TILTING AT WINDMILLS
TILTING AT WINDMILLS If you want to understand how the budget gets inflated, consider that the new Air Force One and its backup each are designed to carry 1,953 meals. This has required...
...For the Americans, work was eighth...
...If they don't like what the government is doing they can stop buying the bonds that finance the deficit...
...While it costs $25,000 a year to keep the average criminal in prison, the crimes he commits after release cost society $430,000...
...The lawyer then waited three years but did not receive his fee...
...Of course...
...Compare cigarettes to what is supposed to be the most addictive substance around...
...He could have received $7,500 for the appearance...
...This kind of thinking lies behind most of the items in the federal budget...
...The Israeli drone worked...
...The best way to end corruption in the Pentagon is to forbid military retirees from working for military contractors...
...It is the speed and the red-tape cutting involved in his acquisition for the Navy of the unmanned drone aircraft manufactured by Israel...
...Why were so many parents suddenly so enchanted with this previously rare name...
...As things stand now, far too many officers spend half their days thinking about how to position themselves for a good job with McDonnell Douglas or Martin Marietta when they retire...
...I tried to stop...
...Of all the nightmares about what the deficit can do to us, one of my worst concerns is the bondholders...
...Speaking of the Post, its customary generosity of spirit toward its competition was again illustrated on July 9 j under the headline, "Post Wins 28 Newspaper Design Awards...
...In the case of my new book, Tilting at Windmills, my greatest regret has to do with public school teachers...
...Thus, even though people knew that years of smoking could cause lung cancer, many of them thought smoking was something they could stop anytime and thus avoid long-term risks to their health...
...But there is one thing Lehman is being criticized for that should instead have earned him high praise...
...The solution is to keep the best teachers and principals where they are and pay them a lot more...
...Among the Indochinese to whom we are indebted, we owe the most to the Hmong tribesmen of Laos, who sided with us in the war and are therefore blacklisted by the communist Pathet Lao regime that now rules Laos...
...I think he is going to win the election...
...The victim would be compensated, but only the amount he really needs, which in this case probably would have been less than $1 million instead of $4 million...
...Nevertheless, the gap between the two figures is dramatic enough that I suspect that this is another liberal myth that is ready for burial...
...In the meetings, the participants are usually preoccupied with impressing one another—and their superiors...
...The story showed no awareness of such key facts as the superiority of the Israeli drone and its relative inexpensiveness or of the sad story of the Army's attempt to develop its own drone...
...If he was not aware of relevant background, why was Pichirallo assigned to the story...
...But then you found out that the reason the sweet old lady had had to hire the lawyer was that she and her husband had neglected to file tax returns for several years...
...We said we would stand by them, that they could count on us...
...The rest of the fellows will be at the Breckenridge Hilton in the Colorado Rockies for the Interdiscipline Ski Conference in February...
...This means they are going to lean over backwards to be tender to defense contractors when it is their duty to lean over backwards to be tough...
...Sounds good...
...The brochure promises "6 Day 'Ski the Summit Passes' lift tickets," "beautifully decorated guest rooms" with mini-refrigerators, wet bars, and "sweeping views of the mountains...
...To the extent Mrs...
...Even those of us who, like the editors of this magazine, feel we should never have sent troops in the first place and were right to withdraw, must acknowledge our debt to those left behind...
...It was not until the sixth paragraph of the story that the reader learned, "The Washington Times won the most design awards this year, 38...
...Indeed, this should be done with all licensing groups because of their natural tendency toward self-protective guild-ism...
...Wrong, he was given a meaningless bureaucratic role as assistant superintendent of schools in the Orangeburg District...
...Now that I've had kind words for public school teachers and even for three doctors, I might as well go all the way and say something nice about John Lehman, the former secretary of the Navy, who has long been one of my favorite targets, and who, along with his friend, Melvyn R. Paisley, is now being rewarded with the ignominy he has so long deserved...
...Four million dollars, however, seems more than will be needed to take care of the child...
...How much is left under the control of the Filipinos...
...Of the $3.5 billion of U.S...
...The alternative was for the Navy to develop its own...
...If you have talked to the Americans who worked with them during the war, you know that we owe them that help...
...Since this study was performed under the auspices of the Republican Department of Justice, its findings cannot be considered above suspicion...
...The girl's name that was dropped from the top ten this year was good old Elizabeth...
...When they were sued, more than a hundred nurses who had worked with them paid $2,400 to buy an advertisement in The Washington Post expressing their regard and support for the doctors...
...Why do Graham and Sulzberger and Neuharth even need to be prodded to do the right thing...
...Soon after I started smoking in 1945, I happened to come across the only publication that was exposing the dangers of tobacco at that time, George Seldes's In Fact...
...Roughly 40 thousand of them escaped to refugee camps in Thailand and now need to be resettled...
...But I neglected to mention another reason good teachers don't go into the public schools —at least the urban ones...
...Not only was he not paid, the widow never made an offer to pay half or one-third or even to discuss the matter...
...And most of the other names in the female top ten are not above suspicion...
...And it was cheap...
...Nurses know better than anyone else when doctors are good and when they're bad, so this was an impressive tribute...
...Well, you could be sitting there all by yourself...
...Another reason good teachers prefer private schools is the overstaffed, third-rate bureaucracies that run many public school systems and that seem to be dedicated to driving intelligent teachers around the bend...
...But people tend to forget to look at what the money finally accomplishes...
...I feared some kind of snobbery was involved and was relieved to discover this year that Jason had finally dropped from the top ten list of children's names, having been replaced by good, solid, old-fashioned Matthew...
...I have recently had extensive dealings with an organization that seems to spend almost all of its time in meetings, leaving its employees only a few minutes a day to actually do something...
...You're right...
...Suppose you belong to the Columbus, Ohio, bar association or the medical society of Franklin County (where Columbus is located) and you want to get together with members of both professions for a program of continuing medical and legal education...
...But I want to congratulate him for having consistently displayed the ability to rise to the demands of the occasion— from the first debate in Houston through his acceptance speech in Atlanta...
...Since we can't rely on the current doctor-dominated licensing boards to be tough enough, we should put a majority of lay members on the boards...
...The New Yorker and Reader's Digest and the television networks all have proved that you can succeed without cigarette advertising...
...Few lead sentences could have been more predictable than this one from a recent Associated Press story: "In the wake of the drowning of a recruit, the Navy has reviewed its training program and concluded that there were no major problems...
...No two groups are more sensitive to the other's faults or less sensitive to their own...
...Now comes the National Institute of Justice with a study that says the exact opposite...
...Aquino has spent it, has she done so wisely...
...Our government encouraged the Vietnamese to resist communism...
...There is good news for all of us who have been compelled to sit through one boring meeting after another...
...One of the more miserable aspects of the life of a writer is waking up in the middle of the night, after your book or article has gone to press, realizing that there was something you didn't say that you •most definitely should have said...
...In June, under a headline warning that crack is "a nearly unbreakable habit," The New York Times published an article that said, "Most people who got started with crack were addicted in six months to a year...
...We have an obligation to these people...
...One of the great articles of liberal faith is that it costs more to keep people in jail than it does to let them go free...
...This has required the construction of a new kitchen at Andrews Air Force Base that is capable of turning out 4,000 meals...
...How much of the unspent money reverts to the U.S...
...aid committed to the Philippines last year, more than $2 billion remains unused, writes Marc Lerner of The Washington Times...
...Then we pulled out...
...There is such a satisfying feeling when Congress passes emergency aid for a needy nation and the president signs it with a flourish...
...He is, on principle, refusing to do cigarette ads...
...Tax deductible...
...The solution is to take malpractice suits out of the courts and handle them on a no-fault basis...
...The need for the drone had been demonstrated when Navy planes were shot down over Lebanon on missions that could have been performed by pilotless aircraft...
...Why, one wonders, can't all those brave, tough, reporters who work for big newspapers take a similar stand and tell the Kay Grahams and Punch Sulzbergers and Al Neuharths that they aren't going to work for an enterprise that publishes cigarette advertising...
...They are highly respected...
...Still it is possible for even the best to make mistakes and this may have been one...
...And the sad fact is that the people who are supposed to scrutinize budget requests—from senators and congressmen and their staffs to the OMB to, in this case, the Pentagon superiors of the Air Force personnel who did the requesting—seldom ask such simple questions as, "Has Air Force One ever gone as much as one day when it wasn't in a place where food could be obtained...
...The need for the meals is based on a "worst case scenario" under which the Air Force estimates that it might be necessary to feed the 93 people aboard each plane for seven days...
...A recent review of studies on brainstorming," reports The New York limes, "found that on average brainstorming groups did less well than the same number of people pooling ideas they came up with on their own...
...One was clubbed repeatedly with a baseball bat and was hospitalized in critical condition and in danger of losing the sight in one of his eyes...
...A warm-hearted concern for the plight of another country—or sometimes an AID bureaucrat's desire to unload funds fast as the fiscal year draws to a close—causes money to be wasted because we insist on sending it before projects for which it could be sensibly used have been identified...
...However, my delight in this development quickly turned into gloom when I considered the latest developments in feminine nomenclature...
...for the Western Europeans, it was fourth...
...In making the point that private schools in Washington, D.C...
...This is a man who may not do anything great but who is certainly not going to do anything silly, stupid, or criminal, and that is a profound relief after the past eight years . Referring to Rose Cipollone, the New Jersey woman whose death from lung cancer inspired a recent suit against a tobacco company, a defense attorney said, "She knew this bad habit was not good for her," as if this excused the company from liability...
...for the Japanese, second...
...I saw this kind of thing happen repeatedly when I was in the foreign affairs bureaucracy in the 1960s...
...But that's not a good excuse...
...Certainly those who have had the gumption to risk death from Thai pirates and North Vietnamese gunboats as they escaped deserve to have us open our doors to them...
...I was persuaded...
...Until the public schools and the police act decisively to end this kind of violence, we can't expect anyone but fools or saints to teach in ghetto schools...
...Or the administrative job actually consists of papershuffling and other phony forms of make-work...
...A hotel meeting room in Columbus or one of its suburbs...
...Treasury...
...I doubt that Michael Dukakis has the imagination to advocate any bold program, but I can't help hoping that he'll seize the opportunity to take advantage of the current wave of public concern about the greenhouse effect and the polluted oceans to propose a worldwide effort to do whatever has to be done to save the environment from disaster...
...So in this case Lehman was right...
...Three Washington physicians recently settled a malpractice suit for $4 million...
...Sometimes our tendency to assume the worst about there, although richly justified by experience, leads to unfairness...
...If for some reason the assignment had to be made to a reporter who didn't have the necessary background, why wasn't he given an editor who knew the relevant facts...
...Sounds like they must be bad doctors, doesn't it...
...have better teachers than the public schools, even though they pay lower salaries, I was trying to persuade the public schools to open their doors to the talented liberal arts graduates who make the private schools better but usually can't be hired by the public schools because they do not have the education degrees that most public schools require...
...It was replaced by Samantha...
...In just one week this spring, there were four assaults on New York City public school teachers...
...Thirty Vietnamese refugees, depressed by slim prospects of resettlement in third countries, have attempted suicide in Thai camps in the last few months," according to a Reuters report from Bangkok...
...A deserving man is rewarded, right...
...Lerner deserves praise for coming up with this story, but there are a few crucial questions he left unanswered...
...Not long ago I clipped an article from the Indianapolis Star with a headline that seemed to promise persuasive evidence for my conviction that the members of the bar are a trifle too concerned with material reward: "Widow's home to be auctioned to pay longstanding attorney's fee" For the first eight paragraphs of the story, including all that appeared on the first page, the facts recounted were sympathetic to the widow, and the reader who got no further would have assumed here was another outrage committed by a greedy lawyer...
...I failed, as I failed each of the score of times I tried to quit over the next 25 years...
...The trouble is that they are mostly conservative fellows, meaning that they will pressure any government, Democratic or Republican, to follow conservative policies...
...I finally quit not in a triumph of character but because of a serious illness that killed my desire to smoke for long enough to get me over the addictive hump...
...Then it seemed as if every other infant I met turned out to be a Jason...
...The problem is that everyone tends to forget about impressing the world with real accomplishment by the organization...
...Yet on July 28 The Washington Post ran an article by Joe Pichirallo that strongly suggested Lehman had done wrong and was illustrated by photographs of Lehman and Paisley, even though the evidence of wrongdoing or of Paisley's involvement in it was slight...
...They include Ashley, Amanda, Stephanie, and Nicole, and the most suspect of all, Tiffany...
...I would urge that most of the lay members on medical boards should be lawyers and vice versa...
...The catch is that the skills that made them good teachers and good principals often aren't the skills needed in the administrative offices...
...The private company will ultimately pay the penalty as that cash flow dries up, but in government the meetings go on and on and on and on...
...It seems to me that it is the addictive quality of cigarettes on which plaintiffs' lawyers should focus in these lung cancer cases...
...It may be that they would not actually carry out their threat to withdraw from the bond market, but the threats themselves may be enough to influence what the government does...
...And, although it will be paid not by the three doctors but by their insurers, the ultimate cost of malpractice insurance is reflected in the medical bills we all pay...
...First, Nigeria plans to prohibit all cigarette advertising by the end of this year—every nation should do the same...
...One of the great problems in public education today is that outstanding principals—and teachers—can usually attain the salary level they deserve only if they become part of the bureaucracy...
...Until the late sixties, of the several thousand males I had met in my life, only two had been named Jason...
...S peaking of tobacco, there are two very heartening developments I must report to you...
...Worst of all, what they fear the most is inflation, so they can be counted upon to oppose policies that run even remote risks of being inflationary even when such policies might be desperately needed to stimulate the economy...
...Where would you choose to go...
...The answer to the problem is for the public to elect first-rate people to local school boards and for legislatures to give these boards the power to get rid of administrators who do nothing but get in the way...
...It is fear—fear of violence...
...I bet you're now saying the next thing he's going to do is say something nice about lawyers...
...We haven't said many kind words about Michael Dukakis...
...Such organizations are common in government and among corporations whose previous leadership has built enough cash flow to spare present employees from bottom-line worries...
...They aren't...
...Recently a Roper survey asked Americans, Japanese, and Western Europeans to rank the most important aspects of their lives...
...The United States Army had been wasting immense sums in following just such a course— developing its own drone, the Aquila, which turned out not to work at all well...
...For a variety of cultural reasons, they need more help than other refugees...
...The cigarette manufacturers did not warn the smoker of the danger of addiction, so that even after the Surgeon General's "dangerous to your health" warning began to appear, the companies still were not telling people they shouldn't start something they couldn't stop...
...Well, I became addicted to cigarettes within six weeks...
...The point is that she could know the habit was bad and know that she should stop but not be able to because she was addicted...
...To make sure such a system is conscionable, there would have to be a way of punishing doctors who make repeated mistakes—they should be deprived of their licenses...
...He has maintained an air of calm and reasonableness that has to be reassuring to the people he will lead for the next four years...
...Timothy Noah tells me that the South Carolina principal he praised in these pages has been promoted...
...Second, when the modeling agency for which Jesse Holmes works called to ask him to audition for a cigarette ad for Benson and Hedges, he refused...
...A baby was left helpless, unable to see, speak, walk or feed himself...
...It's because they feel another pressure, the pressure to maximize profits...
...Charles Peters...
Vol. 20 • September 1988 • No. 8
