TILTING AT WINDMILLs
TILTING AT WINDMILLS More sex means better education. This takes a bit of explaining, so please bear with me. A lot of people now recognize that in many large cities parochial schools are...
...So the government raised the allowance for New York and other high-cost cities...
...Tropez, but he chose to go to Emmons, West Virginia, to work in a poverty program...
...The big reason I hope Jay Rockefeller runs for president is that I think he could be the person to lead the elite out of its spiritual morass...
...It's time for an update on taxpayer-financed travel...
...But they are increasingly lonely...
...Last month, we reported that Rep...
...The Texas Medical Association's dedicated search for sites conducive to learning has uncovered the Laurie River Lodge in Northern Manitoba...
...Now comes the news that the Los Angeles Public Library recently spent $400,000 on collector's item volumes that could have been used to buy regular books needed in the branches...
...The Pope may be wrong about celibacy, but he certainly is right about capitalism...
...This may lead to a breakthrough in accounting efficiency...
...Last year, he accepted allexpensepaid trips to Brazil, Great Britain, Austria, Italy, and Czechoslovakia...
...Still, to give you a sense of how extravagant they are in lotus land, she ranks only 93rd on San Diego's list of big water users...
...It's a big-picture thing...
...And then when you're my age and maybe younger, too, you want to think you can contribute to world peace...
...A lot of people now recognize that in many large cities parochial schools are the only places where a quality, affordable, and democratic educational experience is available for the children of the average man...
...The Washington Times has been displaying admirable enterprise in getting the inside scoop on official travel...
...The group happens to constitute 60 percent of the population...
...James Sensenbrenner's trip to France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union was $5,087, while two aides needed only $1,844 each for the trip...
...It needs the encouragement of regulation to make sure that human and environmental values are respected...
...If you've been reading this magazine lately, you may have noticed a pattern in the facts we have been uncovering...
...Pool owners say they're really conservationists at heart...
...On real estate assessment, the rich are favored, as they are on college admissions, and as they are in not having to do military service, and as they have been under the tax policies of the Reagan-Bush administrations...
...The Peace Corps is one of the few places where the elite still perform service of any kind...
...They did not distinguish themselves in the war against Iran...
...Take Robert and Jayne Wilson of Bel Air, who have a custom-built pool and waterfall with a 40-foot drop...
...Unlike Vietnam, we can win through air power because there is not much jungle where we're going...
...Why, then, didn't we stick with the sanctions in the first place...
...Because groups that over the years have supplied most of the teachers—the nuns and brothers of the various Catholic orders—have been leaving the church, and there are not enough young people replacing them...
...The headline in The New York Times sounded innocent: "Bush's Son Getting Aid on Legal Fees—A Family Friend Sets up Fund After the Silverado Case...
...Two reasons: One is that many of them have never had substantial contact with the problem...
...Since the official has friends at the White House, I asked why they couldn't help in dealing with the civil service...
...Here in the city of Washington, officials are being a bit more cautious about billing the taxpayer for travel because of the Air Sununu scandal...
...Does this sound somewhat familiar—like maybe exactly how things worked out...
...The recent drought has tended to make the people of the American West a bit touchy about the amount of their water siphoned off to fill the swimming pools of Southern California...
...He teaches leisure...
...His recent encyclical affirms the basic economic desirability of the free market but also points out the kinds of human and environmental exploitation that are its handmaidens...
...Les Aspin's female friend, described on the plane's manifest as a "tech rep," rode free on an Air Force jet from Denver to Washington...
...He has, according to the St...
...Then it took a similarly sensible step by supplementing the salaries of federal employees stationed in those cities...
...similarly, Rep...
...As a young man in 1964 he could have gone to Wall Street or, for that matter, to St...
...At the White House, the atmosphere is hard-charging, so White House people who haven't worked in the bureaucracy—and most have not—have no idea what the slow charge is like...
...It turns out that the female friend is also a lobbyist for a defense contractor...
...I think our administration is doing good things for the country...
...The reason is that we can't fire these people...
...It's—it's part of the game...
...One of the many insane actions taken by James Angleton, the CIA spy-hunter, was to return to the Russians a KGB officer who had been spying on behalf of the CIA...
...According to the Los Angeles Times, it seems that during her most recent performance evaluation, in December 1990, the controller lost track of a plane taxiing onto a runway on which another plane was about to land, almost exactly duplicating the actions that produced the crash this year...
...Because the church requires celibacy...
...What happened to the officer...
...When I was just one step from the top of the civil service in 1968, I made $25,800, which was just a few thousand more than a lot of steel and autoworkers earned...
...What the headline didn't tell you was that the old friend was Thomas L. "Lud" Ashley, the leading lobbyist of the banking industry...
...Paul, Minnesota, asked George Bush why he wanted to become president, this was the best the leader of the free world could come up with: "You have to have some motivation—ideological motivation...
...The groups most victimized are families making less than $40,000 per year...
...Now that practically everyone in the world sees the folly of Marxism, it is crucial that mankind not make the opposite error and rush to an uncritical embrace of the market...
...What can we feel about that...
...Whatever his faults, he has devoted his life to public service...
...Ninety percent is a higher figure than I have heard from other federal managers, but there is no question that a relaxed approach to one's duties is far from unusual in Washington...
...That's precisely the kind of choice the young elite should be making today...
...Moritz or St...
...In years gone by, federal employees moaned and groaned about the per diem allowance for federal travel...
...Of course, it has shrunk by three-quarters since the sixties...
...That's right— he is a professor of leisure...
...Spokesmen for the pool industry respond by emphasizing the positive: "We think it's important that people understand that a filled pool can provide the water necessary to help fight a fire...
...How does the administration now propose to get rid of Saddam Hussein...
...What is Professor Harker's discipline...
...The danger for the Democrats is that they will try to broaden the group they champion to include the lawyers, doctors, congressmen, upper-level bureaucrats, academics, and journalists whose salaries range from $75,000 to $200,000 but who think of themselves as beleaguered because they have come to want to live like the rich...
...Is there even the faintest sign of conscience among our professionals...
...Second, the few who do understand see themselves in power for, at most, only five more years and think the civil service problem is too deeply rooted to be solved on their watch...
...Embracing this group, becoming its champion against the rich, could be not only the moral salvation of the Democratic party, because it would be right, but the electoral salvation as well...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, "testified as an expert in court cases from Hawaii to Massachusetts against laws requiring bathing suits on beaches...
...Now the other federal employees are demanding the same salaries that those in New York are paid...
...The latest example comes from the case of the air traffic controller who landed one plane on top of another at the Los Angeles airport...
...Edward Feighan cost only $1,617 for an aide...
...It also seems that when she was a controller for the Air Force, she had been relieved of her duty and urged to seek psychiatric help...
...Unfortunately, the number of parochial schools is declining...
...Here in Washington we have two excellent ones, Lea Thompson at Channel 4 and Roberta Baskin at Channel 7. They are vigilant against the tendency of business to screw the consumer...
...If that doesn't put an end to the whining, we should ridicule this group's selfpity until it is embarrassed to claim for itself the benefits that should go to the truly struggling...
...The scene is reminiscent more of Balliol or Magdalen than of the spare facilities in which I saw typical volunteers teaching in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the sixties...
...It was the same amount wherever you went...
...Mayor Maureen O'Connor of San Diego is a strong foe of water rationing, and the Los Angeles Times found out why...
...So, if the Pope will just loosen up a bit and permit priests and nuns to marry, he will make them happier and improve American education at the same time...
...At a dinner party not long ago, I was seated next to a senior official in one of the cabinet departments who was complaining about the lack of work ethic among the department's civil servants...
...Last month, we noted that the New York Public Library was spending too much on the elite patrons of its main building and too little on the average folks who use its neighborhood branches...
...Here's what a former high CIA official told an interviewer from "Frontline": "They shot him when they got him out of sight the day he was turned over...
...If you have been convinced by the defenders of American higher education that the allegations against academia are scurrilous and unfair, consider the case of George Harker, a professor at Western Illinois University...
...I thought I saw a tiny ray from the state of Washington, where the bar association recently voted to cancel its Maui meeting...
...In 1990, according to The Washington Post's Mike Causey, 370 federal employees were fired for unacceptable performance out of a total white-collar workforce of 1.6 million...
...His specialty is nude beaches...
...When a student in St...
...where it is sponsoring a taxdeductible continuing medical education program on "Neurology for the Non-Neurologist...
...Aspin has found a way to eliminate all these middlemen— just let the Air Force pay for all the travel and none of the tiresome paperwork is necessary...
...When The Washington Times reported that congressional travel budgets for June's Paris Air Show would cost approximately $1.2 million, including about $350,000 just for rooms and suites at the posh Meridian Hotel, all but two congressmen suddenly discovered that they had other pressing engagements and regretfully canceled their trips...
...The John Sununu of the Supreme Court may turn out to be Justice Anthony M. Kennedy...
...Let me explain how this professional class has separated itself from the average man...
...According to Newsweek, local TV stations throughout the country are caving in to advertiser pressure and firing their watchdogs...
...This group is powerful because of its disproportionate influence over public opinion...
...This is a truth the Democrats must understand if they are to emerge from their long night...
...My sense that the American elite has unconditionally surrendered to selfishness is heightened by recent Peace Corps advertising...
...It seems that, during 1990, the mayor was one of the top residential water users in the city, consuming an average of 3,248 gallons per day...
...The trip to Cyprus that required $5,146 in taxpayers' money for Rep...
...One of the good developments of the seventies was the emergence of consumer reporters on local TV stations...
...Iraq would not be devastated, the multitudes who are now dead would still be alive, and we would have had just as good a chance of getting rid of Saddam as we do now...
...Aspin is, of course, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee...
...The brochure says, "Be assured that you will experience full days of trophy fishing and that the educational portion takes place in the evening after the fishing day has been completed...
...Did the congressmen fly first class and the aides in steerage...
...One of the places that federal regulation is weakest is the FAA...
...His courses include "Concepts of Leisure" and "Philosophy of Leisure...
...If I were still in the government at the same level, I would be making around $100,000, three times the salary of the steel or autoworker who still has a job...
...It used to be that the lobbyist paid for the congressman's travel and his own and then turned in an expense account to his company, which deducted the charges from the defense contractor's income tax...
...I would live in a world that has little in common with the world of the group that needs help...
...This is especially unfortunate because eight years of Reaganism left behind an almost totally emasculated consumer protection apparatus in the federal government—a problem that has been compounded, The New York Times points out, as "financially troubled states and cities across the country have sharply reduced the budgets of their consumer agencies...
...A civil servant's chances of being fired for poor performance are 1 in 4,300...
...Economic sanctions...
...But the action was motivated not by a moral stand against taxdeductibility but by the fact that state bar officials were not taking the tax deduction and were instead routinely charging the association with outrageous bills for travel expenses and luxury suites at conventions, running up a bar deficit of $548,000 for the eighties, when 8 of 10 meetings were held outside the state...
...In fact, the remarks that got Dugan fired included the most prescient analysis I've seen of what would be the key factors in the war...
...In other words, the man who was neck deep in the S&L scandal is being rescued by the man who is heading the fight for deregulation of the banks, the leading candidates for the next big bailout—a man who more than anything else needs the help of Neil Bush's father to save his clients...
...Did his fate trouble the CIA at all...
...When Dick Cheney fired Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Dugan last fall, the press was, as Scott Shuger recently noted in these pages, remarkably incurious as to whether or not we were losing a good man...
...For instance, it discovered that when aides travel with congressmen, the money spent on the latter can be dramatically greater than what is shelled out for the aide...
...Now, apparently, Peace Corps administrators have decided that the only way to attract new volunteers is to go upscale with their image...
...Capitalism can be benign, but it is not automatically so...
...Ninety percent are strictly nine-to-four," the official said, "and their main delight is finding meetings and conferences that will get them away from their desks...
...It takes 28,000 gallons of water to operate, but the Wilsons say, "We're not going to take advantage—we'll only run the waterfall a couple of times a week...
...One recent television ad features not huddled masses in Calcutta, not poor campesinos in Bolivia, not starving children in Ethiopia, but Peace Corps volunteers in the architectural splendor of Budapest, teaching a group of very clean, very white Hungarian students in classrooms with richly filled bookshelves and desks with individual lamps...
...I have no particular feelings about it...
...Ground forces may be needed to reoccupy Kuwait, but only after air power has so shattered enemy resistance that soldiers can walk in and not have to fight house-tohouse...
...The Kentucky Bar Association's Mid-Year Convention will be at the Maui Hyatt in nearby Hawaii, while the Ohio Bar is holding its Continuing Legal Education Seminar in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico...
...The way to counter that influence is first to eliminate the legitimate reason the upper middle class feels aggrieved (high tuition costs—see our solution on p. 45...
...Iraq's [army] is incompetent...
...While the payment was adequate for most places, it didn't begin to cover expenses in New York City...
...Charles Peters...
...Iraq's] air force has very limited capability...
Vol. 23 • July 1991 • No. 7
