Tilting at Windmills

...And why then give the warning only to the DC-9 pilot and not to the others, especially the 727 captain who was about to take off...

...F o r me the most disturbing part in all the stories about that collision at the Detroit airport in December was the revelation that planes are permitted to take off with just a quarter-mile visibility...

...I have told you many times that the incompetence and cowardice of the FAA threaten your life every time you go near an airport...

...In both cases, according to a preview The Hartjord Courant obtained of the final report of the NASA investigation of the Hubble error, lower-level personnel were discouraged from bringing potential problems to the attention of their superiors...

...In the coming days, we should all devote ourselves to convincing the president that this is a wise and honorable course for which he will be praised, not ridiculed...

...If your answer is that the District performs more of the functions of state and county as well as municipal government, you should know that the Rivlin commission took special care to allow for that fact in arriving at the 42 percent figure...

...If the office has only seven employees, why, the authors of the report wonder, does the director need a deputy, two special assistants, and an administrative officer...

...When I have told this story before, I have refrained from exFlaining that the firm involved was not some fly-by-night outfit, but Clifford and Warnke, one of Washington’s most eminent legal partnerships...

...He had two other lawyers in tow...

...And in Illinois, Judge Frank Easterbrook found another attorney billing half his time to a case in which the appeal was pending, a period during which only the appellate court, not the lawyer, has any work to do...

...You just can’t store all those records,” an Air Force official explains...

...Serious economic damage has already been done...

...Is the FAA really certain that every pilot of a large passenger jet speeding down a runway will, after he has spotted another plane on the same runway, be able to: 1) correctly perform the mental calculations involved in deciding whether to abort or to proceed with the takeoff, and 2) if he decides to abort, bring the hurtling aircraft to a safe stop, all with less than 440 yards having been traveled from the moment of the sighting to the moment the plane has completely halted...

...That escalation is, according to Alan Greenspan and most other knowledgeable observers, the main factor in turning the slow economy of summer into one on the brink of a dangerous downturn...

...Carl George of Prince William County, Virginia, who was recently convicted of murdering a 15-year-old boy after having tortured him with electric shocks to the groin...

...Needless to say, it’s more often-much more often-Paris or some other European capital or international resort...

...T h e flawed mirror in the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope was caused by the same management climate at NASA that led to the Challenger disaster in 1986...

...So what about the customers who the government says were defrauded...

...Consider just one of them, Orion Truver, a retired office manager who lost his life savings after International talked him into investing in soybean and cattle options...

...Last month, one of those Christmas gift catalogs that feature such vital necessities as $100 Italian silk scarves from Gucci also carried this injunction: “Dress up your pet for the holidays,” and offered a choice of a cat’s 14-inch-long strand of pearls “with five silvertone fish or a dog’s triple-strand pearl necklace inspired by one worn by our First Lady...

...So why wait until he was clearly in the wrong place to give warning...

...We don’t have the room...

...In the time he still should have been in prison, he has been charged with two murders, an attempted murder, and two robberies...

...The basis for the retirement: stress related disability...

...And even some of them were sitting at desks...

...One was about another increase in gasoline prices and the other was about a warning of an oil glut from President Suharto of Indonesia...

...And why when the District’s population has been static or declining has its number of municipal employees risen from 37,000 in 1982 to 48,500 now...

...While Beare cavorts in his “Temple of Love,” Truver survives in a two-bedroom frame house in Hammond, Indiana, living on his monthly pension check...

...Didn’t that mean he could have been in a disastrously wrong place...

...Certainly, it doesn’t stand a chance if Saddam thinks it is only a bluff...

...government, but the main impression the media left with the public was in the Post’s subhead to the “Council Members Assail” story: “Rivlin Report’s Findings Met With Criticism...

...His early release was the product of a bureaucratic error in calculating the credit Thanos was due for good behavior...

...As faithful readers know, I had personal experience with both a few years ago when a congressman who felt the Monthly had been a bit too severe in its comments about him engaged a Washington law firm to act in his behalf...

...The basis of the stress: They were upset because they were caught in an act of misconduct...

...What happened to the officers...

...Even though the deputy commander of Desert Shield, General Waller, has cast doubt on our ability to launch a ground attack at that time, the bluff just might work...

...But in a decision that is not reassuring to those of us who admire her, Dixon has determined to keep 18 or 19-and to have a sophisticated fence, security system, and guardhouse erected at her home...

...For example, physicians who owned their machines ordered chest X-rays for 46 percent of their patients with cold and flu symptoms compared to 11 percent for the patients of doctors who made referrals to radiologists...

...And last year a federal appeals court found that more than half of the 6,652 hours of work billed in a Texas case were for work attributed to “revision,” “conferences,” and “monitoring...

...See Scott Shuger’s article on p. 16 for another illustration...

...It uses its aircraft to fly the government’s top brass-including congressmen, generals, and high officials from the executive branch-to Paris, Abidjan, Calcutta, or anywhere else the fellows want to go...

...I escorted them to the street where a limousine was waiting to take them back to their office...

...Consider Robert Thiret, who was convicted in 1984 of having sexually assaulted and attempted to murder a 3-year-old girl, whom he left for dead in an outhouse pit...

...Just one flight, uncovered by James R. Carroll of the Sun Jose Mercury News, which carried six congressmen and seven aides to Berlin in December 1989, cost the rest of us $1 14,608...

...I also wonder why the controller didn’t stop all traffic immediately when the DC-9 pilot first indicated he wasn’t sure where he was...

...The reason is that the Air Force destroys the evidence, the records that show the cost of these trips, six months after the date of travel...

...George was free to commit the murder because he was released from prison after having served only two and onehalf years for killing an eightyearold boy...

...He has been freed by a ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court-freed, not placed on parole-after serving 6 years of a 10 year sentence even though psychologists say he has made “minimal” progress in therapy...

...Just two of its findings illustrate my point: *Only 1,800 of Washington’s 4,100 officers were on uniformed duty in the police department’s seven districts, meaning not more than 1,800 could possibly have been on patrol...

...Whenever my wife accuses me of not helping enough around the house, my defense is “I’m better than my father,” whose sterling qualities did not include the slightest commitment to domestic burden sharing...

...The price to the federal government alone will be-again absent war-at least $50 billion including Desert Shield and such unanticipated consequences as the increases in Social Security and civil service pensions triggered by the oil price inflation...

...From the day he let his State Department signal Iraq that a move against Kuwait wouldn’t upset us, George Bush has earned our scorn for the mess he’s gotten us into in the Persian Gulf...

...convicted robber and rapist named John F. Thanos out of prison 18 months early...

...And that’s why I was driven to despair when I heard Richard Darman’s response at a luncheon last month to a question about the kind of people OMB was hiring: “We’re getting the brightest young policy analysts from the best graduate schools...

...The most dismaying fact of all comes not from the Rivlin report but from a recent story in The Washington Post about Sharon Pratt Dixon and her security detail...

...It seems that Dixon was shocked to find that Mayor Barry’s security detail consisted of 37 police officers even though the previous mayor, Walter Washington, had gotten along with only 3 or 4 guards...

...1 know one should never do it, but sometimes I can’t resist quoting myself...

...I thought for a moment about the fees that would be charged for the limousine, for the hour it waited, and for the half-hour it took to make the round trip to and from the office, and for the one and one-half hours each of the lawyers devoted to the visit, not to mention the time they spent conferring with each other and the client before and after the visit...

...The problem, of course, is that, as a plane gathers speed down the runway, we all desperately want to believe we are in the hands of capable people who care about our survival...

...But I have to admit that, since he has sent all those ground troops out there and we are in a mess, I can understand why Bush feels he must stick to his threat of war if Iraq doesn’t withdraw from Kuwait by January 15...

...But it isn’t easy to find such figures...

...But-and this is crucial-if it doesn’t work, Bush should announce that we will not go to war but that we are committed to maintaining the trade embargo until Iraq does withdraw...

...Almost all of the initial news accounts of the report focused on just one of its many recommendationsthat the size of the District police force should be cut...

...They have been permitted to retire...

...It is precisely for this reason that The Washington Monthly has for 22 years been urging the government to find independent channels through which bad news can be communicated...

...Finally they departed...

...This would have prevented the tremendous economic harm done to the nation by the rapid escalation of gasoline prices since early August...

...Not only did these bandits take more pictures, they charged more for t h e m 4 0 percent more than their outside radiologists...

...Another 15 minutes made clear that there was nothing to be gained by further discussion...

...Another case is that of Michael In another example of just punishment, The Charleston Gazette has revealed that a West Virginia doctor has been allowed to continue practicing medicine for more than a year after he was convicted of molesting three young girls...

...They also wonder why the District needs a bicycle coordinator with two special assistants...

...We proceeded to state our respective positions...

...These trips cost the taxpayer a pretty penny...

...I hope now you are beginning to believe me...

...I had other work to do and was hoping they would depart...

...The truth is that the Rivlin report is right in many of its findings about the police and about many other parts uf the D.C...

...Do you remember that videotape that showed two white Los Angeles policemen pushing a black man’s head into a window shattering the glass...

...Now that we have added Hafez el-Assad to our distinguished list of allies, it’s interesting to recall that just last spring, Vice Admiral Richard Dunleavy, the assistant chief of naval operations, told a Senate Armed Forces subcommittee: “Right now, I’d be more worried about going against the Syrians than the Soviets...

...A Minneapolis firm charged $208,733 in fees for winning $3,000 in damages...

...But the higher figure is sometimes waived for students of special academic or athletic promise...

...This would not have happened if the president had reacted to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by quickly adopting the Monthly’s proposal to hold down prices by selling oil from the reserves and announcing that we would have gasoline rationing if necessary...

...That is why it was less than heartening to read the New England Journal of Medicine’s recent study of X-rays...

...In case you missed it, the study found that doctors who own their own machines order four times as many X-rays as those who send their patients to outside radiologists...

...Maryland and Massachusetts aren’t the only states where the corrections system seems to operate with sublime indifference But last year they let a to the public’s safety...

...o n November 29, in the business section of The New York Times, two brief stories ran, one just above the other, in an obscure position among the back pages...

...One of the firm’s partners called me and arranged an appointment...

...You may remember that the infamous Willie Horton, having been prematurely let out of jail by the Dukakis administration, proceeded to Maryland, where he committed more crimes...

...It now appears that the market may, absent war, finally bring oil prices under control...

...It was shot by an NBC camera crew who happened to be at the scene and was incontrovertible proof of racist brutality...

...That’s why it’s so important to improve the problemidentification skills of the people performing the evaluative and investigative functions...

...More than one-third of the $1.5 billion fund set up to compensate asbestos victims has gone to lawyers...

...Does it fly dangerous missions behind enemy lines or engage in some other confidential derring-do...

...But together they made an interesting point...

...The report reveals that most of the fat in the District government is in the middle grades, where deputies and special assistants abound...

...If the officials at the top of the agency don’t want to hear the bad news, they won’t hear it unless they are compelled to by people they can’t fire, such as inspectors general and examiners from the GAO and the OMB...

...Since the recommendation was counter to the Conventional Wisdom to which most reporters are enslaved, they concentrated their fire on showing how wrong the report was, mainly by interviewing politicians who are also slaves to Conventional Wisdom, producing front-page headlines such as The Washington Post’s “D.C...

...F o r anyone who has even tried to find an apartment in Manhattan, conclusive proof that the recession has definitely arrived was supplied by this recent headline in the Times: “Rent Falling in Many New York Areas, Ending 50-Year Rise...

...I figured that the client already owed several thousand dollars for a matter that could have just as easily been handled by a few phone conversations...

...D a v i d Beare was the head of International Trading Group Ltd., which the government has charged with systematic fraud in the sale of commodity options...

...Aaron Epstein of KnightRidder, to whom I am indebted for these facts, found that two major causes of inflated fees were overstaffhg and unnecessary work...

...In the District’s Department of Administrative Services, for example, there is a subsection called the Office of Policy and Management with a director and seven employees...

...One of Washington’s best kept secrets is the 89th Military Airlift Wing...

...This was done in about 15 minutes...

...So you would think the Maryland authorities might have learned something from the error of their brethren in Massachusetts...

...This sum plus $200,000 a month in Beare’s legal expenses is paid out of International’s dwindling assets, helping to reduce them by a third since the suit began...

...When he arrived at my office he was not alone...

...Yet only a handful of people spoke up in favor of selling oil from the reserves-which Bush didn’t do until he made a too-little and too-late gesture in late October-and to the best of my knowledge, no one joined us in favor of gas rationing until early December, when Mary McGrory said a kind word for the idea in her syndicated column...

...But the fact is that the Rivlin report documents its case against the police with convincing details, which one suspects the reporters didn’t bother to read...

...Although one in every four authorized patrol positions was vacant, headquarters had six officers for every five authorized positions...

...I believe I should have done so earlier and do so now because I am convinced that these practices and the conscious or unconscious cynicism they reflect are not just a problem of a few shady shysters but are also commonplace among the most respected law firms in the nation...

...In other words, gas prices were going up even as an excess supply of oil was at hand...

...And why does the District need 42 percent more public employees than the average of a dozen other large cities...

...In this case my excuse is the Rivlin Commission report on the District of Columbia, which provides an excuse for me to recycle: “In government, as in human beings, fat tends to concentrate around the middle...

...Unfortunately, the market is working too late...

...Tilting at Windmills Charles Peters A tWe st Virginia University, as at most state-supported institutions of higher learning, residents pay lower tuition than students from out of state...

...In Louisiana, a federal judge caught a lawyer billing more than 24 hours a day, not just once and perhaps inadvertently, but an unmistakably larcenous six times...

...Not exactly...

...An indication of the university’s priorities is provided by the fact that during the 1989-90 year, the school awarded waivers worth $875,000 to academic scholars and $1.4 million to athletes...

...The same is true in relationships with physicians...

...The problem is that policy analysts are not trained in investigative skills, and, because they are fresh from graduate school, they lack the experience in government to have any sense of where the bodies are buried...

...I fear that in such matters as security guards, Dixon may be similarly tempted to defend herself with, “At least I’m better than Barry.’’ . . . B ythe way, the brain-dead state of the Washington media has never been better illustrated than in its reaction to the Rivlin report...

...But they just sat there, going over the same ground again and again for another half-hour...

...The court that is overseeing the case has granted Beare $50,000 a month in living expenses that, according to The Wall Street Journal, pays for “country club memberships, servants, and maintenance for a dozen cars” and his 30-room mansion and estate complete with swimming pool and artificial lake and “something called a Temple of Love...

...Council Members Assail Police Force Cut...