TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...That this case might be just the tip, so to speak, of an iceberg is suggested by the fact that the audit covered only credit card receipts and did not include gratuities received in the form of cash...

...I found it buried in a New York Times story about the son of a high Chinese official who is attending Drexel University in Philadelphia...

...Because they don't know many black people, when they feel they have to choose one to serve the purpose of political tokenism, they can rarely rely on personal knowledge or the thorough checking out that a network of mutual friends makes possible...

...The second, third, and fourth leading dispensers of honoraria are the National Association of Broadcasters, the American Bankers Association, and the American Trucking Association...

...During my late teens and early twenties, there was no subject to which I devoted more earnest study than the identification of evidence that a young woman might share my interest in physical affection...

...Indeed, the welfare system and the social norms in inner-city communities tilt in the other direction...

...One is that their contempt for social programs meant that they didn't care about the quality of people they assigned to run HUD...

...Relatively generous rewards may be needed to turn the situation around...

...Because it does not want the homeless...

...It also covered only one restaurant...

...that it was unfair to expect struggling young wage earners to pay for other's Caribbean cruises through social security taxes that had to be paid regardless of how impoverished the worker might be...

...The people who are in make it hard for talented outsiders to get hired...

...If you are the first, then you are a parasite...

...Thatcher and her government don't want them...

...The other characteristic of the country club conservatives that was a factor in creating the disaster at HUD is their ignorance of blacks...

...Who are the liquor companies targeting as consumers...

...It was not an area of scientific precision, but through dedicated effort I nevertheless developed a set of clues that were reasonably helpful...

...I'm delighted to report that I now have an ally, Isabel V. Sawhill, a poverty scholar at The Urban Institute...

...In economy class the seats are too close together...

...You start to bend over to grab your ankles in the recommended position...

...The latest cycle of this selfishness at work is the great protest movement among the affluent elderly, liberal and conservative alike, against the medicare surtax...

...What we need is not more judges but a Hong Kong work ethic on the bench...

...Also, it would seem more than coincidental that Caesareans are, according to a Los Angeles study, 73 percent more likely to be performed on women with incomes above $30,000 a year than on women earning less than $11,000...

...For congressmen, the closest legal equivalent to straight cash bribes is the speaking fee or honorarium, as our legislative statesmen prefer to call it...

...Such tailoring of contract specifications is a key technique of government contracting officers who want to take care of their friends...

...The Me Decade has now lasted 20 years...

...So Kennedy, with Taylor as his chairman of the Joint Chiefs, significantly strengthened our conventional forces in the early sixties...

...Don't pet them...

...Younger readers will almost certainly not know what I'm talking about...

...On May 9, the publication sent reporters into all 45 full-time courtrooms of the New York State Supreme Court felony trial division...

...For a second round of bidding, the CHP changed the contract specifications to require that the successful bidder have "recent experience as a TV newsperson" and "a history of frequent interaction with the California Highway Patrol or other police agencies...

...Perhaps the judges were busy writing opinions in their chambers...

...It all seemed so thoroughly sensible, yet the unintended consequence was to bequeath to Lyndon Johnson an army capable of massive intervention in Vietnam...

...You can't do it...

...Colonel Higgins sacrificing his to the cause of peace...

...Because mutuality of enthusiasm was important in those situations, I must confess that I would sometimes profess an admiration for the Arab sage that I did not truly feel...

...Today, the figure is one in four...

...But I noticed there weren't many hands clapping when I called on the affluent to do their fair share of service in the armed forces or organizations like the Peace Corps...

...Now it's going in to attempt a dangerous landing...

...Another indication that greed may be motivating physicians is that, according to Jane Brody of The New York Times, "resident physicians who are salaried are much less likely to operate than private obstetricians who receive a fee for services...

...I am indebted to it and to two of its writers, Gary Webb and Pat Dillon, for many of the facts in the next two items of the column...

...The other Mercury News article was a column about the town of Santa Cruz by Pat Dillon...

...You hear the shouted command "Brace...

...The correspondent has, it seems, been paid for several years to provide such instruction for the patrol...

...In the summer 1989 issue of The Public Interest, she recommends a similar program, observing: "There is currently no real reward...for those teenagers who defer childbearing...

...If you're curious as to why the press has not done more to expose our underworked judiciary, you should realize that reporters assigned to the courts long ago figured out that the fiction of a full day of cases being tried was a handy cover for hours spent at the race track, hanging out in a bar, or writing that novel...

...Consider the hundreds of such establishments in cities like Los Angeles and New York, and the thousands elsewhere throughout the country, and you begin to understand the dimensions of the problem and of the revenue that could be gained from tough tax enforcement...

...It just might have something to do with the fact that the operation produces about $2,000 more income for the doctor and hospital than the normal vaginal birth...

...Brace...

...But I found no guide more surely reliable than a high regard for the works of Kahlil Gibran...

...Its policy, says Pat Dillon, is to treat the homeless like stray dogs: "Discourage them...

...Navy ships aren't welcome because the city does not want to be "part of the Pentagon machine...

...It refused to host the Miss California contest because it is sexist...

...Yet it jailed Sandra Loranger because she fed the homeless...

...I was part of a mostly liberal panel of speakers who were generously applauded when we adhered to the conventionally progressive line...

...There are probably at least 50 fancy restaurants in Washington where waiters receive similarly lucrative income from tips and are under equally strong temptation not to confide in the IRS, especially where the hard-totrace cash portion is concerned...

...He wrote in his high school year book," she went on to say, "his goal was 'to always make my family proud of me.' He succeeded...

...They have just the kind of dynamic energy Britain needs...

...Why...

...It was used as a turkey farm, and when that happens to a government agency—as it has over the years with the General Services Administration and the Small Business Administration—the result tends to be an agency run by knaves and fools...

...You expect a conservative to be selfish—selfishness is what he believes makes the world go round—but liberals should be embarrassed by their own hypocrisy...

...All the people out there who are trapped in meaningless moneyrich careers should ask themselves: What would my wife or husband be able to say if I died today...

...Sometimes it seems the selfishness is just getting worse and worse...

...The danger, of course, was that you would always be forced to give in to the enemy in disputes that didn't justify nuclear war...

...Forty-two percent started work after 10 a.m...

...But a few individuals continue to show a better way: Mickey Leland giving his life to the cause of famine relief...

...While Eisenhower could have sent only a division or two, Johnson was able to commit 500,000 men by the end of 1965...

...But what fascinated me the most was the way the correspondent's contract with the police was renewed last year even though there was a lower bidder...

...They found that the average court was in session only 4 hours and 27 minutes a day...

...Number one is, of course, the Tobacco Institute...

...For one, the correspondent did not think he had done anything wrong...

...There is not enough room...

...Of the many explanations for the HUD scandal, two that have not received enough attention involve basic prejudices of the country club conservatives who dominated the Reagan administration...

...Thirty years ago, only one baby in 20 was delivered by Caesarean...

...if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert...

...The tax finances catastrophic health care, which all the elderly want but are indignant about because the wealthiest 40 percent of them are taxed to pay for it...

...Since World War II, the Hong Kongers have created one of the economic miracles of the world...

...Since there is substantial evidence that the figure could be much lower without threatening an increase in infant mortality and since the Caesarean poses a risk of death to the mother that is two to four times higher than in normal birth, why has this form of surgery increased so dramatically...

...But Mrs...

...It seems that of Drexel's 110 full-time graduate students in electrical and computer engineering, 80 are foreigners...

...A Tokyo apartment-for-rent guide called Apaman has a special symbol that means "Foreigners Allowed...

...Don't make eye contact...

...This is obviously racist...

...Sixty-two percent spent less than five hours in session...

...Webb tells about a correspondent who covers state government for KOVR-TV in Sacramento and who was paid $25,000 last year by the California Highway Patrol to teach CHP officers how to deal with the press, including "how to make the CHP look good" and "how to take control" of an interview...

...These are trial judges, not opinionwriting appellate judges...

...Don't feed them...

...Here are a couple of clues...

...They'll leave your doorstep and won't come back...

...If you dine at the Palm Restaurant, a favorite of Washington lobbyists, there's a good chance the waiter won't just be serving you—he'll also be serving time...

...In the 1950s, Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, relied on the threat of "massive retaliation"—with nuclear weapons—to deter our enemies...

...It is also quite foolish...

...The pilot has warned you and the other passengers that the aircraft is in trouble...

...Not very likely...

...Many of them want to move to England before the Chinese Communists take over in 1997...

...They have become so accustomed to the rest of the population paying for their benefits that they feel selfrighteous about it even though most of them are better off than most of the people they want to finance their benefits...

...Thanks to a new book, Respectfully Quoted, published by the Congressional Research Service, I now know that he is the father of my favorite quotation: "Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country...

...3.25 million of the people of Hong Kong are British citizens...

...All they can ask is does he look okay and does he have respectable credentials...

...They were even less pleased when I suggested that the affluent should not receive social security beyond what they and their employer had paid for plus interest...

...Santa Cruz is fashionably progressive...

...assignment, even though he was well aware of the danger, "because he believed he could be useful—that he could help and that he was needed...

...One, for example, who asked when she would hear about her application was told "probably never...

...For those of you who share my concern about the shortage of the engineering students we need to regain this country's technological leadership, here's more evidence that our concerns are not baseless...

...I am reminded by the recent publication of a biography of Maxwell Taylor that when I was deciding whether to support John Kennedy in 1960, I asked him whether he agreed with Taylor's theory of the flexible response...

...No court was in session more than six hours and 35 minutes...

...Three out of the four were treated rudely...

...It chose a socialist as its mayor...

...After "liberty and justice for all" come two new words: "including corporations...

...Charles Peters...

...One reason for the declining performance of government agencies is the declining quality of government employees...

...Manhattan Lawyer recently provided some hard evidence for those of us who have suspected a certain degree of exaggeration in the claims by chief justices and other distinguished jurists that the courts are overcrowded and judges overworked...

...Similar skill in drafting job descriptions is the basis of what is called "the Buddy system" in the civil service, under which the person who is already in makes sure that his friend is the outsider who gets hired...

...The truth is that most American judges have a soft life...

...There were several things that intrigued me in this story...

...It has announced itself to be a free port of Nicaragua...

...Recently Senator David Pryor dispatched four interns to find out just how difficult it was to get a job...

...I will explain...

...Several years ago I ran into a group of this kind in another California town, Santa Monica...

...It is a measure of the true regard the Japanese have for the rest of us on this planet that a recent typical page of the guide contains just three of these symbols out of 66 listings...

...Pierce passed both these tests, but he was a miserable failure on the job...

...Higgins says her husband accepted his U.N...

...Quite a few of the men," according to Susan White, one of the flight attendants on the DC-10 that crashed in Sioux City, "were unable to get into a brace position by leaning over and holding their Some years ago, hoping to halt the proliferation of adolescent welfare mothers, I proposed that we offer $5,000 in cash to each teenage girl who reaches adulthood without having had a child...

...Taylor—and Kennedy, who, I discovered, was a fan of flexible response—believed that we had to have enough conventional armed strength to deal with the disputes that were important but not so crucial as to require risking the destruction of the planet...

...In a recent survey, teenage boys of the Washington area said that their favorite ads were beer commercials...

...If she liked both to walk barefooted and not to wear a girdle, for instance, the situation could usually be deemed promising...

...But now it develops that if only I had studied his works more closely, my admiration might have been genuine...

...In San Jose, California, there are five times as many stores and bars selling alcoholic beverages in Hispanic as in Anglo areas...

...The virtue of the theory was that it meant low military spending because you really didn't need much in the way of an army or navy if you were going to rely on nukes...

...This is why the outstanding jobseeker who doesn't know anyone will be told he will "probably never" hear about his application...

...Eight of the Palm's waiters were recently convicted of cheating on their income tax, failing to let the IRS know about $145,000 in tips they had received...

...As veteran readers know, next to my hometown Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette, my favorite paper is The San Jose (California) Mercury News...