Tilting at Windmills
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS T he E-6 is a new navy plane that will fly over the ocean to provide a communications link with submarines. Where will the E-6 be based? At some coastal air base? No....
...But make no mistake, there is plenty of fat in network news and lots of money that could be saved with no sacrifice of quality...
...In one, on the Lux Video Theater, my responsibilities would be to chalk out the floor plan in the rehearsal hall and make sure the cast was supplied with coffee and the producer with jello...
...Part-time controllers to cover these periods would enable the government to protect the public without wasting money on unneeded full-time employees...
...The result...
...It was 15.9 percent, or more than twice the prime rate...
...What I hope is that, instead of inciting the rednecks, it will inspire the media to remove the blinders that their sympathy for Israel has caused them to wear for too long...
...Most people don't know that little of it now is...
...Charles Peters...
...In Detroit, service is reported to range from bad to terrible...
...And the harm law does to lawyers is minor compared to the harm they do to the rest of us by encouraging adversarial litigation and all the animosity and divisiveness it produces...
...The part-time approach would also give the old controllers a chance to get back into action, make some extra money, and still not make suckers out of the controllers who loyally stayed on the job and didn't go out on strike...
...The controllers want to come back because they liked the work and they made far more money doing it—isn't it an irony that the main demand of their strike was for higher pay—than they have since been able to make on the outside...
...You can see how Mario might feel just the slightest twinge of self-pity...
...Why, then, did The Washington Post devote only 3 column inches to the story and bury it under two other articles on an inside page...
...Reid, who points out that the NSC staff was furiously shredding memos last fall, not realizing that they had left their computer chock full of incriminating evidence...
...On June 25 of last year, Edwards led the fight in the House to restore military aid for the contras...
...For example: "17 Deluxe Days" in Japan, China, and Hong Kong feature one sightseeing wonder after another, a "Peking Duck Banquet," and "Geisha entertainment" (dentists are such devils...
...For new subscribers, let me quote a New York career counselor: "Lawyers are the most dissatisfied professional group in the country:' An attorney who left the law and opened a bar in New York City told Alberta Cork of The National Law Journal, "If I had a dime for every time a lawyer asked me `what else can I do with my life,' I'd have enough money to open three restaurants...
...thus an indexed item called `religion and the presidency' refers to a description of John F Kennedy as 'Roman Catholic' " Ravitch went on to point out that the five home economics textbooks that were banned did contain an abundance of statements to bolster Hand's claim that the textbooks subverted values parents might be trying to impart to their children: "For instance, parents who tell their children not to drink alcohol may be startled to discover that their home economics textbook says, `You need to form your own attitudes toward alcohol...
...From you, the patient— by persuading you that your teeth are in imminent danger of falling out unless you immediately undergo some kind of complicated dental procedure about which only one thing is certain: it will cost you thousands of dollars...
...Where are they going to get it...
...There was no evidence that his words were intended to incite violence...
...Speaking of which, Mario Biaggi must wonder what subtlety eluded him when he took Legal Shakedown 202...
...I am happy to report that first-year law school enrollment dropped again this year...
...He also received speaking fees totaling $90,250 from similarly high-minded organizations such as National Medical Enterprises and the California Public Securities Association, and $36,241 in gifts, including a $4,796 trip to London paid for by the Association of California Insurance Companies...
...The word neoliberal was coined by The Washington Monthly to describe its political philosophy...
...That's all...
...Because the Los Angeles Times broke the story, the Post ran it on page 8. At least that time the Post acknowledged that the Los Angles Times had broken the story...
...E ven the most fervent advocate of mercy and forgiveness may wonder about the District of Columbia's guidelines for hiring police officers...
...The bad news is that, while the overall number of law students is declining, the number of females enrolled is still climbing...
...Some— not most...
...In order to maintain his limousine lifestyle, the Washington lobbyist must constantly exacerbate the anxieties of the folks back home who foot the bill not only for his chauffeur but for all those lunches at Lion d'Or and the Jockey Club...
...This makes five straight years that the figure has gone down...
...The reason is that The Washington Times got the story of Thomas Griscom's appointment first, publishing it a day before the Post...
...But it is certainly a story of sufficient importance to run in a prominent position inside and to command 15 or 20 column inches of background on the new director and the significance of his appointment...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS T he E-6 is a new navy plane that will fly over the ocean to provide a communications link with submarines...
...In other words, give us $250 and we'll arrange for you to dine out whenever you want at absolutely no cost to you...
...Your attitudes may differ from your friends, but the most important thing is that you must make your own decision...
...The speech, the expenses, and the contributions would have all been perfectly legal...
...And those who need it should get more than they are receiving now...
...To the best of my knowledge, not one of us believes in letting the well-paid out of social security...
...Also for new readers: Of course some lawyers do defend the Constitution, free the innocent, help the poor, and in general lead lives dedicated to justice and fair play...
...In 1983 the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government's leading purchaser of medical services, adopted a new reimbursement system under which fixed fees are paid for hospital services...
...The Israelis are going to put him in prison for three years...
...After all the wailing about the recent budget cut at CBS News, I was delighted to see Dan Cordtz's piece in The New York Times arguing that there is indeed real waste in television news...
...And their effort to bust the Writers' Guild, whose members are paid a fraction of the glamorous network correspondents, has bordered on cruelty...
...To get their tax deduction, the dentists have to attend four "professional conferences" during the 17-day trip...
...It is anticipated that your participation will generate a tax loss approximately equal to your restaurant expenses during this period...
...Your present personal dining activities could become an important contribution to a lucrative tax-advantaged business venture...
...We can derive some comfort at least from the fact that marriage made the list...
...He wrote in an English language newsletter that was sent primarily to foreign journalists in Israel and to people living abroad...
...In his new book, Visions and Nightmares, excerpted in the March issue of Harper's, Robert Lekachman writes: "Neoliberals argue that wellpaid professional and managerial workers should be allowed to opt out of social security...
...I glanced down to the lower corner of the statement where I saw the interest being charged...
...He could have arranged the contract and then accepted $2,000 from the company for a speech—and received expenses for the trip to the site of the speech—without getting into any trouble at all, much less going to jail...
...A $250 cash capital contribution is required to cover the cost of managing the partnership, including all overhead expenses, rent, telephone, staff, etc...
...All the professor did was write that Palestinians should "reject and resist" the Israeli occupation...
...Future bureaucratic criminals who think they have destroyed the evidence by pressing the "erase" or "delete" button should know that, in the case of some computers, until a new file is written on the disk, the deleted message remains, just waiting to be discovered by congressional investigators...
...Louis, the fares are higher...
...They also don't realize that, unless he has testified under oath, a lying witness cannot be indicted for perjury...
...What I fear is that most people will think that such disdain for the truth in testimony before Congress is unique to these two characters...
...Veteran readers of this magazine do not need to be told why this makes me happy...
...is looking for frequent diners to evaluate restaurants nationally and regionally throughout the United States...
...I have worried for years about the fact that our government spends billions on computers, while few of its employees, including those who buy and use them, have more than the sketchiest understanding of the machines they're dealing with...
...TRW has expressed "regret" that it defrauded the Pentagon of as much as $23 million between 1978 and 1984...
...at one point they even refused to pay medical benefits for injured strikers...
...They immediately double their debt by setting up their own office and buying all the latest equipment...
...Why Oklahoma...
...In fact, it is so common in testimony from the executive branch, and most especially from the Pentagon, that it explains why I long ago became an advocate of requiring that all testimony to Congress be under oath...
...Finance Charges Will Continue To Accrue...
...They were Harvard, marriage, and a Porsche...
...Had the bank been taken over by some warmhearted Santa Claus...
...Some of them—and Time magazine—may have erred in tilting against Israel, but practically everyone else in the respectable press has tilted the other way...
...As a working partner of R.I.I., you will visit restaurants on behalf of the partnership...
...Tinker had not originally been on the list of bases the Navy considered...
...Both conservatives and moralists want to continue to punish the strikers...
...and between 4 and 6 p.m...
...The sincerity of the company's remorse is suggested by the fact that it gave a $58,000 bonus to the manager of its Cleveland division, where a double set of books had been kept to inflate the cost of jet engine parts...
...The prison sentence recently given Professor Saeb Erakat is the kind of story that needs to receive much more attention in the American press...
...These wasteful practices were already well established when I worked in television in the early fifties...
...No Payment Is Due," read the message on the monthly credit card bill a friend of mine recently received from the Maryland Bank...
...I once was faced with choosing between two jobs...
...In the other, I was to hold a stopwatch and time the commercials during the New York Yankee baseball games...
...I have a compromise solution...
...Caspar Weinberger recently asked Congress for a $340 million supplemental appropriation to cover medical cost overruns...
...The correct answer is Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City...
...As long as the teenager makes his own decision, he can lie, cheat, steal, and swill booze all day...
...If the Post deserves the back of our hand for that one, somebody on the op-ed staff over there deserves high praise for printing Diane Ravitch's "Those Banned Textbooks Are Bad Textbooks," in which, while acknowledging the stupidity of Judge W. Brevard Hand's decision in the recent Alabama case, she points out that the textbooks themselves are relentlessly bland and valueless, seeking above all else to avoid controversy: "The nine history textbooks on Hand's list include some of the most widely adopted books in the nation...
...This is further proof that women's liberation has produced a new form of slavery, slavish imitation of the worst stupidities of the American male...
...The insanity of airline deregulation is clearest when one of two airlines that have provided competing service for a city is absorbed by the other...
...Give up...
...He singled out "salaries that are far too high...
...Beware of young dentists...
...Its health care arm, called Champus, continues to allows physicians and hospitals to calculate their own charges...
...CBS may have fired the wrong people...
...in another, religion disappears in 1850...
...Seven days later, Edwards announced that the Navy had selected Tinker as the base for the E-6...
...Louis, with TWA's takeover of Ozark, to Detroit with Republic's merger into Northwest, and now in my hometown, Charleston, West Virginia, with USAir's purchase of Piedmont...
...Anyone who has ever been in a television studio has to be astounded by the number of employees who are standing around with little or nothing to do...
...By the way, you would have doubled your money if you had bought Piedmont stock when I recommended it last year...
...They permit the acceptance of candidates who have admitted past use of drugs up to 15 times...
...We have repeatedly argued that social security should be viewed as insurance against need: everyone should pay for it, but only those who need it should get it...
...In a third, there has evidently been an effort to 'mention' religion more often, but only as a passing reference...
...It was added at the suggestion of Mickey Edwards, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma...
...In St...
...And in Charleston, where Piedmont had 47 percent of the passengers and USAir 26 percent, higher fares are predicted...
...In Hawaii or Puerto Rico...
...So now they have to make a lot of money fast...
...The government's numbertwo purchaser of medical services, the Department of Defense, did not adopt the HHS system...
...Last year, in addition to receiving his government salary of $37,105 plus a $75 per day tax-free living allowance while he was in the legislature, he got $150,000 from his law firm, a client of which is a subsidiary of Santa Fe-Southern Pacific Corp., whose disinterest in California legislative affairs is, of course, legendary...
...Facts about what's wrong with the Israelis and what's right about the Arabs have been hard to come by...
...It is important that they think of the lobbyist as their only protection against daily threats to their pocketbook from Congress and the bureaucracy...
...Take this recent statement from the American Dental Association's Washington office, which, after noting that "Ronald Reagan's calm presidency is being buffeted by the Irancontra arms scandal," went on to say: "Such changes in the political scenery at the Capitol will also have an effect on dentists throughout the nation...
...I am worried that the Pollard case will lead to a new wave of anti-Semitism in America...
...I know you're saying, now he's really lost his marbles—I must admit that I seem to have some kind of fixation on the dental profession this month—but let me explain my warning...
...Not exactly...
...In that respect we are more liberal than the conventional liberals like Lekachman...
...I understood a little better when I recently learned from Gregg Jones of The Washington Post that even though her husband, Benigno, had urged in 1965 that it be broken up and given to the peasants, her family still owns a 15,000 acre plantation, complete with its own airstrip, 18-hole golf course, and uniformed guards...
...The next line contained a hint that the bank's purpose was not as charitable as it may have seemed...
...Willie Brown, the speaker of the California Assembly, has long been recognized as a pioneer in bringing to the state level legal shakedown techniques that have long been practiced along the banks of the Potomac...
...The most famous example was the first smoking gun in the Watergate story, the discovery that Nixon had told a group of his top aides to "stonewall" the investigation...
...Both Piedmont and USAir have been highly efficient airlines and nowhere has this been more manifest than in their ability to take their customers to the cleaners...
...As a warm admirer of Corazon Aquino, I couldn't understand why anyone but the fascist Marcos clique could dislike her...
...Pragmatists want to rehire them because they fear the skies are so overcrowded with planes that tragic crashes are almost certain to happen...
...Speaking of dentists, they have some of my favorite taxdeductible "continuing education" trips...
...There was no such acknowledgement that The Washington Times beat them on the Griscom s tory...
...The fallacy of the textbooks' approach is that they teach no right or wrong...
...He also would not have had to worry about taking $10,000 in campaign contributions from executives of the company...
...Uncle Sam will pay the The announcement of a new White House director of communications—that's the job Pat Buchanan held— might not make the first page on a busy news day...
...When Oliver North reported that he had misinformed the House Intelligence Committee about his role in directing covert aid to the contras, John Poindexter said, "Well done...
...As further evidence that upward mobility has become the religion of modern America, I offer an eightyearold student at a local private school who was asked to list the key events of the life he looked forward to...
...The Post has a long history of giving only the most grudging acknowledgement to stories that it has been beaten on...
...One of our readers recently sent us a letter he had received from Philip Sheldon of the Restaurant Information Institute: "Dear Friend: The Restaurant Information Institute (R.I.I...
...T ake A Holiday From Your Bill For This Month...
...While these words may be intended to support a teenager's decision not to drink, they can just as easily be used to support the opposite decision...
...It has increased competition among health care providers and caused the rate of growth in Medicare spending to slow for the first time since the program was created...
...This has happened to St...
...The latest evidence that I should worry even more comes from The Washington Post's computer expert, T.R...
...Young dentists emerge from school with very substantial student loans that they must pay off...
...I wish I had...
...Sometimes when the threats aren't too apparent, the lobbyist has to be creative...
...Basing those planes in Oklahoma will make sense as soon as we start basing the submarines in Nebraska," one disgruntled navy official told Knight-Ridder's Mark Thompson, to whom I am indebted for this story...
...And they're already high enough...
...A mere handful of columnists—only Anthony Lewis, Georgie Anne Geyer, Robert Novak, and Alexander Cockburn immediately come to mind—have regularly tried to tell the other side...
...In one of them, religion simply disappears from American history after the settling of the colonies...
...He has been indicted for accepting a free trip from a company after arranging for it to get a federal contract...
...Should we rehire the air traffic controllers who were fired several years ago when they chose to stay out on an illegal strike after having been warned of the consequences...
...The term has subsequently been applied to many others, including professional middle-of-the-roaders and those who believe high technology is the key to America's economic future...
...Each of these is held in the afternoon, presumably to allow the dentists time to recover from the revels of the previous night...
...Maybe that's what he can't stand to admit...
...Offer part-time jobs to the fired controllers...
...The only times the skies are really overcrowded are between 8 and 10 a.m...
...The only position this magazine has ever taken on social security is that the rich should not receive its benefits, not that they should not pay for it...
Vol. 19 • May 1987 • No. 4
