppression...

...He briefly reappeared as Sergeant Bilko and had one great final flowering in the performance by Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock in "The Producers...

...But they were from Staunton, Virginia, and thought of themselves as ladies of the old South...

...She lived in the apartment upstairs with her elderly mother while I was a boy and lavished on me the love that would have gone to her own children had she married...

...Would he make a good president...

...It is a brochure sent to lawyers around the country headlined "Rainmaking...

...Charles Peters...

...Her funeral was in Staunton...

...You can't say the Reaganites aren't a classy bunch...

...But neoconservative Jews are fools to believe that this admiration for Israel has reduced the conservative's prejudice against Jews as individuals and as a group...

...I'm sure their combined weekly income did not exceed forty dollars...

...Almost everyone has a maiden aunt...

...Typically there would be twelve boarders, and an equal or smaller number of roomers depending upon the size of the house...

...He is a state senator who is also tall, handsome, and a Democrat—and can claim to be the "real Gary Hart" since he never changed his name...

...My reasons were captured in a recent article about the governor that appeared in the Boston Observer...

...Was there a train to Staunton...

...And a year later we discover that the reforms actually implemented were so minor as to be practically undiscernable...

...The Japanese will surely rank as the greatest con artists of modern time...

...So there is probably a middle ground between the two extremes to which reasonable men should repair, but the anti-Starr factions at Harvard represent the worse of the two—worse because they are boring and deeply hostile to those who aren't...

...What this means is that it's in industry's interest to expose us to asbestos as infants...

...Take their closest ally in the labor movement, the president of the Teamsters' Union, a.k.a...

...The reason for this is that Israel's toughness appeals to hawkish Americans...

...Change the antiquated work rules...

...It may have to foot the entire bill for these services—as it does in the case of police and fire protection...

...In the case of Amtrak, overmanning and counterproductive work rules are a severe problem—with a lot of employees sitting around while a few are hideously overworked—but, instead of eliminating the service itself, we should focus on eliminating the waste and inefficiency of its delivery...

...It was U.S...

...I didn't have one in the legal sense, but in reality I had one of the best kind...

...T he people who run The Washington Post have many virtues but a passion for self-criticism is not among them...

...or Miss Right increased...

...Each of these worthies was being paid the maximum benefit, $166 a week, even though they didn't need it, because their wages were high when they were working...

...And once again I wanted to summon liberals to a counterattack...

...Can Mario Cuomo be elected president...

...The Post ran it in the lower right hand corner of the second page of its Business section...

...It repeated the error in two other headlines about UPI's problem...

...That way our value will be totally discounted by age 10, and there will be no need to spend a cent on protecting us from asbestos...

...Have you heard about Gary Hart's namesake in California...

...Consider two recent stories...

...This is not a minor error...