Tilting at Windmills

...As we have frequently pointed out, the federal bureaucracy grew under Ronald Reagan instead of dramatically decreasing, as he had promised...

...And then consider the fuzzy-cheeked incompetents who are regularly flying commuter planes into mountain sides...

...His limo had an emergency red light that flashed through town non-stop...

...Following the seminar on ethics, reads the announcement, "will be the UNC-DePaul basketball game...

...What was the agent thinking as the soldiers unlocked his cell...

...Law" encouraging bright people to go into the law where they aren't needed instead of having shows that glamorize the dedicated teachers and scientists and entrepreneurs and public servants that this country so desperately needs...

...The advance purchase airline ticket, the kind that must be used only on the date of the reservation or the discount will be lost, has become the latest threat to government efficiency...

...There was no good reason for the change...

...We weren't thinking about slaughter on the battlefield, we were just having a wonderful time singing...

...If we simply restored that tax to its old level, we would cut the deficit by $15 billion over the next four years...

...He can leave more dead bodies on the field with less remorse than any politician I ever knew...

...Women came to him for innocent hugs and kisses...

...This explanation was buried deep in a Washington Post article that headlined an almost meaningless revelation that "U.S...

...This tax was decreased in 1981 from $298,800 for an estate of $1 million to $153,000...

...So a book on how to protect your privacy will result in an invasion of it by junk mail...

...And where are the Mr...

...Back to the dreadful impact of "L.A...

...What we really want are competent pilots, regardless of age...

...One of the most conspicuous characteristics of the rich people I have known is their desire to avoid hassle...

...One congressional leader explained that the CIA is responsible for collecting human intelligence from agent networks and forwarding it through the CIA station chief to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia...

...Les Aspin missed the crucial last six days of the 1989 session because he, too, had such a ticket...

...Whatever else might be said about the eighties, one thing is clearly true...

...From LBJ: "John Connally doesn't have even the tiniest trace of compassion...

...But if they're Cronins or Hayneses, for Heaven's sake keep them...

...This approach pleases present employees because none of them will be fired...

...Since more than $50 billion in back taxes remain uncollected, the IRS obviously doesn't have the people to do the job...

...Smith...

...For them I have several suggestions: First, give it to entrepreneurs who are trying to create jobs, produce better products, and give better service...

...One wonders, however, why the brochure contains this paragraph: "Marriott Corporation, Executive Edge, and National Support Services and their officials and employees incur no liability for any consequential damages arising from the classes...

...There is no mechanism for sharing such intelligence, even when it bears on military matters, with the Pentagon" (emphasis added by The Washington Monthly...

...Such headlines became common during the eighties as American corporations undertook long-overdue surgery on their swollen bureaucracies...

...The person who tried to do the right thing in those days was fortified in his resolve by the sense that the good he did might be rewarded by the love of a Jean Arthur or a Donna Reed...

...Another, by Liz Carpenter: "It's a good thing John Connally wasn't at the Alamo...

...S peaking of It's A Wonderful Life, I can't think of any hero on television today that has the sense of duty to his fellow man that the Jimmy Stewart character had in that movie...

...In general, such freezes on new hiring are not a wise way to reduce staff...

...That's in New York alone...

...The 600 hymns in the new Presbyterian hymnal will not include "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

...AT&T Announces More Staff Cuts...

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

...The freeze is not...

...He'd be organizing Texans for Santa Anna...

...There will be shuttle buses before and after the game...

...troops unable to find Noriega...

...But suppose some of them are doing next to nothing all day while a person whose resignation creates one of the vacancies that won't be filled may have been doing something truly important...

...But no one cares enough to change the system...

...My guess is that many of them haven't even begun to think about the question...

...If democratic procedure had been observed, the two hymns would have surely been in the top ten selected by members of the church...

...Anyone who has taken that trip knows it is a lesson in humility that has nothing to do with race...

...So while his colleagues were wrestling with catastrophic care, budget reconciliation, and other major legislation, Aspin was lolling on the beaches of Hawaii...

...BEARING THE BURDEN OF BEING THE BLACK MAYOR OF THE WHITE MAN'S PLANTATION" was the headline of Courtland Milloy's column in The Washington Post on the Sunday after Marion Barry's arrest at the Vista Hotel...

...In December, I wrote about a top bureaucrat at the Federal Energy Management Agency, who, because he had such a ticket, left on vacation the day after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake...

...Certainly the opportunity to sing such rousers was more than a negligible factor in my climbing out of a warm bed on Sunday mornings to attend the First Presbyterian Church in Charleston, West Virginia...

...Anxious about your career...

...So you have to be concerned when you hear that it is continuing a freeze on hiring new employees that has already lasted 15 months...

...Could there be a connection between these two facts: (1) Pennsylvania has the highest auto insurance rates in the nation, and (2) Pennsylvania is one of only two states that pays for the insurance for its legislators' cars...

...Something else to whiten your knuckles the next time you're an airline passenger: After a fire caused by a dangerous chemical in the cargo hold of an American Airlines plane injured 16 people last year, the shipper admitted that he had put the same chemical on 11 previous flights...

...In it, Milloy, who is black, claimed that Barry was a victim of racism...

...Now I learn that Rep...

...For only $895, Executive Edge, whose brochure describes it as "Washington's premier Professional Image Program," offers a 10-session course that will not only teach you "5 ways to create a powerful business card" but also how to: * "Arrange your office as an arena of your executive gamesmanship...

...So you can understand the appeal of this announcement from the North Carolina School of Law: What's Better than Watching Tar Heel Basketball...

...But I can assure them that of the hundred or so kids who sang them with me at Sunday school, only one could possibly have been called militaristic...

...I go on at length about this because just as we are going to press with this issue, it has been announced that Dick Cheney plans to use a freeze to make personnel cuts at the Pentagon...

...For example, for a computer it took machinists and assemblers 16,381 hours to put together, E Systems billed the government for those hours plus 187,000 of support labor, including more than 25,000 hours of "management" time...

...Back to that Post story about how the CIA and the Pentagon don't share secrets...

...This deprives the hundreds of thousands of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who live in California of their fair day in court...

...This outrageous decision was made secretly by an 18-member committee...

...For the reader who is old enough to remember John Connally and who shares my distaste for the former governor who deserted the Democratic party to join the Nixon administration, there are some marvelous quotes about him in James Reston's new biography, The Life of John B. Connally...

...Why on earth would we need 320 in such a small country, or for that matter in any country...

...They expect their money to insulate them from the indignities the rest of us endure trying to hail a cab on Third Avenue or exchange a defective sweeper at Sears...

...We have "L.A...

...I can attest that the total effect of the movies of the thirties and forties was to engrave deep in my mind the conviction that the right girl would admire me, not if I made money but if I tried to be Mr...

...Charles Peters...

...Under a freeze, you don't fill a job, not because you have determined that it is useless but simply because it has become vacant...

...The Eden Press features books on how to protect your privacy...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS If you doubt that our attitudes have undergone considerable change in recent years, consider that the featured film on two leading cable movie channels on Christmas Eve was not It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol but Big, which beguilingly and with warm approval describes a sexual relationship between a mature woman and a male who, although temporarily overgrown, is only 13 years old...

...Here is what the Post's editors thought was less important than the possible sighting: "Some of the intelligence gaps in the Panama invasion represented a failure of the military to tap the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose network of agents in Panama had gathered information that was not available to the southern command...

...Ponder the dismaying fact that Captain Alfred Haynes, who made that miracle landing in Sioux City, will have to retire next year...

...Which reminds me of another -ism—age-ism...

...Stop worrying...

...Each participant is entitled to a ticket...

...Milloy's racism charge is based on the following evidence: "Inside the District Building, Barry was treated like a king, with a private elevator, cook and kitchen...

...The article ended with an account of the army's dramatic rescue of a CIA agent from a Panamanian jail during the invasion...

...According to The Wall Street Journal, the FAA has just three staff members working exclusively on hazardous materials enforcement...

...Troops May Have Seen Noriega Escape...

...Instead the author was indulged with the special treatment of having his column run across the top of an entire page of the first section...

...More than two-thirds of the state's 2,000 interpreters have either failed a competency test or have never been tested...

...The irony is that, because they do succeed in avoiding most of the hassles, the few that are inescapable tend to drive them around the bend...

...Why didn't at least one editor at the Post tell Milloy that this is what happens to every luminary, white or black, who leaves his suite in the executive branch to seek appropriations on Capitol Hill...

...Smiths that go to Washington to do good...

...But whenever that car crossed the geographical boundary known as Capitol Hill . . . . we could see people scrambling to open doors for members of Congress . . . But I was embarrassed to see Barry totally ignored when he walked into a government building . ." Barry, Milloy continued, actually had to beg for money "with his hat in his hand...

...Why were U.S...

...The fat remains...

...Select wine with authority...

...Don't put old Siwash in your will just because you went there, do it because Siwash has cut out the deadwood on its faculty and administration, emphasized good teaching, lowered tuition, and required its graduates to have mastered a common core of literature and history and science and mathematics...

...Smiths receive no such support...

...The prissy complain about the martial language of "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...

...They made the rich a lot richer...

...If this isn't racism, what is it...

...How else can you explain the stupid rule that requires airline pilots to retire at age 60...

...As a part of their continuing education program, North Carolina lawyers are required to take a course in legal ethics...

...Finally, I would remind Congress that to the extent these rich people don't dispose of their wealth, let's be sure the public gets it through a substantial estate tax...

...This is not the equal treatment that the Post should be giving blacks on its staff or in the community...

...One was that his "was the only known instance in recorded history of a rat swimming toward a sinking ship...

...One, recently uncovered by Senator Charles Grassley, is the "labor support" charged to contracts...

...To give you an idea of how much fat there is in the government, The New York Times recently reported that the "support staff" for our embassy in Nicaragua consists of 320 employees...

...I suspect it is true that the District of Columbia's status in the federal system is at least in part a product of racism, but the rest of Milloy's argument is just plain silly—absurd enough to have been caught by any reasonably intelligent editor...

...Recall Captain David Cronin, who flew that crippled United 811 back to Honolulu and then had to retire a month later...

...There's even more of it...

...The answer may lie in the fact that the CIA wasn't telling the Pentagon what the CIA's agents in Panama knew...

...As we have pointed out, Wall Street doesn't help such people until they are well along the path to success...

...Second, give it to colleges and universities that are actually doing a better job...

...But before you send away for it, you might be interested in knowing that Eden Press will turn around and sell your name and address as part of its mailing list, which it peddles through a list broker called Conrad Direct...

...Third, donate money to the public school systems and to charities, but only on the basis of demonstrated commitment to improved performance, to quality teaching, to delivery of food and money and health care to those who are in need...

...My own experience in the bureaucracy suggests that it could safely—that is, without endangering key functions—take the 50 percent cut that James Bennet recommends for the officer corps in his article beginning on page 22 of this issue...

...What are they going to do with all that money...

...His argument is one of the best illustrations of the problems produced by the interaction of the Post's paternalism and black militancy that Scott Shuger explores in this issue...

...If you doubt that real racism lingers in our society, consider the San Jose Mercury News's exposure of incompetent interpreters in the California courts...

...Support staff means drivers, clerks, household servants...

...It is important, however, that the cutting be done intelligently...

...It even has a Privacy Catalog...

...Dick Cheney is smart enough to know better...

...The cuts are a sound idea...

...Te ways private industry cons the Pentagon are myriad...

...If they don't have the reflexes, if their minds are a bit addled, throw them out, whether they are 30 or 60...

...Today's potential Mr...

...It must have been something like, "I can't tell these dodos anything, but boy, will the fellows back at Langley be excited by all the news I have for them...

...and Satisfying your Ethics credit at the same time...

...The search for money in the early days of any enterprise is always difficult and often desperate...

...Grasp the concept of power seating to position yourself well in any situation...

...Law" and the values it expresses: The number of lawyers in the city of New York rose from 49,386 to 77,890 in the last decade...

...Unfortunately, nothing similar happened in government...