Tilting at Windmills
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS There comes a time in every young man's life when he wants to tell Daddy to shut up. In Albert Gore's case, that moment may have arrived when his father, attempting to...
...They picked up the officials again to take them to the evening's social events, where more waiting took place before the final trip home for the night...
...In Albert Gore's case, that moment may have arrived when his father, attempting to explain his son's new hawkishness, told The Washington Post's Paul Taylor: "What you're seeing now is no accident...
...You could have knocked me over with a cigarette butt," writes Edward Peeks, a columnist for The Charleston Gazette...
...I have discovered a reason for the precarious state of the world economy...
...The reason such transactions are handled this way, according to Simon Winchester, writing in Airport magazine, is that "beyond the 200-mile limit, no American tax—whether state, federal, or municipal— can be levied on any commercial transaction...
...Of course the most shameful of all such episodes was the forced repatriation to the Soviet Union in 1945 of thousands of Russian soldiers who had been liberated from German prisons by us at the end of World War H and who had told us they didn't want to go back...
...They Shoot Horses, Don't They...
...and Israel started building drones in 1974...
...We have the saying in Germany, 'The oldest boy gets the farm...
...What puzzeled Peeks was that the Gazette and Mail had just outlawed smoking by their employees...
...They also stick us with millions of dollars in fraudulent claims for damages done by American forces on maneuvers...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS There comes a time in every young man's life when he wants to tell Daddy to shut up...
...The Monthly touted the FOG-M in July/August 1984...
...Does this not leave Senator Dole obligated to the firms that supply the plane...
...the San Jose city council has authorized the purchase of 30 trash cans at $707 each...
...Indeed, he appears to have already repaid U.S...
...Did you know that a person convicted of stock fraud can open a new brokerage business and no one will warn his potential customers of his past history...
...Now for more familiar tidings from the Pentagon...
...3, the House version of the Omnibus Trade Bill: "(3) Funds or commodities made available for use under this section shall be used by the Secretary [of Agriculture] to assist organizations consisting of producers or processors of United States agricultural commodities, in such amounts as determined to represent reasonable expenses incurred by them, in defending countervailing duty actions instituted after January 1, 1986, in foreign countries to offset the benefits of the agricultural programs provided for under the Agricultural Act of 1949 or this Act...
...I have never seen so many as I did during the recent joint meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington...
...That is quite possible," acknowledged a military official in the West German embassy to Knight-Ridder's Pete Carey...
...Since the technology is available to produce plastic or ceramic handguns that could not be detected by airport screening devices, there is a movement in Congress to outlaw the guns...
...My son Chris, perhaps prejudiced by the fact that he is a volunteer Babbitt worker, wrote a letter describing his arrival at a meeting hall where one of the barbecues was to be held: "The preponderance of maroon Missouri license plates in the lot tips me that Gephardt supporters have arrived in force...
...They show that the Pentagon can do the right thing...
...If they want to participate in politics, they should be willing to be fired when their party loses...
...If this is true, why didn't he report it then...
...A dramatic revision of the Hatch Act, which would free federal workers to run for office, support political parties, and raise money for candidates on their own time is on a fast track in the House," reports Judith Havemann of The Washington Post...
...Tiger mosquitoes...
...If federal employees want the protected job security provided by the civil service, they should be nonpartisan...
...I would like to see at least half of them make that choice and would like to see present laws amended to encourage them to do so...
...We quoted its inventor as saying its success would "depend on whether the Army lets us leave some of the fancy stuff off" In August they picked the Boeing "Avenger" vehicle for the second part of the new system...
...for the use of its Gulfstream III by supporting the tobacco subsidy program and opposing higher taxes on tobacco products...
...By holding staff meetings on how to generate "positive" publicity...
...Then they get rid of it...
...The FOG-M item appeared as a sidebar to Gregg Easterbrook's article, "The Army's $800,000 Model Airplane," about the Aquila remote-piloted drone...
...Labor or Corporate Pension Funds, a Chief International Officer, a Nobel Laureate, or a leader in Science or the Arts...
...The Boeing 747 takes off from Seattle airport and flies out over the Pacific...
...The plane has been bought...
...After all, many of them write books themselves...
...Suspicion was first aroused when the cash receipts at the golf course skyrocketed after the manager resigned...
...Instead, those who support the bill want to have their cake and eat it too, to enjoy the rewards of both partisanship and nonpartisanship, to be political but without taking any chance of losing their life tenure...
...The down side of this finding is that it also applies to our own troops using the TOW...
...For the past three years I have been feeling sorry for myself because of the strain of trying to write a book and put out the Monthly at the same time...
...The great public service performed by this provision is putting $500,000 into the pocket of a law firm...
...For those wanting to subscribe, there are lists of areas of employment with boxes to check for the job titles of the would-be subscriber...
...The real reason Woodward gets by with these things, I suspect, is that he is such a great reporter that the Post doesn't want to risk angering and possibly losing him by dwelling too much on his derelictions...
...The reason is insurance...
...One called the Minute Repeater is available for $160,000...
...That was news—important news— that should have been given the Post's readers as soon as he learned it...
...Greider was on the Post staff while he was writing the book...
...Under religion, among the boxes to check are Pope, Cardinal, and Archbishop...
...Who could oppose it...
...We noted that it was driving the Divad lobbyists crazy (this was when Divad was still alive), because Divad cost $6.8 million each and Avenger cost about $1 million...
...Last winter they picked the "FOGM," the very cheap (about $20,000 each) missile developed outside normal procurement channels by a few guys at the Army Missile Command, to be the first of the three...
...The presidential candidates are so anxious to win these polls that they try to pack the hall with their supporters, sometimes even yielding to the temptation to bring in people whose claim to being Iowans is not above suspicion...
...In no event may such assistance exceed $500,000 for the defense of any one countervailing duty action...
...Charles Peters...
...It is the limousine...
...Soon the pilot is replaced by a new pilot...
...Clever lobbyists who want to sneak dubious legislation through Congress know that the secret is to make it so paralyzingly dull that no one will read it...
...It will be clear he is a very progressive, forward-looking candidate...
...I hereby present the Kaiser Cup to Eleanor Randolph...
...Rvo of the three have now been selected...
...Soon after moving to Washington in 1954, she turned the basement of her home into a recreation center for children who had no place to play...
...The Post's defense on this one is that Woodward didn't discover the Saudi-CIA angle until last July...
...There must be billions of our own littering the landscape at this very moment...
...It would revitalize the political system to have a goodly number of the bureaucrats who are supposed to serve the people—but too often come too close to behaving like those bored postal clerks in Federal Express commercials—actually be made accountable to the people...
...In his autobiography Ben Franklin tells this story: "About the year 1734 there arrived among us from Ireland a young Presbyterian creature named Hemphill who delivered with good voice, and apparently extempore, most excellent discourses ....One of our adversaries, having heard him preach a sermon that was much admired, thought he had somewhere read that sermon before...
...She distributed surplus food from the Department of Agriculture and she recruited volunteer seamstresses to mend and alter clothing on donated sewing machines...
...New York influences the rest of the country, and the education major is one of the principal factors in the substantive weakness of American public education...
...Kaiser has already done so and Randolph is talented enough that she almost certainly will be asked to do so soon...
...The Monthly endorsed the Avenger in November 1984...
...When Caspar Weinberger cancelled the Divad gun in 1985, he ordered that it be replaced with three different systems...
...This month's roundup of news from California: in Orange County, 24 high schools offer surfing courses...
...Her husband has been using corporate jets from such companies as General Mills, WarnerLambert, and Metropolitan Life for his campaign trips...
...In the case of Veil, one clear wrong was the failure of Woodward in his reporting in the Post of the Fadlallah bombing to disclose, as his book later did, that it was part of a CIA-Saudi conspiracy...
...First they inflate the horse's value through phony sales transactions, then they insure it for the inflated amount...
...In fact in Texas they not only shoot the sick and the lame but the perfectly healthy as well...
...But if the bingo games aren't bringing in much these days, you can get the Mickey Mouse watch for only $25,000...
...This developed into a Jobs for Teens program and later into a community center, where, according to The Washington Post, she "counseled as many as 200 people a week and her activities ranged from helping people fill out job applications to finding overnight shelter for homeless persons...
...Israel's drones were ready to fly in 1978 at a cost of only $30 million and, by spotting tanks and artillery positions, helped defeat Syria in 1982...
...Each morning hundreds of them picked up the officials, who represented nations throughout the globe, took them to their various meeting places, and then waited all day before returning them to their hotels or embassies at the end of the afternoon...
...Tobacco Corp...
...The money, according to Greg Rushford of Legal Times, is a fee owed the firm by the National Corn Growers Association, which is not some public body but a group of private citizens...
...A recent issue of Working Woman lists "The 25 Hottest Careers for Women...
...I stuck by him, however, as I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others rather than bad ones of his own manufacture...
...It honors Robert G. Kaiser because it was his unenviable task to persuade the Post's readers that the amazing revelations of William Greider's The Education of David Stockman had all appeared in the Post first, which they had not...
...Army has spent $750 million with nothing to show for it...
...Only that wasn't the end of the limousines...
...By now, the U.S...
...Kaiser and Randolph are fortunate they weren't around at the time The Final Days appeared...
...The charter rate the rest of us would have to pay for a private plane would be many times that figure...
...The next one gets the maneuver damages...
...and in Santa Clara the manager of the municipal golf course may have made as much as $750,000 by pocketing greens fees and using its American Express card to pay for his personal expenses...
...The government could just as well pay the legal fees of the Magazine Publishers Association—or the National Rifle Association...
...I opened the Gazette and this new Virginia Slims Ultra Lights ad jumped out at me...
...With so little to do, it's no wonder she also found time to bear and care for six sons and nine daughters...
...The mayor is definitely not one of my heroes, as most of our readers are aware, but in this respect I fear he is no different from most government officials I have known...
...According to Newsday's Susan Page, he satisfies the rules of the Federal Election Commission by paying the equivalent of one first-class airfare...
...The cost then: $2.2 billion...
...How is Washington's mayor, Marion Barry, responding to evidence of corruption and ineptitude in his administration...
...But what happens to people who didn't happen to see his article and rely on their government to protect them...
...Having perused the hundreds of catalogs that arrived in my mail box early this fall, I have selected the perfect Christmas gift: World Class Skipping Stones...
...It was the obituary of the Rev...
...Iowa Democrats have found a new way to finance their county organizations...
...I'm disturbed by the stories that some of the Iranian sailors that we captured in the Persian Gulf were returned to Iran even though they wanted to defect...
...Its masthead says: "To receive LEADERS Magazine one must be a leader of a Nation, an International Company, a World Religion, an International Institute of Learning, an International Labor Organization, a Chief Principal Officer, a Major Investor on behalf of...
...I didn't and thank Stanley Penn of The Wall Street Journal for warning me...
...It says it will finally have the Aquila operational in 1992...
...Those TOW antitank missiles that we sold Iran may turn out to be our secret weapon against the Ayatollah...
...Gore Sr...
...This is good news...
...According to Cynthia Lollar of the Cox News Service, they're the latest thing we should be worrying about...
...The National Rifle Association, of course...
...We now know another possible reason for Elizabeth Dole's long delay in cracking down on private plane owners...
...Yes, they do...
...Just in case you've forgotten how insidious the FBI's COINTELPRO had become in the late sixties, it was recently revealed that in Montgomery County, Maryland, FBI informants in the public schools were keeping track of the political activities of students as young as 14...
...When it has reached a point 200 miles from land the radio begins to crackle with conversations between brokers and lawyers...
...You don't drive anything less than a Rolls Royce," the Early Winter catalog reads, "so why don't you demand the best for your skipping stone...
...The top two are "Corporate-identity consultant" and "Specialevents marketer...
...One of their discoveries has been how to make a killing by killing horses...
...Even the Gore Corps has unexpectedly shown up, consisting in this incarnation of about 40 senior citizens from a Memphis retirement village...
...The Cup is not some piece of Hohenzollern memorabilia, but an award that I present to The Washington Post writer who must explain how a book written by another Post writer has not revealed information that should have been published in the newspaper at the time it was uncovered...
...But I fear there are few civil servants willing to take such a risk...
...I would really rather not get dengue fever or encephalitis, so I have a question for the authorities...
...There is a certain conflict of role in having one Post reporter do the apologia about another's book...
...The great thing about the Avenger is that almost all of the development work was done at Boeing's expense and took about two years as opposed to ten-plus years average for Pentagon-supervised work...
...One of them approaches me and genially asks, `Ah y'all folks from Ahuwa?' " It may seem crazy to the rest of us, but not to the county committees that get the revenues from all those barbecue dinners...
...The scandal was that both the U.S...
...Let us hope it will be derailed soon...
...Last month I found an antidote for my self-pity...
...Why are we importing used tires from anywhere...
...That afternoon the Charleston Daily Mail ran the same full page ad, portraying a voluptuous model with cigarette in hand and head thrown back with a smile of delicious joy on her face...
...We've got to get the Dixiecrats [southern conservative voters] back into the Democratic Party, and we're playing damn hard ball...
...They would have had to explain why almost none of its juicy parts had been in the Post, although both men were supposed to be working there while they were researching and writing the book...
...The West Germans are not content to fleece us by having us pay about 40 percent of the cost of NATO, which is mainly devoted to protecting them...
...She was also the pastor of a church, preaching twice a week and presiding at weddings and funerals...
...Consider the provision at the bottom of page 674 of H.R...
...Annie M. Woodridge...
...Leaders carries ads for Gerald Genta wrist watches...
...He found that part in one of the British reviews ....This gave many of our party disgust who accordingly abandoned his cause...
...A task force at the City University of New York has proposed, according to The New York Times, that students being trained to be teachers should be required to major in the liberal arts and sciences instead of education...
...We have done this twice in recent years with Russian sailors...
...You can tell them the place is falling apart and they see it as a public relations problem...
...Later in the campaign, after he has won the nomination, people will see the other side of his record come through: his work on the environment, on chemical waste, on standards for infant formula, on the ozone layer...
...They have a self-interest in convincing the Post's readers—and publisher Donald Graham, who was especially troubled by the Greider book—that nothing wrong has been done...
...According to a recent study by the General Accounting Office, up to 85 percent of the soldiers using TOWs will be killed after firing a single round...
...They transmit dengue fever and encephalitis and are coming into America in cargoes of used tires shipped from Asia...
...That is the good news...
...Is it not possible that these officials display the same indifference to wasteful extravagance in their decisions about public expenditures back home...
...A county committee will announce that it is holding a barbecue dinner, costing so many dollars per plate, at which a straw poll will be taken...
...was telling Washington insiders not to worry about Gore Jr.—we've just got to con those rednecks, you understand...
...The preferred methods other than shooting are electrocution, suffocation, and poisoning...
...Why would they subject the public to the temptation to buy a product they deemed so dangerous to themselves...
...Since the decline in oil prices has made it harder for the entrepreneurs of Texas to pay their Neiman-Marcus bills, they have been searching for new economic opportunities...
...There is a new magazine called Leaders...
Vol. 19 • November 1987 • No. 10
