Tilting at Windmills

...The problem with not recognizing its existence is that you then lump its members together with people earning $75,000 to $200,000 a year-as Bill Clinton does-into the grand group called the middle class...

...Of course, Bush himself was one of the culprits in the executive pay raise, but that doesn’t make his new proposal wrong...

...Once, on a television show, I pointed out that the lower middle and the working classes were supplying most of the soldiers and sailors who were risking death in the Gulf war...

...Since the next person quoted by Kurtz was identified as a “liberal activist,” it seems that Hume ought to have been identified as the cheerleader on the White House press corps who was among those most responsible for the media’s proBush tilt in the first three years of the administration-a fact that deserves consideration in understanding the anti-Bush tilt that occurred this year...

...toward a president in his early honeymoon years, and to shift away from him when he gets in trouble...

...Most troubling is Bush’s indifference to domestic issues...

...One is the haunting knowledge, so memorably described in the pages of this magazine by James Fallows in 1975, that an underprivileged boy was sent to serve and possibly die in his place...

...It seems as if He has joined Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the great conspiracy against the working classes...

...Caught injlagrante, the Beer Institute reacted by claiming that while beer advertising expenditures have increased 50 percent in the last 20 years, per capita consumption has stayed the same...

...Linguistic skills among the State Department’s foreign service officers remain embarrassingly modest despite many articles about the problem in this and other publications...

...Beer companies use the same tactic...

...She was smart enough to see the trap and avoid it...

...According to the Times, the two leaders of the effort to silence the consultants are John S. Reed, the chairman of Citicorp, and H. Brewster Atwater Jr., chairman of General Mills...

...The big mistake we made when we abolished prohibition in the thirties is that we permitted drinking to be glamorized in the media...

...My guess is that he hasn’t been willing to forgive himself...

...Another example of BushReagan injustice: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the richest 20 percent of families got more than 1100 percent of the increase in average family income during the (eighties...

...There are, I suspect, three reasons for Clinton’s guilt...

...What’s really going on is that alcohol consumption among older adults has been steadily declining-the same is true of cigarette smoking-so that the beer and tobacco companies are fighting to stay even...

...Instead, they are telling the sources of those stories-the compensation consultants-to shut up...

...Actually, about 65,000 of them make $75,000 or more and 1 1,000 make more than $100,000...

...was as bad as Specter’s, are both highly respected by their colleagues...

...There’s still time for Ohio lawyers to make the Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminar in St...

...If drugs are legalized, the big money will be taken out of the trade, and drug-peddling crime will end...

...Is the FCC sound asleep...

...Can we find another term for this group...

...Contemptible...

...This is strong stuff...

...Kennedy later managed to extricate his crew and himself from behind enemy lines...

...In one story that appeared in The New York Times, George Cave, a witness, was described as “the only official of the agency who was fluent in Persian...

...Music videos are also used to reach what the Miller tape (prepared solely for use within the company) describes as “the allimportant entry-level drinker...

...At the time of the takeover of our embassy in Tehran in 1979, only one in 10 of the foreign service officers stationed there were even minimally competent in Persian...

...But the lobby’s latest triumph-getting a smokers’ rights bill passed by the California assembly by one vote-plowed new ground...

...The decisive vote was cast by legislator Dick Floyd, who was not in the chamber at the time...

...There are things written about Bill Clinton and A1 Gore that I’ve never seen written even by opinion reporters...

...I think there’s been a double standard...

...The late Drew Pearson put it this way: “We will give immunity to a very good source as long as the information he offers us is better than what we have on him...

...Just three influential congressmen-Dan Rostenkowski, Richard Gephardt, and Henry Waxman-got around $150,000 each...

...The main thing to remember during the next month is that while there is a lot wrong with Bill Clinton, there is a lot more wrong with George Bush...

...His point was immediately adopted by the TV pundits, and in the following days a visible antiClinton tint colored a good many campaign stones...

...as ABC’s White House correspondent...

...The president and other administration officials are valuable sources that reporters don’t want to offend-until, and this is the crucial point, it appears probable that the incumbent president will lose the election and the stories about what the administration is doing wrong are richer than the stories administration sources can give the press...

...We also think that an advertising prohibition is an essential companion to our even more controversial position in favor of legalizing drugs...

...The Bill Clintons of this world must wonder if they would have passed such a test, and if they will later come through in another clutch, more important for their country and the world, as Jack Kennedy did in the Cuban Missile Crisis...

...Stop being nervous about your failures in 1969 and focus on coming through in the critical final months of this campaign...

...So, to Bill Clinton, I would say what counts is the courage you show today...

...I think that’s why questions about his draft history continue to trip him up long after he should have learned the...

...Kurtz identified Hume simply The press has a tendency to lean One result of Bush-Reagan economic policies is that the percentage of students at the 25 most selective colleges and universities who came from families with incomes of at least $100,000 a year is rising and now stands at 37 percent...

...speaking of fairness, I think that most fair-minded people have been willing to forgive Bill Clinton for trying to avoid military service in Vietnam...

...I told her my own income put me squarely in that group, but she would not be comforted...

...And the consultants are complying, according to a recent story in The New York Times...

...God may have been innocent in this case-there is reason to suspect the long arm of a protobacco legislator at an adjoining desk-but I have to tell you that I’ve been worried about Him lately...

...He’s a crafty fellow...

...Mathematically impossible, you say...

...What the people most want to know is that you are pulled together inside...

...The person reporters should watch with high skepticism during this campaign is James Baker...

...I ’ve been remiss in not keeping you up to date about taxpayersubsidized conferences, conventions, and travel opportunities...

...By midsummer they had already contributed $10 million to House and Senate candidates...

...w h a t counts the most: that Bill Clinton as a very young man evaded the draft in a dubious war, or that George Bush as a president in his sixties evades taxes by claiming legal residence in Texas to avoid paying Maine or the District of Columbia the taxes he should pay on his only possibly legitimate residences...

...Yet this praiseworthy effort is being opposed by-guess who-the American government, in the person of Carla Hills, the U.S...

...Did you read about the study that showed the majority of young Baltimore blacks were somewhere between arrest and parole in the criminal justice system...

...What I ultimately learned, after years of Clinton-like guilt, was that what counted was not what I failed to do in the past but what I chose to do in the present...

...There is no question that people do terrible things under the influence of illegal drugs...

...I speak to him not as a morally superior World War II combat veteran like George Bush, but as one who, while he served in that war, was injured in training before facing the test of combat...

...They are succeeding by attracting new customers through advertising and “product placement” in movies and on MTV...

...News accounts of the recent trial of the CIA’S Clair George have inadvertently brought to light two of the government’s most enduring problems...

...So why do we persist in applying the same failed policy to other drugs that we don’t like...

...Has the Tobacco Institute enlisted a higher power...

...What better market than those wh’o are too young to know better or young enough to feel like they’re going to live forever...

...Another story about the George trial in The Washington Post reported that “throughout the trial, George expressed genuine indignation over having been indicted for doing what he, and the agency, had always done...

...that glamorize smoking or drinking...

...And you only make them worry when you give them evasive answers...

...I’m sony to report that Missouri lawyers who didn’t find out about it on their own have already missed their Mid-Year Seminar in Santa Fe...

...So it’s no small accomplishment that Taiwan recently embarked on a campaign to discourage smoking among its youth...

...The trouble with the Post article was that the first authority cited was Brit Hume, who told Kurtz that “some reporters are smitten with Clinton...

...What does it say about the United States Senate when Specter and Alan Simpson, whose behavior at the Hill hearings-“I have in my pocket...

...Related, and to me more reasonable, is the sense, extremely important to men like Clinton who have aspired to leadership positions since their grade school days, that war tests how a young leader will perform in the clutch...

...including 1.2 hours of ethics credit” at the Hyatt Regency on Grand Cayman Island in November...

...With guilt -Charles Peters...

...In fact, the Center for Science in the Public Interest recently got ahold of a Miller I3rewing Company videotape that bragged about the company’s success in getting its products shown in movies such as Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop...

...There is no jobs program that our government can offer today that has a realistic probability of even coming close to the income offered by the drug trade...

...Bush is bored by these problems as was dramatically demonstrated during the first four years of his presidency...

...But the worst act of Specter’s political career was trying to pin a perjury rap on Anita Hill a year ago without a shred of justification...

...A nice woman called up to say her husband was in the military and she resented being called lower middle class...

...As the Post explained, agency officials had become accustomed to, if not actually lying, telling Congress only as much as they wanted to tell, using cleverly crafted responses to avoid saying more...

...The reason for the consultants’ silence is, of course, that they depend on the good will of the executives for their business...

...The danger is that benefits that should go to the bottom half will be wasted on the more affluent...

...We believe that such advertising should be outlawed...

...As for misleading Congress, there is widespread feeling in the executive branch that evasion and lily-gilding are justified to protect the interests of one’s agency, whether it is the CIA or HUD...

...Of the 30 Americans serving in our consulate in Bombay in 1990, only one spoke the language well enough to do more than take a taxi across town...

...In fact, no one wants to admit to being a member...

...Only we tried that, didn’t we...

...This made him so angry that he made the false charge against her anyway...

...like this, you don’t answer questions with the ease and confident self assurance that is so important for a presidential candidate to project...

...See Christopher Georges and Katherine Boo’s article on page 36 for some of the reasons...

...For instance, His Hurricane Andrew hit, not Palm Beach, but Homestead and Florida City, which are largely inhabited by the very groups whose income has suffered the most from the tax and economic policies of the last 12 years...

...He had tried to trap her into committing perjury...

...WINDMILLS Unfortunately, language problems also exist at other government agencies...

...Under Reagan and Bush the tax burden of a couple making $15,000 a year has risen b:y almost a third, but the tax burden for a couple with a $150,000 income has fallen by about a third...

...This is why I hope Clinton will forgive himself before it’s too late...

...Manipulating the press is his specialty-no one in the ReaganBush era has done it better...

...The charge, of course, was lying to Congress...

...companies encourage the young to smoke is by paying the movie producers to use their cigarette brands in films that attract One way the cigarette youthful audiences...

...If the best economic opportunity for poor youth is selling illegal drugs, they’re going to seize that opportunity even if it means jail...

...And how about this study by the Tax Research Project at the University of Missouri...

...Who pushed the button on Floyd’s desk...

...I especially admire the chutzpah of the one to two hours of “ethics” credit...

...Even if he fails with his debate hustle, reporters should remain alert to the danger of writing the stories he wants them to write...

...Iran has had such an important position-either as ally or foe-in American foreign policy for the past 40 years that this is a genuinely frightening statement, even to those of us who have long been unsure of the linguistic competence of the CIA...

...But they also do terrible things under the influence of a legal drug, alcohol...

...What exactly are the ethics involved in cheating the taxpayer...

...What’s happened to fairness...

...And I hate to have to tell the morticians that they missed the National Funeral Directors Association winter seminar, where, according to the organization’s publication, The Director, “One hundred and five funeral directors, family, and friends enjoyed the plentiful powder at Steamboat Springs in the beautiful Colorado Rockies...

...As veteran readers of this magazine know, we don’t accept advertisement...

...I suspect that few voters know that more than a handful of government employees are so well paid...

...Trade Representative who is fighting to keep the world free for Phillip Morris...

...Clinton’s life shows that he really cares about the economic, health, and educational problems that must be faced by the next administration...

...Etched in Clinton’s mind must have been, as it was in mine and so many others who knew the story, the picture of Kennedy, after the Japanese destroyer had plowed through his PT boat, assembling his men in enemy waters in the dark and swimming to a nearby island, towing, with a line gripped between his teeth, a badly burned sailor...

...speaking of the tobacco industry, it has long been admired, even by those of us who oppose it, for the cleverness of its lobbying tactics and its all-around skill at getting legislators to vote its way...

...danger of answering them in a misleading way...

...Another reason, one less rational but deeply rooted in the male psyche, is that he had evaded a test of manhood...

...Bill Clinton grew up hearing the story of Jack Kennedy’s heroism in the South Pacific and he must have wondered: Would I have the brains and courage and determination to come through a crisis and figure a way to get my men out of such a mess alive...

...Of course, the problem of addiction won’t end, but we can minimize it by prohibiting advertising and devoting to treatment programs even half the money we spend today on the incarceration of drug criminals so that addicts who want to shake their habit will not be denied treatment as they now often are...

...In September, Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post’s fine media critic, proved how influential he is by writing an article headlined “Republicans and Some Journalists Say Media Tend to Boost Clinton, Bash Bush...

...And it didn’t work...

...I would not be at all surprised if, by the time these words are published, he has succeeded in conning the press into either uncritical or only quietly critical acceptance of a debate format and schedule favorable to Bush...

...It’s frightening how the cable television industry has flooded its channels with advertising and comment that represents only its own side of a bill before Congress that affects its interests, and not even made the tiniest effort to show any other views...

...Thus the wisest drug to prohibit is alcohol...

...If you have to spend three hours in class, why not spend the other 21 in the American Paradise?’) And members of the Young Lawyer’s Section of the Louisiana Bar can still get “1 5 hours of CLE credit...

...And they do more of these terrible things while drunk than while stoned, because alcohol is now the drug of choice among the young men who cause most of the violent and accidental (vehicular) homicides in America today...

...If you’re from Pennsylvania, 1 can’t give you a travel tip but I can advise you on what to do at the polls in November: Vote against Arlen Specter...

...Even the sports announcers have been turned into propagandists...

...Because the bottom 40 percent actually lost ground, it is possible...

...I n re cent decades, cigarette smoking has been as accepted in the Far East as eating rice...

...H o w are American business executives reacting to the news stories about their generous salaries...

...Thomas in December...

...We favor legalization of drugs, not because we think it will decrease consumption, but because it will decrease crime...

...One reason the working class has been so terribly screwed is that it doesn’t stand up for itself...

...There is, however, one stand Bush has taken with which I sympathize: his proposal for a 5 percent reduction in the salaries of federal employees making more than $75,000...

...The catch is that only 5 percent of American families make $100,000 a year...

...Are they saying, “We should take a cut?’ Not exactly...