Tilting at Windmills

...Remember when there were only one or two commercials per time out...

...If you aren't convinced I'm right about this, let me tell you about a friend of mine who saw a replay of the Rams-Broncos exhibition game, played in London in August, on BBC television, without commercials...

...Many time outs are called, not by the teams, but by the networks, and the length of each one seems to be controlled by that man with the orange sleeves on the sidelines, who in turn is controlled by the TV director...

...This idea was put forth this summer by the editor of Science magazine...

...But who needs to know how many bedrooms or cars or phones we have...

...Before his 1984 election to the Senate, where his mastery of arms control issues exceeds that of any of his colleagues, he was one of the most respected—for competence—members of the House for eight years...

...The union contends that Prag's high productivity deprived other members of their chance to get overtime on Saturdays...

...I decided to find out if the Post's brass suffers along with the rest of us, so I called a friend, Carol Trueblood, who lives a few doors from Katharine Graham...

...Speaking of unions, Steven Waldman missed one in his list of losers in our last issue...

...The ad argues that proposed federal excise taxes on such products as telephones, gasoline, cigarettes, and beer would threaten the jobs of farmers, truckers, sales clerks, mechanics, and factory workers...

...In other words, what could he reasonably expect in the way of pension income...

...It lasted exactly one hour and 45 minutes...

...My suspicion that we are fast becoming a nation of snobs has not been diminished by the Hardees commercial that shows a tiny tot munching a hamburger and saying she wants to go to an Ivy League college...

...The space devoted to Inglenook was doubled in the second edition...

...The Army, by the way, has an interesting definition of routine...

...His offense: he was overproductive...

...It offered the assistant attorney general handling the case, Cletus Hanley, $1 million for the state—and $241,251 for himself...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS here is a proposed constitutional amendment in California that may go a bit too far, but you have to admit it's headed in the right direction...

...What we have to care about this time around is making the regulation sensible so that it won't reacquire the bad name that led to its demise under Ronald Reagan...

...Now comes the FBI sting operation, where out of 106 officials from all around the state who were offered bribes, 105 accepted and the 106th declined only because he deemed the amount offered him to be inadequate...

...I am a fervent capitalist, but I know that capitalism, left to itself, can maim, pollute, and monopolize...

...Speaking of election coverage, The New York Times recently carried this observation about the candidates: "The emergence of competence and experience as key tests for the coming campaign would appear to help such candidates as Senator Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who has served as Senate majority leader, and Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, who has run a widely praised administration in a major industrial state...

...This was reported in late August by Stephen Engelberg and Bernard E. Trainor of The New York Times and is confirmed by my own sources...

...Carol didn't know there was a problem...

...How much was he paid before he retired...

...Now there are more likely to be four to six, which take a lot longer...

...Hanley accepted...

...After a ruling by the West Virginia Supreme Court made clear that the state would ultimately win, Blue Cross proposed a settlement...

...But Babbitt aside, the statement about Gore is just plain stupid...

...In addition, Babbitt has had the courage to propose means testing for the entitlement programs, with less money going to the affluent and more to the needy...

...In September, the National Endowment for the Humanities released a study that testified to, among other things, a frightening ignorance of history on the part of the 8,000 17-year-olds surveyed...

...Regulation is the only way to control these tendencies...

...It would abolish the California Bar Association and prohibit its members from holding public office or practicing law in California courts...

...The ad is illustrated with photographs of individuals who are identified as "members of sponsoring unions" and carries the names and logos of several large unions...

...On Saturday morning, August 15, I bounded down the stairs and out the front door, eager to pick up the paper and read about the first Redskins exhibition game, which had been played the night before...

...Why not have each presidential candidate present his own version of the federal budget for the next fiscal year, showing just how he would change the present level of expenditures...

...It is Local 140 of the International Die Sinkers' Conference...

...I endorse it wholeheartedly and hope others will too...

...Yet Babbitt is dismissed by much of the press because his name sounds silly and because he managed to look pretty silly in the Houston debate...

...Certainly some of the information the census unearths is vital, but many of the questions seem aimed primarily at providing information for private businesses...

...It is a frightening comment on Carlucci, Weinberger, and Shultz...

...But I don't reside at some RFD address or even in the suburbs...

...Coincidentally of course...

...Note I said look...

...Among the guests was committee member Richard Cheney—invited, of course, only because of his lovely wife...

...It looks like the states that are honored in my Hall of Fame of Corruption—West Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Kentucky, Tennessee, Nevada, and Louisiana—will have to make room for a new star...

...What services...

...he airlines are a splendid example of the need for more regulation...

...We want the plane to fly away...

...And only Babbitt has had the wisdom to support profit-sharing as a way to moderate wage demands in the interest of competitiveness without stealing from the worker the rewards his sacrifice might make possible...

...it was his appearance and bearing that offended, not the substance of what he had to say...

...But, despite the new competition, my home state, West Virginia, continues to maintain its lead in innovative approaches to hanky-panky...

...Nowhere does it mention that it is paid for by the Tobacco Institute, the public relations and lobbying arm of the cigarette manufacturers...

...The wives' itinerary, according to the Associated Press, "included sightseeing, a fashion show, and visits to an old cottage and a candy factory...

...It is interesting to note the identity of those who rushed to object when OMB proposed that some questions be omitted from the 1990 census...

...Shaw noted that such arrangements were forbidden by a few major papers, but not by the Times...

...A recent study of their flights by the Army Audit Agency concluded: "Virtually all the flights were for routine matters and could have been accomplished with commercial aircraft...

...Just a few days before Caspar Weinberger was scheduled to testify before the Iran-contra committee, he gave a small dinner for his French counterpart, Andre Giraud...

...Also, I was anxious to see how my favorite baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, had done that evening...

...Don't these guys have any desire to do good while they're making money...

...The competence and experience test could just as easily have come out in favor of Babbitt, who was also a highly praised governor...

...Will Koch really have to cut services...

...I, and many other subscribers, can get a semi-final edition one day, an early edition the next, and a final on the third day, with none of the reviews and sports results that had been missing the previous mornings...

...She argued that the bill might endanger efforts to educate the public about how to prevent AIDS, adding, according to the Sacramento Recorder, "We have hands-on experience with safe sex...

...Both the networks and the stations they own are shared monopolies that should be regulated in the public interest...

...It also quotes the state's comptroller, Edward V. Regan, as supporting the additional pension payments because the "vast majority of the retirees from state and city service have suffered significantly as a result of inflation...

...of Tennessee...

...Gore does have faults, but they do not include a lack of competence and experience...

...California is a special place...

...One of the Corps's plane trips carried wives of Corps employees to a conference of the International Association of Navigational Congresses in Helsinki...

...In the same month, ABC stopped airing "Our World," an excellent series of documentaries on modern American and world history...

...He discovered that the Times's wine critic, Nathan Chroman, not only got the free wine, the free meals, and the free trips—for himself and his wife—but that he also had "a financial involvement with at least three California wineries," and that the second edition of his book, The Treasury of American Wine, was subsidized by Inglenook Vineyards...

...Yet the real culprit is the TV time out, the one that is called to permit the airing of commercials and seems to grow longer every year...

...Those criteria would seem something of a handicap to relative outsiders like former Governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona and Senator Albert Gore Jr...

...This is the kind of objectivity through opposing quotes that drives me around the bend, offering us not one word of the information we need to know to decide who is right...

...Not long ago, for example, it was discovered that Blue Cross had overcharged the state $6.4 million, and the state attorney general sued to get it back...

...It revealed all the foregoing information on page 9 of the same issue...

...The Drive to Increase Excise Taxes Could Drive Us Out Of Work," proclaims the headline on an advertisement in the September issue of The Progressive...

...When Reagan decided last March to protect Kuwaiti tankers, he was told by his senior cabinet advisers that it could be done without any increase in American naval forces in the Persian Gulf...

...We should demand shows like "Our World" in return for the money-machine franchises we give these companies...

...There were no night baseball scores at all...

...If the Corps sold its aircraft, it would gain $6.4 million for the Treasury, and, if it used regular airlines, it would save $1 million more in travel costs...

...Te Army Corps of Engineers owns three planes, including a 14-passenger executive jet...

...Speaking of West Virginia, here is a statistic worth pondering: 8.5 percent of the state's workforce is now employed by the mining industry...

...Not long ago, it fined Charles Prag, an edger, cutter, and die worker at the International Drop Forge Company in Milwaukee, $200 and placed him on probation for two years...

...Of course, we shouldn't leave virtue entirely to them...

...But you may have missed the tapes made by John King, a mechanic who was fired by Eastern for revealing its dangerously sloppy safety practices...

...The 1980 census cost us $1.1 billion...

...The evidence lately has been overwhelming...

...At the Post this problem is compounded by its owners' refusal to spend the money necessary to figure out which reader receives which edition...

...In July, Missy Florez, the star of a porn film called Behind the Green Door—The Sequel, appeared before a state legislative committee to testify on an anti-obscenity bill...

...It is possible that the government has a legitimate interest in knowing whether we have a roof over our head, a car to get around in, and a telephone with which to reach the outside world...

...It seems she gets the final edition every day...

...Only The Washington Post's Paul Taylor and David Broder and the Los Angeles Times's Robert Shogan have shown any sign of appreciating Babbitt's superiority on matters of substance...

...Now for The Washington Post...

...Most of it has been on the front pages, so I won't repeat it here...

...They included, according to Donald Lambro, a columnist who has a keen nose for bureaucratic extravagance, the National Association of Home Builders and Dun & Bradstreet...

...There was nothing about either game in the Post...

...It is rare that newspapers blow the whistle on themselves...

...My next complaint against the Times concerns a story that appeared on July 8, describing favorable action by the New York legislature on a bill that would supplement the pensions of retired state and municipal workers...

...We have often complained about how the Post has failed to meet the Night Baseball Box Score Test since the demise of the Washington Star...

...Obviously I had received an early edition...

...One of King's tapes reveals that a supervisor, who did not want to report a fuel leak because it might mean the plane would have to be taken out of service, said: "I have no chance to move this aircraft with this stinking item in the logbook ....We don't want any showstoppers...

...The articles explain how critics receive free wine, free meals, and free trips to vineyards in Europe and California and that, coincidentally of course, the provider of these goodies usually is rewarded with praise from the writer...

...What evidence is there that what he is getting is inadequate...

...Only Bruce Babbitt has faced the need for increased taxes so far...

...Charles Peters...

...How much pension is the average retiree already getting...

...The article quotes Mayor Koch as saying he would have to cut city services to pay for the increased pensions...

...The networks have been pressing the National Football League to shorten games, which have been running well over three hours...

...If he proposes increases, he should also indicate from where he expects to gain additional revenue...

...I live well within the Washington city limits...

...Once papers achieve monopoly status, they tend to get careless about making sure the previous night's sports results—and theater, music, and dance reviews— make it into the next morning's paper...

...On all the questions the Times stands silent, leaving its readers with only the conflicting quotes and no way to evaluate them...

...Senator David Pryor estimates that the 1990 bill could be nearly $4 billion...

...It is New York, where previously naughtiness had been thought to be rare north of the Westchester County line...

...The Progressive, to its great credit, refused to go along with this con game...

...We need more of it now, not less...

...So the Los Angeles Times deserves a pat on the back for having done so recently in a series on wine writers by David Shaw...

...Since Thomas S. Murphy, the head of Cap Cities-ABC, is supposed to be one of the smartest businessmen in America, why can't he use some of his genius to figure out how to keep "Our World" going...

...21.9 percent is employed by government...