Tilting at Windmills

...But they kept his money-his livelihood-and gave him a receipt in its place...

...and cheap rents for rooms and apartments...

...Congressmen pay $90 per day for up to four people...

...She had spent November 1-3 in Pasadena, Calfornia...

...I suspect that high rent is the number-one killer of youthful creativity...

...A club sandwich in the subsidized House and Senate dining rooms costs more than one-third less than it does at the closest comparable restaurant, which also happens to be considerably less spacious than the congressional restaurants...

...Where did the discounts not apply...

...Part of the problem is the success enjoyed by the Lee Atwaters...

...Remember how Baker kept asking, “What did the president know and when did he know it?’-a question that surely offered little comfort to Richard Nixon...

...Leahy then threw away the ball game by saying, “Please don’t misunderstand my question, Judge...

...Cinnamon house sits on a secluded 22-acre plot and has a private beach...

...There, members may die but their motions live on...

...Of course not...

...L et’s say you were unpersuaded by our pitch for a modified version of the Canadian health plan [“Socialized Medicine Now-Without the Wait,” October] and unmoved by Pennsylvania’s tremendous response to Harris Wofford’s call for universal health care-costs too much, you shrug...

...There are more than 1,200 motions pending before the City Council,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “with hundreds more than 5 years oldand dozens more than 10 years old...

...A little-known talent of Harris Wofford is literary skill...

...I nodded my head when he said this-it was the sensible, respectable line-until a friend of mine pointed out that it wasn’t a courtroom...

...Some of them should be invested in repairing defects of the Canadian system such as overly long delays for operations for painful, if not emergency,conditions...

...We face problems too serious for us to scorn facts or legitimate arguments simply because they don’t fit our case...

...The District of Columbia, for example, spends $26 per capita per year on its ambulance services-$1 1 more than any other major city...

...The bureaucratic state serves the bureaucrats first...

...I am confining it to the workplace...

...The House has shut down that nice bank that kept cashing checks even when members didn’t have a dime left in their accounts, but, as a recent Knight-Ridder story points out, a few other congressional perks remain...

...Even then the cheap rent wasn’t easy to find, but it was still gettable-I lived in apartments that rented for less than $65 per month in Greenwich Village, on West 92nd, and at 50th and 2nd...

...Not only is there the unsettling prospect of global warming, but there is clearly a better way: Move to Los Angeles and get elected to the City Council...

...What Leahy failed to grasp was that, although the workplace element was necessary to establish a record of sexual harassment in the office, it was not necessary to establish a prior interest in pornography...

...You have to prove you are innocent and the cases often take months or even years to try...

...But next to them it serves the rich, who can afford to hire all the expertise that dealing with the bureaucracy requires...

...That’s right,” Bartlett Does Bartlett’s article strike a faint chord in your mind...

...They would have to pay between $3 10 and $5 10 at nearby private resorts...

...A few years back, Maury Maverick Jr., a columnist for the Sun Antonio Express News and son of a great liberal congressman, published a breakdown by religion of the men who died in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983...

...But as this magazine never tires of pointing out, the problem is often not a lack of money but a lack of competence...

...At National w o r t , the public spaces closest to the terminals -just on the far side of the free ones provided to Congress-cost $20 a day...

...A vast jury selection industry has been developed in recent years, which gives an unfair advantage to the side that can afford the best psychologists...

...Getting more or better government services sometimes requires paying more money--e.g., expanding Head Start...

...I often find myself instinctively favoring liberal causes and liberal candidates...

...continues...

...I will not allow this committee or anyone else to probe into my private life...

...w a t th e Monthly calls the Slot Syndrome is the persistence of a job, or slot, on the government personnel rolls long after its original program has either disappeared or been reduced to the point where this job could easily be combined with one or two other jobs whose responsibilities have been similarly reduced...

...Had Biden enunciated a different, higher standard for approving Thomas, a lot more senators would have felt a lot more comfortable voting against him...

...The process of getting a building permit is considered so complicated and time-consuming that an entire industry has been spawned to deal with it, even to the point where expediters hire their own expediters...

...The result is that a judge can empanel a jury in as little as an hour...

...Here’s how they were described in another recent article about perks from Scripps-Howard: “A dream vacation for many Americans would be a hilltop house in the U.S...

...It is to get frequent flyer credits given to them personally, even though we the people pay for the travel that gains the credits...

...No charges were ever filed...

...He or she is someone hired to get permits for construction and renovation by figuring out, according to Sarah Bartlett of The New York Times, “which lines to stand in and what will satisfy a particular building examiner...

...None of these men let loyalty to the party keep him from making a reasonable effort to find objective truth...

...If you’ve got a yen for immortality, you can forget about having your corpse frozen...

...Then you have to sue to regain possession of what you owned...

...A recent study summarized in The New York Times says the way to save New York is not by giving subsidies to manufacturers and companies that construct office buildings, but by “reinforcing the city’s role as a center of brainpower and talent...

...He figured out why Congress tolerates an incompetent bureaucracy: Members know that a major factor in their reelection is the political credit they earn when they straighten out bureaucratic errors on behalf of their constituents...

...All these things combined to lure thousands of the most brilliant young people in the country to New York...

...Louis, the hub TWA dominates...

...Then you should ponder this report from The Washington Post about a study commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: “The United States could save $241 billion on health care costs the first year and $4.2 trillion over the next decade if it switched to a Canadian-style national health insurance system...

...And speaking of bureaucracy again, did you know that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and its affiliate, the Resolution Trust Corporation, have been paying $177,000 for wall hangings in their offices, not to mention $800 each for chairs...

...As I watched emotions register on Thomas’s face during his testimony, it seemed dramatically clear to me that the pornography question was the one he feared most...

...Remember The washington Post article I cited not long ago about how affluent Washingtonians were hiring standers-in-line at the local passport office...

...A n o t h e r Democratic failure was Senator Biden’s repeated assertion that the burden of proof rested with Hill...

...Sometimes they produced great art-as they certainly did in dance and theater in the New York of that era-and sometimes they found other outlets for their creativity...

...Cancun, Mexico and Naples, Florida...

...In so doing, they may earn the lifetime loyalty of each voter affected, and quite probably of his family and friends as well...

...But this time, as he waited at the American Airlines gate in Nashville Metro Airport, he was flanked by two police officers who escorted him into a small office, searched him, and seized the $9,600 he was carrying...

...But something terrible has happened in recent years to transform these understandable feelings into a politics of selfrighteous, one-sided attack in which no effort is made to consider the other fellow’s points, no matter how valid they may be...

...Now comes the list from the Gulf war, again compiled by Maverick, and it tells the same depressing story...

...Where was she going...

...Indeed, not only in New York City but in Washington and other major cities, far too many of the young are forced by the cost of living space to forsake work that is interesting but unremunerative or give up the kind of goofing off that is intellectually and spiritually enriching but, of course, also unremunerative...

...M a y o r Sharon Pratt Dixon left Washington on November 8 for what The Washington Post described as a “five-day business trip...

...For example, it would have been simple to request a reading from the record of Hill’s testimony that would have exploded Senator Arlen Specter’s charge that she had committed perjury...

...Currently the credits are used to decrease the deficit by paying for other government travel...

...But whatever the cause, the time has come to restore civility and objectivity to our public discourse...

...The only time pornography came up was when Senator Patrick Leahy asked Thomas, “Did you ever have a discussion of pornographic films with Professor Hill?’ THOMAS: Absolutely not...

...No evidence was ever produced...

...No wonder they keep telling us the bailout cost is rising...

...Speed isn’t the only reason the California system is better...

...Three Episcopalians, one Unitarian, and no Jews were listed among the 375 Americans who died...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS T h e saddest aspect of the Thomas hearings was the failure of the Republican senators to even seem interested in finding the facts as distinguished from making partisan points...

...Due to a quirk in city laws, motions remain current until they are passed or defeated or otherwise disposed of...

...Now you understand why the Department of Agriculture remains overstaffed even though the number of farmers has declined dramatically...

...But Sorensen may have been innocent in Wofford’s case...

...We’ll take just part of the savings...

...Senators have free use of indoor tennis and basketball courts that private clubs charge $1,500 a year for...

...And this doesn’t count the additional free care available at both the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Bethesda Naval Medical Center...

...One opportunity after another was blown...

...But the certain result of all that talent was a vibrant economy for the city...

...Harris, who is an otherwise wonderful man, is occasionally a bit long-winded, and Jack Kennedy’s impatience with the excessively discursive was legendary...

...cheap, safe transportation (10 cents for the subway and no fear about riding at 4 a.m...

...The senators had a duty to determine the truth of Anita Hill’s accusations...

...Finally, there is the preponderance of single-issue lobbies such as the NRA, which have made issue adversarialism a greater threat to the republic than party partisanship...

...Another tipoff was that he tried to exclude the possibility of such questions...

...I recently asked a high federal personnel official if anyone in the government was dealing with this problem...

...Another reason New York may be beyond saving is the city’s bureaucracy...

...Charles Peters...

...When I worked for the Peace Corps in the sixties, my boss, Sargent Shriver, did not hesitate to hire outstanding Republicans such as Lewis Butler and William Saltonstall...

...Do you know what an expediter is...

...Congressmen get free health care that costs the taxpayer $2,794 for each member...

...Any doubt is important-you don’t have to have conclusive evidence...

...In October, the council passed a motion filed by Howard Finn in 1983...

...s p e a k i n g of the burden of proof, did you know that if you fit the profile of a criminal, law enforcement agents can seize your cash, car, or other property without even charging you with a crime...

...This sounds right to me, although the Times account of the report did not mention the four factors that made the city attractive when I was a student there in the late forties...

...Yet I cannot recall a single Republican question that was designed to discover factual support for Hill’s version of the story...

...I understand why Republicans are similarly inclined to favor conservative causes and candidates...

...What has happened to the spirit manifested by FDR, certainly no saint when it came to partisanship, when he named two prominent Republicans, Frank b o x and Harry Stimson, to his cabinet in 1940...

...Pat Flaherty of The Pittsburgh Press recently investigated the results of this law and uncovered 510 cases of injustice, including the following: Andrew Schneider and Mary “Willie Jones, a secondgeneration nurseryman in his family’s Nashville business, makes twice-a-year trips to Houston to buy flowers and shrubs...

...cheap balcony tickets ($1.20 to $2.40) for theater, dance, concerts, and opera...

...THOMAS: Senator, I will not get into any discussions that I might have about my personal life or my sex life with any person outside of the workplace...

...All you have to do is remember Republican Warren Rudman and Democrat Lee Hamilton during the Iran-contra hearings or Republican Howard Baker and Democrat Sam Ervin during the Watergate hearings...

...Congressmen (and executive branch VIPs) stay at bargain prices at four luxury resorts operated by the National Park Service...

...Virgin Islands only a 100 yards or so from the white beaches of Little Cinnamon Bay...

...When I served in my state legislature, there were several intelligent and concerned Republicans whose arguments I always listened to with respect...

...On November 4, she traveled to New York to receive a Glamour “Woman of the Year” award...

...LEAHY: Have you ever had with any other women...

...A ticket agent had alerted the officers that a large black man had paid for his ticket in bills, unusual these days...

...And a record of such interest would have been highly relevant to the credibility of Anita Hill’s testimony...

...Plenty of cheap French and Italian restaurants like the Champlain and the old Barbetta’s, where you could eat a good meal for $2 to $3...

...The senators were making an affirmative decision about a man seeking office, not passing judgment on someone accused of a crime and facing prison...

...As a born-and-bred Democrat -both my parents were active party members-I am not immune to partisan sentiments...

...Finn departed this world in 1986...

...But as any Washingtonian will tell you, the most notable skill of local ambulance crews is an uncanny knack for going to the wrong address...

...Or that displayed by Dwight Eisenhower when he nominated William Brennan to the Supreme Court...

...But what the study makes crystal clear is that plenty of money exists to finance the improvements we would want to make in the Canadian system...

...If you don’t think we have a monopoly problem in America today, all you have to do is look at how the major airlines are bilking the customer at the hub airports they occupy...

...Those whose patience was strained by the interminable jury selection process in the William Kennedy Smith trial might consider California’s Proposition 115, which took jury selection out of the hands of the lawyers and gave it to the judges...

...The three-bedroom Little Speaking of Congress, Morris Fiorina, whose review of David Mayhew’s new book appears on page 53, is the author of one of political science’s more penetrating insights into behavior on Capitol Hill...

...Another factor may be the explosive growth of the legal profession in the past 30 years and the adversarialism it fosters...

...The Democrats may have been less partisan than the Republicans in the Thomas hearings, but they were also, as practically everyone noticed, more inept...

...Take Thomas’s statement Friday night, after Hill had testified: “I am not here to be further humiliated by this committee or anyone else, or to put my private life on display for prurient interest or other reasons...

...But as a former trial lawyer, I was driven most crazy by the Democrats’ failure to follow up on the question of Thomas’s interest in pornography...

...The same can be said about the former lightkeeper’s cottage on pristine Bodie Island off Nags Head, North Carolina, or the secluded log house with a stone fireplace on the shores of Jackson Lake in the Grand Teton National Park, or the quiet cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains within a stone’s throw of two trout streams...

...Do senators have to behave this way...

...A disproportionately large number of Catholics and Baptists was included, as was a disproportionately small number from more affluent religious groups such as the Episcopalians, Unitarians, and Jews...

...s p e a k i n g of bureaucrats, are you aware of the righteous cause currently embraced by the Senior Executives Association, the elite of the civil service...

...Studios where senators can produce videotapes of themselves to send to television or radio stations cost the taxpayers $17,000 per member and give incumbents an incalculable advantage over challengers, who not only have to pay for such facilities but rarely enjoy the convenience of having the studio just a few steps away...

...Because of the cash and the fact that he fit a ‘profile’ of what drug dealers supposedly look like, they believed he was buying or selling drugs...

...Those who have read his book Of Kennedys and Kings-an excerpt of which appeared in these pages in our July/August 1980 issue-know he is an excellent writer...

...Witnesses often do this, trying to define issues in such a way as to make irrelevant any inquiry into facts they don’t want to disclose...

...For example, TWA recently offered special discount coupons for many of its flights...

...Garage parking on Capitol Hill that costs private citizens $1,620 per year is free to congressmen...

...The officers told Jones he was free to go...

...I have always suspected that Harris was allowed to leave the White House in 1962 because his talents as a speechwriter made him a threat to Theodore Sorensen, JFK’s number one ghost, who was also said to have conspired to oust another of his speechwriting rivals, Richard Goodwin...

...His answer was no...

...She seems so sensible and nice, but with the city in terrible trouble, this behavior is frivolous to the point of stupidity...

...He takes cash, which the small growers prefer...