TILTING AT WINDMILLS
TILTING AT WINDMILLS The president has a $149 million jet aircraft that will serve as his command post in a nuclear war. It is designed to fly above the holocaust so that the president and his...
...Either way it was not good...
...There is, I must concede grudgingly because I've come to so dislike his arrogance, another reason to vote for Hart—or I should say Hart or Gore...
...In states that have adopted it, traffic fatalities have increased by more than 50 percent...
...My favorite is the Otsego County lawyer who created a fictitious heiress to inherit his...
...As they learned what their brokers had done to them on October 19, thousands of small investors also found out what a big favor the Rehnquist court had done for them last June when it ruled that the arbitration clause in forms they signed when they opened their brokerage accounts kept them from suing the Wall Street firms that had treated them so shabbily...
...I hope he doesn't give up even if he is badly beaten in the early primaries...
...By the way, did you know that the United States, with one government employee for every 15 citizens, now has as many government workers per capita as the Soviet Union...
...Have your ears been assaulted by those new leaf blowers...
...The Whitby was an apartment hotel on West 45th street that musicians, dancers, and actors could afford...
...Were you blind or were the umpires determined to undermine your respect for the rule of law...
...There's still time to sign up for Advances in Internal Medicine and Cross Country Skiing...
...All those bright writers and media people who mold the opinions of the rest of us had to make a lot of money just to pay the rent...
...The days are free for skiing...
...So their values had to change to justify their greed, and they proceeded to brainwash the rest of the country with their new morality...
...We didn't have a town square in Charleston, West Virginia, but in my travels I have seen and envied hundreds of them, most of all those in Latin countries, where the paseo (nightly walks around the square) brings the community together and provides the young with an easy way to flirt...
...Did you think the tax return law of 1986 was going to simplify the preparation of your returns...
...As for the human impact, consider the story of Billy and Lilly Ross, a young couple living in Ohley, West Virginia...
...As for intelligence, the selection of each group is equally random, meaning that comparing the two is a valid exercise...
...Why does dignity no longer matter...
...The hazard that kept it from remaining airborne was geese that were sucked into the plane's engines...
...Our brethren at the bar, as this column has often noted, include in their number some of the greatest scoundrels to be found outside the walls of penal institutions...
...At least one group of whites should know better—the sports fans...
...It has increased and now stands at a record 447,000...
...More importantly, it can hurt human beings...
...On issues of war and peace, they are simply better prepared...
...The arbitration process provided for by those forms is, in the words of Money magazine, "stacked against the investor...
...Then it turned out that what he thought was an ear infection was in fact inoperable cancer, requiring chemotherapy and radiation...
...You don't have to be very smart to realize that Bundy, who specialized in killing young girls, is a monster and guilty beyond a shadow of doubt...
...Now it will become expensive, like most housing in Manhattan...
...Government is organized to meet problems of the past...
...it's all on the rest of us...
...He had to quit work early last fall...
...All but one of the "meetings," the only part of the program that threatens to distract the mind with professional concerns, are scheduled for 4:00 or 4:30 p.m...
...Lack of money may compel him to run a campaign that has even fewer frills than Hart's, but he should hang in there because the voters could awaken to his merit at any time...
...Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering has invested $750,000 worth of its time in the defense of Theodore Robert Bundy...
...Evidence of the extent to which Americans are conned by credentials was furnished by the introduction given the soprano, Kathleen Battle, at the beginning of a recent televised concert with the New York Philharmonic...
...And the bore was more than made up for by the other guests, who were usually interesting or entertaining or both...
...An attorney from upstate who stole $71,000 from an elderly woman and made off with her piano for good measure...
...This footdragging negativism in the face of a new and good idea is, I fear, far more typical of State's bureaucracy than the laudable response to the ozone problem...
...Law," identifying with those who lead glitzier lives than he does...
...enator, we'd love to have you speak at our convention in Honolulu...
...Why have they abandoned their fastidiousness...
...Having grown up in a town where almost every house had a front porch, I know how they encouraged neighborliness...
...Bureaucracy has been a major concern of this magazine since we began publishing 19 years ago...
...Just in case you thought it couldn't be done, my friend Donovan McClure has come up with a reason to vote for Gary Hart: if Hart's no-frills campaign wins, it will be a devastating blow to the vast industry of pollsters, consultants, and advertising agencies, raising money for which has become the principal occupation of modern candidates, diverting them from the issues and awarding victory all too often to those who can best afford it...
...But the old job and institutional framework persists...
...and offer the solace of "hot drinks and snacks...
...Unfortunately mine have, and I can tell you they are a real menace...
...Why not help them instead of Bundy...
...The files of the Client's Security Fund of New York, which compensates victims of legal malfeasance, include the following examples: A Nassau County lawyer who took $167,000 in pension money from a widow...
...While on a recent test flight, the plane was forced to return to its base...
...The neighborhood bore might hesitate to knock on your front door and invite himself in, but if you're sitting on the porch you can be sure that he will interpret the slightest acknowledgement of his wave as a warm invitation to join you on the porch, where he can be counted on to studiously ignore the yawns that strained courtesy can only half suppress...
...This, as you have probably guessed, is a typical lobbyist offering a subtle bribe to a typical senator...
...Yet this is exactly what many whites think...
...Front porches and town squares are coming back, according to a recent article in The New York Times...
...It has another, Franklin Life Insurance Company, that gives discounts to nonsmokers...
...Divorce cases, they said, were "messy," the implication being clear that such matters were beneath their dignity...
...But I should warn of one hazard to the one I know best, the front porch...
...Speaking of sports, there has just been a change in the baseball rules that has to be welcomed by every boy whose faith in his power of observation was shaken by the strikes that were called balls by the umpire...
...One of the more fascinating developments in American culture in my lifetime has been that the average guy has stopped identifying with other average guys, as he did when I was growing up...
...Unfortunately, that involved them in another sin—the defense of rent controls, the persistence of which has caused the short supply of housing that makes other apartments so dear...
...Under the new law "the amount of information needed now to prepare a tax return is shocking," Roxanne Coady, national director of taxation at the accounting firm of Seidman and Seidman told The Wall Street Jounal...
...But the general consensus of tax experts seems to be that the new law has made things simple for lower-income people but more complex for those in the middle brackets and above who don't use the standard deduction...
...If an individual has been convicted of smuggling dope, the Bureau of Customs wants that fact stamped on his passport as a warning to customs agents to give his luggage special attention...
...The supposedly impartial members of the arbitration panel can include Wall Street spouses or retired brokerage industry officials...
...In the case of Karp v. Karp, for example, the legal fees amounted to more than $1 million...
...The Whitby is going coop...
...The Journal goes on to report that accountants say they will spend 20 to 50 percent more time preparing 1987 returns than they've spent in previous years...
...But today, as I sit stupefied by a typical evening of television, I realize that the bore was no worse and that, unlike the oversimplified characters that dominate the tube, he and the other neighbors who joined us on the porch were real human beings with problems and experiences to tell us about, people from whom I learned about life, not the imitations of it that appear on the screen...
...I hope the Times is right...
...When did the change begin...
...But by 1949, with South Pacific, he was a wealthy French planter...
...To establish her existence, according to The New York Times, he "dressed up as a woman and checked into the Best Western motel in Little Falls, New York, under her name...
...People talked with one another instead of watching television...
...Any student of post-game interviews has to concede that the blacks are just as insightful as the whites...
...Among the organizations that indulge in this practice and the honoraria they paid last year are the National Association of Broadcasters ($96,000), the Tobacco Institute ($75,000), the American Trucking Association ($85,750), and Paine Webber ($122,200...
...Well, it seems that in 1980 New York law changed so that the breakup of a wealthy couple was, in the words of a Manhattan lawyer, "transformed into something like the breakup of a business partnership, requiring expertise in real estate, tax and corporate law and commanding six-figure fees...
...It will be held at that great center of medical learning, Yellowstone Park, from February 21 through 27...
...It is designed to fly above the holocaust so that the president and his top commanders will be sure to survive a nuclear attack...
...My father became expert at detecting the first faint sound of the bore's approaching footsteps, dashing inside if there was still time, or slumping in his wicker chair, trying to disappear below the porch railing...
...Having asked your father what a strike was and being told it was a pitch that crossed the plate between the batter's knees and armpits, you would then see every pitch above the belt buckle be called a ball...
...Four caseworkers ignored his pleas for help...
...New York City's population has declined since the 1940s, but the same cannot be said of the number of its public employees...
...An example of the former comes from a recent General Accounting Office report that reveals that the government pays about one-fourth of its bills too early and one-fourth too late, thereby forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in either interest income or interest penalties...
...There'll be an honorarium of $2,000 [the legal limit], and we'll take care of all your travel expenses, and Mrs...
...But the State Department refuses, saying the stamping might interfere with the "integrity of the document...
...I have always thought that next to the possibility of some fool pushing the wrong button accidently or some similar foul-up, the greatest danger of nuclear war lay in our leaders thinking they could survive it...
...If I were black, the most maddening of the prejudices I would have to face would be the assumption that I am stupid...
...The only New Yorkers who escaped the new passion for money were those who had rent-controlled apartments...
...The problem is that under the old limit, everyone was really going 60, so that the new limit is viewed as a license to do 70, a point at which a good many cars become difficult to control and a good many drivers discover that their skills and reaction time have become inadequate as their vehicle plows into another or sails off the road and into a tree...
...Instead, by the eighties, he was watching "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," "Dallas," "Dynasty," and now "L.A...
...Charles Peters...
...I think it was the late forties, and I offer the following evidence from the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein...
...I have a theory that the greed of the seventies and eighties had its roots in the disappearance of affordable housing in Manhattan...
...So I am happy to report that the strike zone is now officially what it always seemed to be in fact...
...Both the whites and blacks are interviewed because of their athletic accomplishments...
...Surely there must be thousands or at least hundreds of possibly innocent people who are caught in our criminal justice system without adequate representation...
...The problem is that they don't know black people or that they assume that the bad attitudes and values that they see in some blacks, especially in the ghetto, are caused by intellectual deficiencies...
...Last month Martha Hodel of Associated Press reported his story, and finally the caseworkers responded— which helps explain why we hope more of the press will join us in covering the bureaucracy...
...A limousine will be at your disposal throughout your stay and another will take care of your transportation to and from the airport in Washington...
...But for anyone who has been involved at the more impecunious levels of the arts in New York, as I was in the late forties and early fifties, it is terrible news...
...His food stamps were revoked...
...The announcer listed the degrees she had been awarded...
...Although this event may have inspired anxiety at the White House and the Pentagon, I take great comfort in it...
...When he applied for welfare in October, his papers were lost...
...What did the government do to help this man who was down on his luck...
...These figures do not include the amounts these organizations shelled out for expenses, which were often more than the honorarium...
...A few enlightened city councils have banned them, and one splendid soul, John Miller of Palo Alto, is fighting for an initiative that would outlaw them throughout California...
...His sick child was rejected for medical help...
...In the fifties, in The Sound of Music, he was a baron, and you don't have to guess what he was in The King and I...
...New problems that don't fit tend to be ignored...
...And they are not a group of elite blacks specially selected to do well against average whites...
...American Brands has one subsidiary, the American Tobacco Company, that sells cigarettes...
...Billy had a job, but it paid so little that he, his wife, and ailing young son qualified for food stamps...
...They seldom give the victim the full amount of his loss, and, according to Money, "almost never add punitive damages...
...What do they have to do with her ability to sing...
...He doesn't have the same rights to discover facts that he would have in court, sometimes even being unable to compel the firms to produce relevant documents...
...And a father-and-son firm in Rockland County that took $75,000 from an orphaned boy and $150,000 from a fund that was to pay for the training of seeing-eye dogs...
...The rich are going to save plenty, but it may be that some people in the middle will end up paying their accountant whatever savings they were supposed to realize from the reforms...
...It is also why the State Department should be congratulated for rising above these tendencies to deal with a new environmental problem through an international protocol to protect the earth's ozone shield that it negotiated last fall...
...Accountants, like other professionals, are highly skilled at finding excuses to run the meter...
...Their careers and interests have involved them much more substantially in national security issues than have those of the other Democratic candidates...
...A position or an office or a department that was established to deal with a problem—e.g., a shortage of energy—may find that the problem no longer exists...
...There are two reasons for this concern...
...Speaking of New York lawyers, it used to be that the state's classier firms avoided matrimonial law...
...Now they know that even if they escape the blasts below, they still may be done in by a gaggle of geese...
...For most people the question will be "so what...
...Nothing you have to prepare, of course, I'm sure our members will be grateful for just a few off-the-cuff remarks and the chance to get to know you informally...
...One is that bureaucratic ineptitude can cost money...
...The 65-mile-per-hour speed limit does not seem to be a great winner...
...The square and the porch can help restore humanity to our towns and cities, which is why I'm in favor of both...
...But suddenly we find that the most distinguished firms are displaying a keen interest in matrimonial law...
...That's not what your accountant thinks...
...That is why the Congress has such a hard time getting the military services to deal with the problem of terrorism, an effective response to which would cut across the old bureaucratic lines...
...Best of all, the vacation is tax deductible...
...In the early forties they had written two musicals, Oklahoma and Carousel, in which the hero was an an average guy...
...For all those internists out there who are suffering from the winter blahs and would like to get away but don't want to pay for their vacation, I have glad tidings...
...client's estate...
...Senator's—what a lovely lady—as well...
...Although I am convinced that Bruce Babbitt must show evidence of giving more thought to these security issues as the campaign progresses, I continue to think that he is the best candidate overall (see David Osborne's article, page 12...
Vol. 20 • February 1988 • No. 1
