Tilting at Windmills
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS Have you noticed that when you deposit a check in your bank that the funds aren't available for you to draw against for ten days or so? The bank claims it takes this long...
...I asked him," the Air Force doctor told Chris Spolar of The Washington Post, "how in the heck can you be a surgeon when your depth perception is so bad...
...The world's fairs with which we have become familiar over the years customarily feature exhibits by various nations and business organizations...
...There are many things about NOW I admire, but ignoring the importance of motherhood and children is not one of them...
...The reason given by the board of education to the Annapolis Capitol was that if the furniture were given away, someone might be injured by it and sue the board...
...Now for our monthly item on the ethics of the bar...
...What you usually end up realizing is that they are retired federal employees— usually from State or AID— who have joined the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund...
...But modern political developments have added a new entrant as witnessed by this story from the Tanzania Daily News: "Eleven countries, 130 local firms, and three liberation movements have confirmed participation at the Ninth Dar Es Salaam International Trade Fair this year...
...I, too, am pro-choice, but I do not understand why prochoice supporters minimize, ignore, or suppress the moral issues involved in abortion...
...Martinez, who is paid $69,000 a year, was astounded to find that 222 U.S...
...Tom Evans, R-Del., now a Washington lawyer...
...Among the more intriguing pieces of information to reach my attention was this from a column by Jane Brody in The New York Times: "Fiber adds bulk to the stool, and among Finns stools tend to be three times larger than among New Yorkers...
...Yeah...
...Its promoters promise everything to get the franchise—you like chamber music, you got it...
...The best way to cut the Pentagon budget is to eliminate weapons that don't work or that we don't need...
...Alaska doesn't go quite this far...
...The agenda for the 1985 Texas State NOW conference lists 19 workshop topics, including "Consciousness Raising," "Lesbian Rights in Texas," and "Women and Images...
...And judging from figures on these new salaries recently obtained by Rep...
...Yeah...
...In the recent Ghanaian spy case, it is clear that the CIA had some informers within the Ghanaian government, and the Ghanaians wanted to find out who they were...
...Obviously, if EPA were to decide that ocean incineration is the wave of the future, Rollins would be hurt...
...Their reasoning is that if people can keep more of the money they earn, they will work harder...
...But it does say that, if you reject a settlement offer and the jury then gives you less than the offer, you have to pay part of the other side's legal bills...
...While your lawyer can get the defendant ordered to come into court to reveal his assets, Shepard reports that in San Jose only a third of those ordered to report do so...
...You get the $5,000, right...
...Joseph Mengele...
...Unfortunately, I did not see a single editorial praising O'Neill...
...We are in the office of Charles "Chuck" Colson, counselor to the president...
...He waves his cigar and says, "Jackie, sit down and make yourself comfortable...
...Winning your case is the easy part," Judge Robert Baines told Alicia Shepard of the San Jose Mercury News...
...A similarly costly bureaucratic failure seems to have resulted in at least four deaths at Bethesda Naval Hospital...
...dirty movies, ours are so hot your screen may melt—then, when the competing bidders have folded their tents and left town, they sneak back in the side door of the city council and quietly get the terms of the franchise changed so that the subscribers are lucky to end up getting half of what they had been led to expect...
...Next, consider the case of the Postal Rate Commission's efforts to get information from the Postal Service...
...While I am humbly in his debt, it is still a bit hard for me to imagine the kind of researcher who would choose this as his subject...
...Otherwise, you can pretty much count on it to lie, cheat, and evade everyone else in town, including both branches of Congress, the secretary of defense, and the president's own Office of Management and Budget...
...That way the poor who need the COLA will benefit but we won't be wasting money on the rich...
...Many of them do concede this privately but seem afraid to do so in public lest it be seen as a concession by the other side...
...Rock appealed...
...Yet this year Congress has refused to cut one single weapons system...
...Fearing he might attack her at any time, she sent an urgent message to the State Department's security office on May 30, asking that her son's "dependent pass," permitting him to visit her at State without having his belongings searched, be revoked...
...This tends to cause litigants to accept reasonable settlements and thus reduces the number of cases that have to come to trial and consume the time of judges and juries...
...According to the phone script we obtained, Beckel's solicitors said, "Hello, this is (name of caller) calling for the Alliance to Save the Ocean!' "The Alliance" is a paper organization created by Beckel...
...The reason you now see a Mercedes in their driveway is that they're drawing both their federal pension and their new salary...
...hat lead sentence can you be absolutely certain has apeared in at least 500 newspapers over the last 15 years...
...I asked a wise friend on the Hill why this was so...
...In Bellingham, Massachusetts, the summer work program for teenagers didn't happen this year...
...Take the Department of the Army...
...Collecting is the tough part...
...On page 18c of the same issue readers are advised, "On large purchases, avoid paying state sales tax by buying at a store that is not incorporated in your state!' How are the states going to pay to rebuild their roads if AAA members don't pay their taxes...
...The judicial transgressions included, among other things, adjusting parking tickets at a 50 percent discount and reducing or dropping drunk driving cases at $100 per case...
...Alaska has revived my faint glimmer of hope that we may some day restore sanity to our legal system...
...I have an idea that could help us both...
...There is something about the workings of the conventional liberal mind that can drive me to distraction...
...It was killed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees...
...The other doesn't...
...With these thoughts in mind, ponder what Laffer recently told an interviewer: "I've not spent my life trying to get a high income...
...Germond, like the late Peter Lisagor, is finding a way to express on television a sense of humor that, again like Lisagor, he usually keeps out of his writing...
...This time the service said the report was not complete and therefore it did not exist...
...For the average citizen, writes Shepard, "collecting a judgment from a debtor who doesn't want to pay is almost guaranteed to be a head banging, hair-pulling experience!' She adds, "It generally costs to collect:' meaning you have to pay an attorney or a collection agency...
...You have doubtless already heard that Jackie Presser has escaped indictment because he had been a confidential informant for the FBI...
...The service refused to turn over the report...
...What were the fellows up to this time...
...Bureaucratic sloth is usually the subject of humor in these pages...
...Governor Cuomo has replaced Yvonne ScruggsLeftwich, the head of New York's housing agency...
...This was a story in The Washington Post about the District of Columbia's cable problems...
...The senator's nightmare is that he will be arguing on the floor against the X22 on grounds that the aluminum gizmo doesn't work and that one of his opponents will rise and say, 'Doesn't the distinguished senator know that the gizmo is actually made of titanium and that is precisely why it will work ' The nightmare ends as he sits down amidst embarrassed laughter...
...Her administration was so bad that it was condemned by both landlord and tenant groups...
...What threat does Ghana pose to our national security...
...The only way it is going to get better is through a fair draft...
...The bank claims it takes this long for checks to "clear," or be honored by the originating bank...
...Oh yeah...
...Which are the most corrupt states in America...
...Speaking of our judicial system, what do you think happens when you win a judgment of, say, $5,000 against someone who has wronged you...
...The problem with the across-theboard increases the conventional liberal favors is that they will tend to keep bad teachers in the system when we should be trying to get them out...
...A State Department employee named Carole Doster was being terrorized by her violently deranged son...
...Local checks always cleared within one day, even though I regularly stopped at the local pool hall for 20 minutes or so on the way to the clearing house...
...Operation Greylord, an undercover FBI investigation into corruption in the Cook County, Illinois court system, has resulted in the indictment of six judges and 13 lawyers...
...Wrong...
...How...
...You see, we need teamster votes...
...Robert MacNeil was obviously convinced that higher pay for all teachers is the answer, so he resolutely ignored suggestions from his interviewees that there might be other approaches, like pay increases only for good teachers or allowing talented liberal arts graduates to enter public school teaching without education credits...
...The service claimed the report was "an internal document that it did not have to surrender...
...Evasion of the intent of the Freedom of Information Act has become one of the higher forms of bureaucratic art...
...How ya gonna do that...
...It will patriotically salute and execute any direct order of the president of the United States...
...Wouldn't it have been prudent to hold our tongue at least long enough to rid ourselves of the murderous lunatics from Mariel...
...If you want to find out about the world's best luxury hotels, just ask employees of these two organizations where they stay...
...So the Ghanaian agent, Soussoudis, was assigned to pry their identities from the CIA's Sharon Scranage...
...Every Washington agency is locked in mortal combat with other Washington agencies, often a whole flock of them...
...Arthur Laffer, the California economist, is one of the great heroes of the supply-siders, who, of course, emphasize the importance of lower taxes as an incentive to growth...
...Only Tip O'Neill had the right idea—keep the COLA but tax it...
...For the purchase of a home or for the education of his children, for example, an IMF employee may borrow at interest rates as low as 4 percent...
...Aren't they part of the same government...
...Is this an indication of how Cuomo would run Washington...
...My nominee is: "The company awarded [name of city]'s cable television franchise said yesterday that it cannot live up to the agreement it signed less than four months ago and asked [name of city] for substantial cutbacks in its obligations...
...The caller would urge residents to help stop EPA's plans to burn "highly toxic PCBs" off the Brownsville coast...
...The consultants also testified on behalf of the "Council" at the EPA hearing, without disclosing that they were connected to Rollins...
...Commander Donald Billig, whose surgical ineptitude is alleged to have been the immediate cause of those deaths, was recruited by the Navy even though he was legally blind in one eye...
...But the harm it can do is real...
...Nor is NOW's resolute self-righteousness about its prochoice position on abortion...
...There are enough of them— many were identified in this magazine in 1981 in an article entitled "Thirty-five Ways to Cut The Defense Budget" —that if we canceled production, we could save scores of billions that have yet to be appropriated or spent...
...Why should the CIA even have a mission there...
...On June 23, the pass still had not been revoked, and the son carried a gun into the building in a canvas bag and proceeded to shoot his mother dead...
...Then they noticed that the names of each of the 15 banks involved had been deleted...
...Charles Peters...
...It shows what nice Washington liberals do when they aren't campaigning: The EPA is considering the disposal of hazardous wastes by burning them at sea in special incinerator ships...
...In my imagination—and before anyone issues a libel summons, let me assure you it is my imagination not the world of fact that I am describing—the scene is the Nixon White House in the early seventies when—one actual or at least alleged fact—Presser's career as an informant began...
...Previously I have contended that the great confidence men, who in the nineteenth century sold the Brooklyn Bridge or remedies guaranteed to cure everything from whooping cough to athlete's foot, were now in consulting or academic administration...
...Since the World Bank pays comparable salaries and has 7,000 employees to the IMF's 1,600, you can imagine what the situation is there...
...It's a small country in West Africa—the British called it the Gold Coast—with a population of only 12 million...
...In most jurisdictions the sheriff is supposed to help you, but his office is often understaffed and gives priority to the cases of influential creditors such as large department stores and automobile dealerships...
...I thought he was going to be the next panelist on this show...
...Evans in turn hired National Strategies Marketing Group, a Washington political consulting firm run by Walter Mondale's former deputy campaign manager, Robert Beckel...
...Billig had attempted to join the Air Force shortly before he entered the Navy, but he failed four different eye tests administered by an Air Force doctor...
...I must add cable television to the list...
...Don't they all work for us...
...When he wakens, he resolves never again to take on a weapons system...
...In the last year or so the evidence has been mounting that military medicine is in bad shape...
...If good ideas are going to go unnoticed by the press, how can public opinion be mobilized in their support...
...Just as the Castro government was beginning to perform an exchange agreement under which we would send back the 2,500 Marielistas who have been committing mayhem in this country and Castro would permit thousands of bona fide Cuban refugees to come here, the Reagan administration decided to put Radio Marti on the air with its daily denunciation of Castro...
...There have been few stories in my lifetime with such a distinct aroma as this one...
...I worked as a messenger for a bank while I was in high school...
...The average citizen may wonder why the Postal Service would not want to give information to the Postal Commission in the first place...
...Boris LeBlanc, president of local 747, explained to the Middlesex News that union members objected to the program because they believed they would be responsible for supervising the students...
...Ya got a deal...
...In the July/August issue of AAA World, the publication of the American Automobile Association, the lead article advocates spending "lots and lots of dollars" on rebuilding our highways...
...Loser pays discourages frivolous litigation by requiring the loser to foot the legal bills of the winner...
...The candidates would certainly include Illinois, as well as Louisiana, New Jersey, Nevada, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland...
...So Rollins hired former Rep...
...Back in the thirties, they opposed the CCC and the WPA...
...Beckel set up a telephone bank to make calls to residents of Brownsville, Texas, one of the ports where EPA is thinking of putting a dock for loading incinerator ships...
...Simple, Jackie, we're going to make you an FBI informer...
...As a last resort, the Journal filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act...
...Scruggs-Leftwich has been given a new state job at $76,000 a year, a $3,900 increase over her salary as housing commissioner...
...In the debate over whether to eliminate the Social Security COLA, there was little of merit said on either side...
...The increases should go to reward the good teachers who are in the system and to attract good new teachers...
...In addition, both institutions have perks that are generous even by Washington standards...
...And that means the government can never even indict you much less put you to the inconvenience of a trial...
...But it has happened everywhere...
...Another told lawyers when he was assigning cases to them, "Whatever case you have in this courtroom, one-third goes to me...
...Did you happen to hear what Jack Germond said on "The McLaughlin Report" when asked about what had happened to Dr...
...Common sense queries like these only reveal the innocence in which the average citizen dwells...
...Maybe you haven't noticed, but Jack Anderson's column has gotten a lot better since he made Joseph Spear his partner...
...Another foreign policy outrage took place recently in regard to Cuba...
...This is an issue the unions have always been wrong about...
...We have all benefited, in terms of increased dissemination of facts about colorectal cancer, from the president's recent surgery...
...So incompetent doctors who can't earn enough on the outside are now too often at the head of the recruiting line...
...One judge was taped as he boasted that he could make $1,000 a week fixing cases...
...Other nominations are welcome...
...As things are now the competent doctor feels like a sucker if he sacrifices his $100,000 a year to enter the service...
...But concessions must be made if we are to end this insane debate over abortion, which both sides see as black and white but which is truly gray and which is absorbing so much passionate energy that could be more constructively directed toward other causes...
...They're afraid of making fools of themselves," he said...
...Beckel said he sees nothing wrong with his lobbying techniques...
...Well, if you promise to get the teamsters to vote Republican, we'll keep you out of jail...
...Not one of the subjects mentions or has anything to do with children...
...If they would concede that serious moral issues are involved they might begin to bridge the gap between themselves and the equally self-righteous pro-life group...
...When, a few weeks later, 174 pages of material arrived, the Journal reporters were at first exultant...
...By adopting at least in part the British "loser pays" principle...
...My question is, why does the CIA need spies inside the Ghanaian government...
...You know how in England they have Purveyors to the Queen, well, you'll be Informer to the FBI...
...citizens working for the IMF make between $70,000 and $149,000...
...Waste Management's rival, Rollins Environmental Services, operates several land-based incinerators...
...Matthew Martinez, you may soon be seeing a second Mercedes in their driveway...
...The commission asked the service to give it a report that was embarrassing to the service because it revealed the service's productivity increases had not been nearly as great as claimed...
...Consider the case of The Shreveport Journal, which for some time had been trying to get facts about Louisiana banks out of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...
...An example was a recent segment of the MacNeil-Lehrer report on how to improve education...
...You need to keep out of jail...
...Then, Elliot Rock, an employee of the commission, sought the report under the Freedom of Information Act...
...Here is an excerpt from one of their recent columns...
...When you're lying on your deathbed, you don't want to say that you made $10 more than someone else...
...In San Francisco, Beckel created the Ocean Tourism Council and hired two consultants to drum up support from the tourism industry...
...I f you've been in Washington long enough, you're bound to have friends who suddenly appear to be wealthy but who have not won a lottery or been the beneficiary of a rich relative's will...
...Either today's banks are conning us or their messengers are shooting an awful lot of pool...
...In the seventies, they made CETA a joke by demanding that its jobs be meaningless make-work, which demoralized the young people who held the jobs and gave lethal ammunition to the program's critics...
...Year after year, knocking on doors all over Helsinki, not to mention the Bronx and Staten Island, saying, "Madam, I wonder if you could help us advance the cause of science by letting us measure " Further notes on the impact of law on modern society: When residents of a community near Annapolis, Maryland noticed that the board of education was depositing truckloads of usable school furniture in the local dump, they expressed curiosity as to why it wasn't being given to local churches and charities instead...
...One of the rival firms, Waste Management Inc., has the capability to incinerate at sea...
...That objection quashed the program because, in order to get federal funds, affected unions must agree to the program...
...If they show up and tell the judge the nature and location of their assets, they can leave the courtroom and switch their deposits from one bank to another before you can get to them first with your lien...
...Well," replied Billig, "you learn how to adapt...
Vol. 17 • September 1985 • No. 8
