Tilting at Windmills

...But after a news report of the case had been printed, the IRS conceded the amount was wrong...

...Should the staff of this magazine, fed up with America’s failure to heed our wisdom, barricade the doors and proclaim a new nation established on the fourth floor of 1611 Connecticut Avenue and dedicated to the principles of The Washington Monthly...

...Well, believe it or not, there’s a California company called Entertainment Express that will provide two women to act as if they are the president and vice president of your fan club and a photographer to pursue you with camera clicking and bulb flashing...

...Is it any wonder,” the authors ask, “that so many CEOs act like bureaucrats rather than the valuemaximizing entrepreneurs companies need to enhance their standings in world markets?’ . . . While we keep wasting money on executive salaries, the Japanese are spending 28 percent of their GNP-twice what we d m n new plants and research...

...One publication that does not seem to have embraced Cheap Chic is Money magazine, which is now advertising that it “covers everything from renting an Italian villa to commissioning a family portrait...

...Tired of trendiness and materialism,” Erne writes, “Americans are rediscovering the joys of home life, basic values, and things that last...

...Speaking of stupidity in spending, ponder for a moment the billions we have squandered on the B-1 and B-2 bombers and then face the fact that in the percentage of infants immunized against measles, we now rank behind the following nations: Panama, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, St...

...What happened was that between 1981 and 1991, the Reagan and Bush administrations increased the immunization budget only half the amount needed to cover costs...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS L a s t month, we noted how the Gulf war filled the entertainment gap between the Super Bowl and the beginning of baseball season...

...Kitts/Nevis, Chile, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cuba, Honduras, Antigua, Barbados, Bahamas, Costa Rica, Colombia, St...

...If, on the other hand, the hatred does not exist among the reasonable people on both sides-as in the cases of the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium, the Ashanti, Ewe, and other tribes of Ghana, and, come to think of it, the blacks and whites of America-staying together seems to be the right answer...

...God bless and keep you, Lee...

...Executive pay continued to rise in 1990 despite the recession and despite the fact that profits were dec.lining...

...I would, however, caution Fred Goldberg, the IRS commissioner who took the brave stand, that as he proceeds down Washington’s bureaucratic alleyways, he take care to cast frequent glances to the rear, lest a knife be inserted in his back...

...In the case of physicians, the fair but tough reviews of their performance that would deprive the incompetents of their licenses could make it possible to at last get rid of the malpractice suits that run up insurance and medical costs...

...Would you like to be treated like a movie star...

...I detested your politics...

...Mahogany tables have been shined, plush carpets cleaned, silk pillows arranged on brand new sitting room sofas...

...This has been a significant factor in the current banking crisis...

...A clue is that one of the officers made only three arrests during the period...

...As a result, my old friend Frank Mankiewicz notes, Kuwaiti officials “got a lot better at dealing with the press...

...The subjects offered at the seminars include such clear enhancers of professional competence as: *“The common billing practices which greatly increase your chances of being audited by Medicare and insurance companies...

...And every room has one...

...We don’t want to be misleading, but too much combat footage interferes with the longterm attributes of Army service that we want to portray: money for college, skills training, and relevance to a civilian career...

...The latest development in this field is an organization called the American Educational Institute, which offers doctors, lawyers, and dentists tax-deductible travel to their choice of 31 exotic locations around the world from St...

...The one element of this trend that does not absolutely delight us is its focus on home and children, which, while in many respects sane and healthy, can also involve a dangerous denial of and escape from responsibility to the broader community...

...George Bush himself is still angry at the IRS, according to David Ellis and Sidney Urquhart of Time, because of a 1984 audit that made him pay nearly $200,000 in taxes, interest, and penalties...

...Clearly if they all had their way, the world would be fragmented into Petersstans-a phenomenon to which Americans, with their great faith in the Union, have an instinctive aversion...

...He has demonstrated his lifelong commitment to making great pianos by training as a quality control engineer in the nuclear power industry and by serving as manager of strategic planning and development at General Electric...

...Time magazine has been among the first to recognize the sea change that is taking place, publishing a major article on the subject last August and a cover story last month that notes, among other evidence, that BMW sales are down 28 percent from 1985 levels...

...The gap between what the average worker is paid and what the average CEO gets-the latter’s salary is often 75 or 80 times that of the worker-doubled in the past 15 years...

...And it was already greater than in most industrial countries, and much greater than in our major rival, Japan...

...ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN are pooling coverage of the White House so that the number of camera crews assigned to Bush’s daily schedule will be reduced from four to one...

...Do reasonable people among the aggrieved group hate their alleged oppressors and vice versa, as, say, in the cases of the Tamils and the Sinhalese, and the Palestinians and Israeli Jews...

...What kind of protection from crime have the citizens of Washington been given in return for such generous compensation...

...Pat Moynihan is one of those men whose virtues are so great that those of us who admire them find it hard to face the facts that Nicholas Lemann recounts in this issue (page 39...

...It is producing a 60minute documentary about Operation Desert Storm...

...H e r e are Lee Atwater’s last words about his decade: “The eighties were about acquiring-acquiring wealth, power, prestige...

...Yet, incredibly enough, the FDIC does not have the power to require banks to cut their dividends, even though those excessive dividends could obligate the taxpayers to finance a bailout of the guilty bank...

...With such exciting entertainment available, it is not hard to understand why one panel at the American Society of Magazine Editors’ conference last month was devoted to “Running Socially Relevant Issues: How Much Can Readers Take...

...One District of Columbia policeman has been paid $178,096 over the past two years in salary and overtime pay...

...One practice that we cannot trust either the doctors or the lawyers to monitor is taxdeductible travel, to which the two professions are both devoted...

...Although I am convinced that Lemann is right, I think it’s important for us to pay due honor to Moynihan’s good side, one expression of which is his excellent work on international law, which we praised in a book review last year...

...And certainly there were boundaries drawn by French and British colonialists in Africa and the Mideast that were based more on whim and bureaucratic convenience than on respect for ethnic and religious differences...

...the Federal Anti-Kickback statutes and the Safe Harbor regulations...

...As the quality of American products seemed in steady, almost relentless decline in recent years, one of the few exceptions was the Steinway piano, which retained by virtue of its excellence a nearmonopoly on the concert stage...

...Highlights of the war will be displayed in what Michael Silver, the California reporter to whom I’m indebted for the story, describes as “a lush production, featuring orchestral music, declassified military footage, and a booming-voiced narrator...

...You’ve got to be careful how To influence the American public, reports The Washington Post’s Gary Lee, Kuwait spent more than $1 1 million “employing three U.S...

...public relations firms, dozens of imagemakers, a team of lawyers, and a squad of Washington lobbyists...

...Another place the Cheap Chic message does not appear to have enjoyed overwhelming success is in the executive suites of corporate America...

...Wouldn’t the Gulf war, a reporter asked, be good to feature in recruiting ads since it was quick, decisive, even flashy...

...Colonel Steve Titunick, who heads the Pentagon’s broadcast pictorial branch, told Silver he would screen the film before its release “to make sure it portrays the DOD in a positive light...

...The title does suggest a schedule allowing ample time for fooling around, doesn’t it...

...One would hope the rest of the media would see the beauty of this idea and leave coverage of staged events at the White House to a single camera crew and a couple of wire service reporters, thereby freeing scores of high-quality journalists to go after important stories instead of sitting in the White House press room, lapping up what the administration wants them to hear...

...In New York City, 39 of 50 investigators are police oficers...

...Lucia, Uruguay, Belize, Nicaragua, Turks and Caicos, Brazil, Paraguay, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Suriname...

...After all, the two groups are acutely aware of one another’s deficiencies...

...But equally clearly, there are tribes around the world who feel abused and alienated...

...Three hundred dollars an hour pays for the entire package...

...Army Corps of Engineers, which-can you believe this-gave the project top priority, he still has a problem: “We can’t find enough bulbs for the chandeliers...

...One IRS official told The Sun Jose Mercury News that it was “the largest dollar error” he had seen in 15 years at the agency...

...Perhaps Lemann’s article will make Moynihan mad enough to show us up by actually sticking with the cause of social security tax relief until he gets it enacted...

...H ow can we stop police brutality...

...White House officials seldom react cheerfully to having an underling like Goldberg show them up...

...A clerk told her she’d have to resolve it in court...

...In other words, they get automatic annual raises without regard to performance...

...Moroccan tiles have been cleaned and repaired...

...But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty...

...Malpractice claims could be handled on a no-fault basis with compensation for medical expenses and loss of earnings but not for infinitely inflatable damages for pain and suffering...

...The unfortunate fact is that the American public schools are loaded with such job titles-see Michael Willrich’s article on page 24-and while their holders may fill their free time with behavior less exotic than Smart’s, it’s a pretty good bet that their working hours are similarly unrelated to serious learning...

...As things stand now, complaints of police brutality are all too often evaluated by friends and associates of the accused...

...No, replied Colonel John Myers, director of advertising and public affairs for the Army Recruiting Command: combat, or the potential for combat, is displayed in your commercials...

...For years, banks have been wasting money on overly generous dividends to their owners-money that should have gone to increasing their capital and the reserves needed to cover the many bad loans they’ve been making...

...The civilian review board solution seems so obvious that 1 hope it will be extended to other boards charged with investigating professional misconduct, especially those of lawyers and doctors, whose instincts for selfprotection are so finely honed...

...Amidst the many intriguing aspects of the Pamela Smart case, one that may have escaped your attention is the job she held at that New Hampshire school: media service administrator...

...We explore this danger in Beth Austin’s article on movies on page 30...

...The second part of the test concerns a matter that I’m not sufficiently informed about in regard to the Kurds and their neighbors to answer, but that is the most important question of all...

...Water runs hot and cold...

...the other made none...

...But your last words couldn’t have been better...

...to in time is Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles llmes, who has revealed-much of his story was later confirmed by The New Republic-that while war-ravaged Kuwait City was without electricity and running water and there was growing desperation among its newly liberated people, 400 workers were laboring 16 hours a day on the “sumptuous restoration” of the emir’s palace...

...Another has received $181,509...

...w h e n Dickie Conn got a tax bill for $1 billion, she called the IRS to say that it must be a typographical error...

...The world hasn’t gone that crazy yet, but it does seem that every day one reads of some new group threatening to break away from the nation of which it has been a part...

...Thomas to Eleuthera to Maui to Acapulco to Sun Valley and Aspen...

...One way that is increasingly advocated by reformers is to have a civilian review board staffed with civilian investigators...

...Eight million dollars went to Hill and Knowlton...

...But the Kuwaiti in charge of the restoration notes that even though he has been assisted by the U.S...

...They win even though their companies are losing...

...Mankiewicz is such a master of his art that I have to suspect that he is the one who soaked that poor bird in Uniflo and called the photographers...

...But now the company appears to have taken the suicide pill of choice in modem American industry...

...The relationship between A fact about the Stanford scandal that may have escaped your attention: While the university was billing the U.S...

...If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to write...

...My answer to the problem is what I call the Reasonable Test...

...If so, a split at least into some sort of confederation is desirable because the two parties are not destined to live happily together in any realistically foreseeable future...

...Another is his championing of the cause of social security tax relief for the working poor and the lower middle class, an ancient cause of the Monthly that Moynihan was the first prominent politician to embrace...

...As an article in the Haward Business Review points out: “Corporate America pays its most important leaders like bureaucrats...

...government overhead charges-on research contracts-for such items as $7,000 custom sheets for the school president’s bed and $45,000 for a trustees’ junket to Lake Tahoe, it was waiving overhead charges on similar contracts with large corporations and the Japanese government...

...The first part of the test is fairly obvious: Is the group of reasonable size, as is the cases of the Kurds and the Lithuanians...

...I am happy to report that another Monthly cause, Cheap Chic, seems, in contrast to our campaign for social security fairness, to have met with almost instant acceptance in American homes...

...This common-sense approach has been made impossible by the doctors’ insistence on controlling their own licensing, which means there is no effective discipline for misconduct by a physician other than the malpractice suit...

...It has selected a Harvard MBA to run its factory...

...Silk brocade has been hung on the walls...

...But if the IRS looked bad in this case, it looked heroic in rejecting White House efforts to make it target audits on the middle class instead of on wealthy individuals and corporations...

...Of course, the civilian boards must not consist of fools and patsies-which is why 1 have long advocated having lawyers serve on medical licensing boards and doctors on lawyers...

...It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime...

...I s Petersstan the answer...

...I know, I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most...

...The list would be much longer if, as you have probably guessed, it wasn’t confined to the Western Hemisphere...

...Hundreds of gold-plated French bathroom fixtures and doorknobs have been installed...

...Apparently NFL Films feels the same way...