Tilting at Windmills

...You proved you were clever by finding the bistro or small hotel on the Left Bank that was good and cheap...

...a second classmate asked, also laughing...

...Charles Peters...

...The other explanation is that Babbitt tried to take advantage of his reputation with the media for being courageous while failing to repeat and explain to the public the positions that had gained him the reputation...

...The only standard that should govern the retention of such employees is performance, performance that demonstrates competence and dedication to the public interest...

...Why waste billions of dollars in futile efforts to keep drugs out when the money could be spent on programs to prevent and cure addiction...

...No other faith's representation was greater than 16...

...Whenever political columnists fret about the possibility of a convention that will not be decided by the primaries, they say it will be a "brokered" convention...

...I recall hearing a few years ago about a similar success with a program of service in hospital emergency rooms as an alternative to jail for drunk drivers...

...This meant vacations, like most of the things that prove your good taste back home, were costing lots of money...

...Three years ago Lutgen strangled his wife in front of his two daughters...

...Why does it have to be brokered, with all the cynical deal-making that word implies...

...Cheap meant you didn't have to be greedy...

...We're really getting creamed," one congressional aide told The Washington Post...

...The result has been that of the 300 offenders who have made the court-ordered visits, only one has been arrested again...

...I've taken it and I'm not sure!' "Oh, you know," chimed in one of her former classmates...

...He was the only Republican candidate in 1940 with enough sense to realize that the Nazis posed a bit of a problem for the rest of us on this planet...

...Polly Toynbee, in her article on Margaret Thatcher in this issue, argues that men and women are more alike than different...

...The low status of the education school is also explained by the quality of its faculty and curriculum...

...In my continuing search for any indication that Americans are at last beginning to free themselves from the greed that has dominated the past two decades, I have become skilled at extracting hopeful signs from the slimmest evidence...

...He would take stands on the need for worker ownership and new taxes, and for reducing social security payments to the affluent, prompting a spate of articles saying how brave he was...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS When Florida police finally caught up with a speeding Audi, they found an attractive 32-year-old woman in the driver's seat...

...Two years ago a municipal court judge in Sacramento, California, depressed by the carnage caused by drunk drivers, decided to require them to visit the morgue to view the bloody remains of victims of drunk driving...

...I see no hope for quick reform of the teachers colleges—major change will take decades because of all those tenured geezers with their audio-visual displays...

...There have been only a handful of complaints and thousands of grateful compliments...

...Petersburg Times, drank a pint of gin a day...

...All they have to do is send a few tanks 30 miles from Czechoslovakia to a small plant in West Germany...

...Maury Maverick, the son of the great liberal congressman and a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, became curious about the religious composition of the 220 marines killed in the bombing of their barracks in Beirut in 1983...

...An alcoholic who misses 389 days of work deserves our sympathy and our help in overcoming his addiction, but he does not deserve a government job...

...What would be their reaction if a similar derogatory term were applied to black males...

...Recovery rates are dramatically better in such cases than when the patient is ignored...

...During the same period the number of administrators has increased by 400 percent...

...So that's why I'm hopeful again...

...Few laws are enacted or enforced that violate the mutual interests of these members of the permanent party...

...Remember that old geezer with his audio-visual displays...

...If Uncle George is in a coma and you're in the hospital room with him, don't start talking about how you never could stand the old bastard or about that Mediterranean cruise you're going to take when he kicks the bucket and you inherit his fortune...

...Well, for one thing, the owner and the driver were not the same person...

...For years the PSA flight attendants have tried to relieve the burden of air travel by spicing their routine announcements with humor...

...Their taxes have gone up, and by substantial amounts, almost doubling in many cases...

...But the school of education accepts two out of three applicants...

...Yet he's being punished by this whopping financial loss...

...There is a simple solution to this injustice...

...Speaking of Bruce Babbitt, my son, Christian, who campaigned for him in Iowa, has two explanations for his defeat that do not involve blaming the public or Babbitt's awkwardness on the tube...

...And it can produce the best candidate and a lot of excitement to boot...

...If we are going to save the public schools we must stop hiring teachers from the teachers colleges and instead hire bright liberal arts graduates...

...Washington is filled with such couples, in which the wife might work at Commerce or Justice and her husband on the Hill or for a trade association or a new sweekly...

...Now California has enacted a law to encourage morgue visits or emergency-room service throughout the state...

...I agree, but here is one difference that has been true at least of the women I have known best, those of my own generation, and that I think is important...

...This is in part because of the quality of people who are attending education schools, or teachers colleges, as they are sometimes called...

...According to a recent study by the University of Chicago, there is a good chance that the old boy can hear everything you're saying...

...Petersburg, Florida...

...There is doubtless some amalgam of the best qualities of Dukakis, Gore, and Jackson that would make a preferable candidate, but in a world where we have to choose one human being, Babbitt is still my man...

...People would go to court only if they are confident that they are in the right...

...For the others, I fear it represents further proof that the affluent are not doing their part in the defense of their country...

...But there is little dispute over what goes at the bottom: nursing and education...

...What's that...

...During the years 1980-83, he missed 389 days of work...

...I can't believe it...

...It's abolishing the jokes...

...When Walter Mondale asked, "Where's the beef...

...Robertson sued McCloskey for having alleged that Robertson used his father's political influence to avoid combat in Korea...

...If McCloskey was telling the truth—and knowing him, it is hard for me to imagine that he was not—he did nothing wrong...

...But by then he had forced McCloskey to incur $400,000 in legal fees...

...In libel suits— and for that matter, in all other civil cases—the loser, or the person who drops his suit, like Robertson did, should pay the legal fees of the other party...

...So what's USAir doing...

...There is now a waiting list of more than one thousand people who want to enter the detoxification and rehabilitation programs operated by the District...

...For the law school it's one in nine, for the medical school, it's one in 18...

...A survey by the American Council of Education found that this year's college freshmen who planned to become teachers were the least likely of all college students to have been "A" students in high school...

...Hart kept pulling out a book he had recently written and saying, "Here it is...

...Maybe if people will begin putting off the Ritz, they'll stop thinking they have to make big bucks and stop respecting only those who do...

...Suppose war breaks out and the Russians want to halt our missile production...

...The result was that Iowa voters, instead of being impressed by the favorable publicity, were knowingly telling one another that it was nothing more than the expected media boomlet...

...What is depressing is that it was much less for the groups that tend to be most affluent—there were no Unitarians, Quakers, or Jews, and only two Presbyterians and two Episcopalians...

...They, by the way, are people who came here legally—with visas...

...This may be the first time journalists themselves have provided the advance spin control for their colleagues...

...Robertson, however, did not let the case come to trial, dropping the suit at the last minute...

...But in the 1950s and 1960s, people traveled with Arthur Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day under their arms...

...Ferguson, according to the St...

...The judge reasoned that all federal agencies should make reasonable accommodation for their "handicapped" workers, including alcohol and drug addicts...

...It is important that we keep talking to patients who are in comas...

...After all, that was the original idea of conventions...

...Pat Robertson's libel suit against Paul McCloskey, the former congressman, demonstrates how libel law can be used to persecute those who tell the truth...

...Consider the case of Clarence Ferguson, an employee of the National Marine Fisheries Service in St...

...Last month, James Fallows wrote in these pages about the tendency of American anticommunists, like Pat Buchanan, to see the world in terms of who is Red and who is not and to ignore the differences caused by tribe, race, religion, and nationality...

...Washington's permanent government—the bureaucrats, congressional staff, lobbyists, and journalists who stay as the politicians come and go—usually is skilled at taking care of its own interests...

...2 Drug Users Rejected For Help Try Suicide" That was a headline in a recent edition of The Washington Post...

...Gary Hart did something similar in 1984...

...Beside her was a 27-year-old man who was married to the car's owner...

...But they slipped up in the case of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which, while kinder to the poor and the rich, is wicked in its impact on the twowageearner family with incomes of $120,000 or so...

...Since the 1967-68 school year, the number of pupils in the schools of Kanawha County, West Virginia, has declined 40 percent...

...The jokes may not be the greatest—as the plane for Los Angeles taxis toward the runway, the attendant might say, "Welcome to Flight 302 to Seattle," and as a gasp arises from the passengers, quickly confess she's only kidding—but they do relieve the tedium of being trapped in the cabin...

...Although some of them were real dragons, on the whole they were much less likely than men to have chips on their shoulders or to indulge in other such macho nonsense...

...What happened during the 1970s and 1980s is that Americans came to view travel as a way to prove their taste by patronizing the glitziest hotels and restaurants...

...Tivo cocaine abusers had sought help in kicking their habit but had been refused admission by the city's drug treatment facilities and by St...

...They're all moaning...

...When one thinks of the hierarchy of a university," Alexander W. Astin, a professor of education at UCLA, recently told the Los Angeles Times, "there might be some dispute over what to put at the top: law, medicine, physics...

...Delegates can simply vote for the person they think will make the best president...

...Because most public schools require degrees in education...

...Now a federal judge has given him the right to get his job back and has awarded him $150,000 in back pay...

...It wasn't enough to go to London to see the city, you had to stay at Claridges and dine at the Connaught Grill...

...Remember Wendell Willkie...

...Are such graduates willing to teach...

...If this kind of thing continues, we're going to have to open a Good News Branch for our Only in California Department...

...I wish the sexual revolution had consisted of men imitating women in this respect instead of women becoming Margaret Thatchers...

...For the Quaker, the avoidance of military service may be a matter of conscience...

...My fantasy is that the public will awaken to Bruce Babbitt's superiority and there will be chants from the gallery like the "We-WantWillkie" of 1940—I can hear people shouting "Br-u-u-u-ce," the way the kids do at a Springsteen concert...

...The acceptance rate for Harvard's undergraduate college is one applicant in six...

...In the midst of a severe nursing shortage, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is going to deport qualified and experienced foreign nurses...

...They are indeed— just ask the people who do the hiring at the best private schools...

...The Russians and the Chinese are now having to face the fact that their troubles with the Armenians and the Tibetans are not caused by the capitalist imperialists but by the same forces the Pat Buchanans ignore...

...Which audio-visual displays...

...Launch a thousand nuclear missiles to destroy our factories...

...That's a good question," she said, laughing...

...He wanted to be praised for his position papers but not explain his positions...

...One is that Babbitt's moment in the media sun in January, having been predicted and impliedly discounted by David Broder and Paul Taylor of The Washington Post, was then subjected to self-conscious put-down even by reporters who liked Babbitt...

...After he was released from prison, he was awarded custody of the girls...

...That would describe most of them...

...This is the rule in England and should be the law here...

...And it was the need for all that money that inspired all that greed...

...Finally, both the driver and the passenger were assistant state's attorneys...

...Finally he was fired...

...For another, the driver was nude below the waist...

...Ann Roark of the Times reports this conversation between two former education students: "Social Foundations of Education," said one graduate from Cal State Dominguez Hills, reading from a list of courses that she had taken one year before...

...Unfortunately, the American Bar Association is sure to oppose such a triumph of common sense because its members know it would cut the amount of litigation in half, which means we wouldn't need so many lawyers and those who were left wouldn't get as rich...

...Elizabeth's Hospital, after which they both tried to kill themselves...

...It just happens to make all of the high-purity silicon we use in our missile guidance systems...

...This finding has a serious side...

...And his come-from-behind victory, from just a handful of votes on the first ballot to a majority on the fifth, produced the most fascinating convention of my lifetime...

...But the details of "it" were seldom explored either in his campaign commercials or in his debates with the other candidates...

...If you weren't quite persuaded by Judge Lois Forer's article last month on the need for orphanages to care for children in cases where the parents are an undesirable alternative, consider the children of James Lutgen of East Dubuque, Illinois...

...Their professional training could be supplied by apprenticeship with the best of the experienced teachers for classroom practice and instruction in methodology...

...Sophisticated political writers have taken to describing the electoral power of the southern white male as "the Bubba vote...

...It can be argued that some of the whites describe themselves as Bubbas, but that is no better excuse than Richard Pryor finally concluded that he had for using the term nigger just because some blacks applied it to other blacks...

...Then why don't they apply to the public schools...

...We're throwing them out—just because their visas are expiring—at the same time we have a program of amnesty for illegal aliens...

...One of the more troubling developments in the civil service movement during this century has been its increasing preoccupation with the interests of the employee as opposed to those of the public...

...But his television commercials would quote only the praise for his courage and not explain his stands, which needed explaining if the voters were going to rally to his cause...

...Then there would be no more nuisance suits...

...What's unusual, you ask...

...Ironically the communists have the same problem...

...What do they have to do...

...There are occasional exceptions to the truth embodied in Big is Bad and Small is Beautiful, but the takeover of PSA, the California commuter airline, by USAir does not appear to be one of them...

...While journalists often provide us with after-the-fact interpretations, heretofore it has been only the candidates and their aides who have attempted to control the media "spin" to be put on a coming political event...

...The list he got from the Navy shows 78 Catholics and 64 Baptists...

...And which old geezer...

...But lest you shed too many tears, consider what the aide said next: "This means we'll have to borrow the money for our trip to Europe...

...The latest example is the spring travel section in The New York Times of March 6 with headlines such as "More With Less: Putting Off the Ritz" and "The Grand Hotel goes out and the station buffet comes in...