TILTING AT WINDMILLS
TILTING AT WINDMILLS In the 1970s Liggett developed a cigarette that contained an additive designed to protect smokers from lung cancer. Why didn't it market the cigarette? Because its...
...At the Santa Clara County minimum security jail, inmates have been buying furloughs...
...Cheaper, maybe—at least on long-distance flights—but safer...
...From our Only in California Department, I offer this headline from the San Francisco Chronicle of January 12, 1988: Oakland Teachers Fight for Face Lifts And in case you're saying, I don't believe it, Peters has to he pulling my leg, here's the first paragraph of the story: "Oakland teachers are holding fast to their unused health care benefits that have allowed them to undergo elective cosmetic surgery at the expense of the financially strapped school district...
...The problem is that clients are often so filled with the righteousness of their cause that they resist all appeals to reason...
...How do those supermarket tabloids unearth the celebrity scandals they write about each week...
...You have to admire the creativity that the potential income from taxdeductible conferences has inspired in the travel industry...
...He'll sell the star out to get space for his next client...
...Why the shortage of nurses...
...Nicholas Lemann, who was then an editor of the Monthly, and I were being sued by some aggrieved author, and Michael Kinsley, one of our former editors who was then just out of law school, volunteered to represent us...
...It is estimated that stock index arbitrage now accounts for one-fourth of all the trading on the New York Stock Exchange...
...Foreigners can appeal the denial, and in most cases they receive a waiver...
...airlines in 1987 had the highest number of accidents in 13 years and the most deaths in five years, while commuter carriers had their worst safety record of this decade...
...An administration should he able to choose its policies—the rest of us are free to oppose them in Congress, in the courts, and with our ballots—but it should not be permitted to choose its facts or play around with the data base upon which other branches of the government and private citizens depend...
...That this situation has changed is suggested by the fact that one of the advertisers in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review is Mercedes-Benz...
...It's also backward policy...
...The average charge went up 19 percent last year...
...The Defense Department has decided to treat as veterans the civilians who served in the merchant marine during World War II...
...The truly horrible thing lawyers have done to our national life is to create situations like this where one lawyer says we can't do the right thing because another lawyer would sue us...
...In January, the Associated Press reported: "Major U.S...
...The Royal Viking Star is offering a China/Orient Conference on Legal-Medical Issues...
...It's time that we made the nurse and the doctor equal...
...But you can he sure that efforts to take effective action against it will encounter fierce opposition...
...I should also acknowledge the reasonable lawyers—the natural mediators who nobly resist the adversarial imperatives of the law...
...thinks it can make money offering a training program called "Dealing with the Angry Public...
...I f Bruce Babbitt can't win the Democratic nomination, and as this is written his prospects appear less than electrifying, my candidate is Albert Gore...
...It used to he that journalists identified with the working class because they were members...
...He said, "I'm fed up with the guy I've got, he's always telling me I should understand my wife's side...
...But money isn't everything...
...There may have been a note of wistful envy in a remark about another candidate that Gore's campaign manager made to a reporter last month: "There is no doubt that Babbitt is a likable man with a sense of humor and especially a sense of humor about himself...
...He must have enjoyed the trip...
...While many of these seamen did risk their lives, I can see how this decision would curl the hair of Navy veterans who were paid far less for work that was also hazardous and who were in for the duration and not free to quit or take long vacations as the merchant seamen were...
...Barbara Bailar recently resigned because of a decision that will result in an undercount of blacks and Hispanics and that will almost certainly cause a loss of House seats and federal aid for states with large numbers of blacks and Hispanics in their population...
...The other is the Census Bureau, from which Dr...
...Paul Volcker says there are three reasons why we lose good civil servants: low pay, political patronage, and lack of excitement...
...A change in cultural values is one major reason...
...Another cost that's rising is what we pay for hospital care...
...But even more important, I think, is respect...
...It's yours for $3,250...
...Because its lawyers said doing so would constitute an admission that its other products were unsafe...
...With the rate of inflation at only about 4 percent, that seems outrageous...
...And I can't say that of any of the other candidates except Bob Dole, who is far too conservative and whose suspicious loner qualities would make it impossible for him to run the government effectively...
...And last, but not least, the California Computer Crime Law exempts from punishment crimes committed by "employees engaged in designated labor union activity...
...Of course not...
...For those of you who have been worried about what to wear with your C.D...
...It is interesting that neither Michael Deaver's lawyers nor Lyn Nofziger's chose to let their clients testify...
...The money to pay the nurses more should come from the doctors, who are now earning more than they deserve, not from the patients or the taxpayers...
...The worthy social objective that will be attained is teaching them how to avoid civil and criminal liability for their mistakes...
...Peacock all-diamond tennis bracelet, the jeweler has mercifully provided a ruby tennis bracelet as a "perfect companion...
...with illegal drugs...
...I remember one fellow who asked me to recommend a new lawyer to represent him in his divorce case...
...Now, as I reported last month, the State Department is fighting a plan by the Customs Service to similarly mark the passports of Americans caught trying to enter the U.S...
...Unofficially, and without fair pay, talented nurses often have covered for their doctors and done things like suturing that the doctors were supposed to be doing...
...You need to respect the people you work for, and you can't respect people who change facts, as the Reaganites do...
...This remark should win State an award for hypocrisy...
...The judge, having heard the facts, recommended mediation...
...Gore is a bit more conservative, or more cynical in courting southern votes—it is hard to tell which—than I would like...
...It's hard to believe, but otherwise rational people really get to thinking like that during political campaigns...
...Write your congressman now...
...They were saved by a provision forbidding their sale that was slipped into the 1987 spending bill by Rep...
...When someone said to Michael McCurry, Babbitt's press secretary, "Do you realize that [Babbitt] will be on national television looking like a space alien," McCurry replied, "Well, at least he will be on...
...I have an apology to Gary Hart and a rebuke for the Postal Service...
...I worked in an administration—John Kennedy's—where the pay was much worse but morale and performance levels were much higher than today...
...Tom Bevill...
...Army auditors estimated that selling the planes would bring in more than $6 million to the Treasury and that, in addition, the use of commercial airlines would save $1 million a year...
...Nor is patronage a major factor—it accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal work force...
...It is to establish programs that permit nurses to grow professionally by being allowed to perform—and be paid fairly for—some of the functions usually done only by doctors...
...So were the planes sold...
...But I always feel guilty when I fail to acknowledge that at least a few of them really are dedicated to freeing the innocent, prosecuting the guilty, and defending the Constitution...
...He is mostly wrong about the first two, although there are a few jobs where higher salaries are needed, and although the Reagan administration has used miserable judgment in making many of its political appointments...
...Often that is my precise intention...
...Customs says the plan would alert its agents to give the person's luggage special attention...
...Some months ago we told you how the executive jet and two other aircraft owned by the Army Corps of Engineers seemed to be devoted less to essential business than to pleasurable jaunts in this country and abroad...
...because of their political beliefs...
...If the sky isn't falling, planes certainly are...
...I must confess that this happened to me once...
...This 21-day trip will be financed by you and me and other taxpayers because of the 28 hours that its participants will devote to study...
...The reasons for supporting him are in John 11 Eisendrath's article, "The Long, Long Shot," that we published in November 1986...
...It's funny that they deliver Time and Newsweek a day after mailing but take a week or two or longer to deliver us, even though we pay the same postage...
...My only other reservations about him are that he has never known defeat, an experience that tends to increase humility and understanding, and that, while he has a splendid wit where others are concerned— remember "Jesse Jackson is the candidate of the South, South Chicago, that is"—he has little sense of humor about himself...
...Volcker is right about the importance of excitement...
...id you know that mortgage payments now take more than $1,000 a month from the average homebuyer's income, which is not good news for young people who want to get married, have children, and live in their own home—without having to sell their souls for the sake of lucrative employment...
...With giant firms like Morgan Stanley involved and determined to resist reform, strong pressure from the public is going to be needed to bring it about...
...If young people who are considering a nursing career could know that such work could be done publicly and recognized and rewarded, and that they could be trained for it by in-service work-study programs, the profession would have an appeal it now lacks...
...But when issuing the visa, the State Department, still suspicious, puts a mark on the foreigner's passport identifying him or her as having received the waiver...
...What seems even more outrageous is that care that costs less than $400 a day in Alexandria, Virginia and Niagara Falls, New York, costs more than $1,000 in Reno, Nevada and San Jose, California...
...Kinsley urged me to go along...
...They may not have worn blue collars, but they were paid blue-collar wages...
...But there is another change that is also important, one recommended by Donna Fenn in these pages several years ago...
...Charles Peters...
...My admiration for my friend and former colleague, Gregg Easterbrook, is almost unlimited...
...It seems that the congressman had used the jet for a visit to Hawaii...
...In this month's story on the ACLU (page 27) we talk about the McCarran-Walter Act, a McCarthy-era law that gives the State Department the power—one it frequently uses—to deny foreigners the permission to visit the U.S...
...He has used her as either a servant or a sex object...
...The Reagan administration is playing bad politics with two agencies that should be treated as important sources of information whose objectivity should be treasured rather than tampered with...
...There is nowhere in American life that sexism has been more troubling than in the attitude of the male physician toward the female nurse...
...While lawyers will often, as these did, give other excuses for this omission, the main reason nine times out of ten is that they think the client's testimony will damage his own case...
...Could it have something to do with the fact that they fear criticism from the media giants much more than from a gnat like The Washington Monthly...
...A tabloid writer recently revealed one of the secrets of their success to an interviewer: "A star's agent is usually a great source of dirt about his own client, especially if the client is on the way down...
...Bailar, who are disillusioned by their superiors' willingness to distort or conceal the truth...
...But because of the incompetence of the Postal Service, many copies, including those for Washington, D.C., didn't reach our subscribers until more than two weeks after they had been mailed from our printer in Pennsylvania...
...Often they have difficulty with their clients who want them to he mean and nasty...
...I said, "Michael, I don't want to be reasonable, I want justice...
...air travel has become safer and cheaper...
...Hart was leading or near the top of the polls at the time we went to press with last month's issue, which criticized his relationship with William Broadhurst...
...I know that many times in these pages I have appeared to be harsh on lawyers...
...One is the Office of Management and Budget, where budget examiners are being asked to put an administration "spin" on their analyses...
...He has been right repeatedly when practically everyone else has been wrong...
...And government can ill-afford to lose the services of competent professsionals like Dr...
...Speaking of Babbitt, did you see those pictures of him the Saturday before the Iowa caucuses, outfitted in a crazylooking helmet and mask and riding a bike in zero weather...
...It has plenty to fear from the illegal drugs smuggled in by its own citizens...
...But on the crucial test of who can deal with Gorbachev, I think Gore would be the equal of Kennedy with Khrushchev at the time of the Cuban missile crisis...
...What does it say about the behavior of our corporate and government bureaucracies that Educational Technology Consortium, Inc...
...But on rare occasions his contrarian approach doesn't work...
...State claims marking the passport would interfere with the "integrity of the document...
...Obviously these values must change if we are to have more nurses...
...That's right, they get an hour out of jail for each dollar they contribute to the construction of a weight room at the facility...
...By that time Hart was down to 1 percent in Iowa and we appeared to be picking on a man who was already down and out . As for the Postal Service, its record on delivering the Monthly has steadily worsened over the past couple of years, despite our repeated complaints and their repeated assurances of reform...
...Almost everyone agrees that program trading was a factor in the crash of October 19...
...Wall Street firms make big profits using stock index arbitrage, which is a form of program trading, in managing their own money...
...A recent survey of students entering college, reported in The Washington Post, indicates that they are interested in careers associated with status, power, and money...
...America has nothing to fear from the opinions of visiting foreigners...
...Such is the case with his article in The New Republic last autumn, entitled "The Sky Isn't Falling," that began, "Since deregulation, U.S...
Vol. 20 • March 1988 • No. 2
