TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...For a look at Richard Darman's failings in this regard, see "What the Smartest Man in Washington Doesn't Understand...

...They found none...

...My favorite retirement program is the one for Air Force chimpanzees...

...They had a search warrant based on the suspicion that they would find a large supply of marijuana in the ranch house...

...Chrysler boasts that its new Concorde ushers in "the renaissance of the American car...

...To find out what you really wanted to know, you conducted auditions and talked to respected friends who had witnessed their performances...

...He was the EPA's expert witness in a number of important cases that the agency won against corporate polluters...

...One technique officials—who get up to 11 weeks of vacation and sick leave time—used was to legally sell back up to five weeks of that time to the county...

...Charles Peters...

...I continue to think that extremists on both sides of the abortion issue present a grave danger to the social sanity of this republic...

...The big challenge for whomever gets the job is figuring out a better system for monitoring which government programs are working and which are not...

...These veterans of the space program cost $37,000 each to maintain through their golden years...

...If he had been charged 20 percent of the Medicare-approved price, which was $2,917.15, he would have had to pay only $594.23...

...This will surprise the ambitious power people who are currently vying for plum assignments in the new administration, and who could not imagine writing back to Mom about the thrill of working in personnel...

...It may be time to revive our column devoted to the Worst City Government, an honor that had clearly been earned by the District of Columbia before we decided to declare a moratorium as a courtesy to new mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly...

...The National Taxpayers Union (NTU) is trying to enjoin this raise in the federal courts on the grounds that the 27th Amendment—the one drafted by James Madison in 1789 but not ratified until last May—provides that "no law varying the compensation for the services of the Senator or Representative shall take effect until an election of Representatives shall have intervened...

...government: Recently, two D.C...

...But my guess is that the federal judiciary will rule otherwise...

...But the decline in quality of the civil service over the past 25 years has been dramatic...

...I have long contended that, next to threatening to cut an agency's budget which might lead to bureaucrats losing their jobs, the issue surest to arouse passion in the bureaucratic breast is parking places...

...With good reason: The national inspection rate is even worse...

...Of course, the rancher would have been better off without a gun, but just think how many times you've read stories of violent forced entry during a drug search which led to gunplay in which one or more people were wounded or killed, all on the basis of the suspicion of the nonviolent crime of possessing drugs...

...And that means you and I will be stuck with the bill...

...The catch is that far too few trucks are inspected meaning that only a handful of offenders are actually caught and taken off the road...

...The ideal person for the job was Ken O'Donnell who performed it, without title and with a proper passion for anonymity, under John Kennedy...

...Let's hear one hand clapping for Ross Perot...

...If he weren't a paranoid egomaniac, he would be a great man...

...George Bush seemed totally uninformed about the agency but said, don't worry, it's backed by the credit of the United States government...

...The scene is a mountain ranch in California...

...Why can't we free ourselves from these knee-jerk responses to crime and adopt a rational policy of being tough on the violent and tender on the first-time, nonviolent offender, except in cases involving betrayal of trust by such people as public officials and savings and loan executives...

...Don't kill me...

...Superior Court judge was protecting the public by sentencing the killer of a cabdriver to just six years in prison...

...The reason is that, on the issue of pay raises, the judges and congressmen are allied under the great banner of More is Better...The 435 members of the House of Representatives each spent an average of $171,809 of your money on franked mail from January 1991 to September 1992...

...Again and again I encountered obviously padded resumes claiming Broadway and Hollywood credits that even the moderately suspicious would view with skepticism...

...What really counts is performance, but our educated elite wants test scores and degrees to be the markers of success instead...

...To launch an Italian satellite, the equivalent of which we sent into space in 1976, at a tiny fraction of the cost of the Columbia mission, in an unmanned Delta rocket...

...This just doesn't make sense...

...I begin to sweat when one of these giants comes near me on the Beltway...

...Her husband, who had been sleeping in the next room, seizes his gun and rushes to protect her...

...Its cost will be in the neighborhood of a billion dollars...

...There is a middle ground of common sense and humanity on which both sides of the abortion debate should try to meet instead of behaving like hysterical Nazis...

...If the federal government is bad, then state, county, and municipal governments are usually worse...

...And Why it Will Hurt You," Jason DeParle, November 1989...

...police department are under indictment for other crimes...

...One of the cruelest and dumbest prejudices of the American meritocracy is its bias, in favor of credentialism...

...As the husband's arm drops, he is shot twice in the chest and dies instantly...

...Can you believe the Bush administration wants to add to the danger by permitting truck drivers to drive 100 hours in an eight-day period instead of the 70 hours currently allowed...

...Several armed men crash through the door...

...If only the people doing the hiring would learn this lesson...

...In another California county, The San Jose Mercury News found that officials had cut $37 million from essential services while refusing to cut a cent from the $10 million paid each year to the top 120 of those same officials...

...Next in importance is the person who will serve as Clinton's chief of staff, who, incidentally, I would not call chief of staff because the title tends to make the incumbent put on airs and think he should be on talk shows...

...The only catch is that the cars are assembled in Canada with 28 percent non-American parts...

...When someone tries to convince you that decentralization will automatically produce better government, you would be wise to find out how much he knows about local government...

...There was no doubt that the defendant had shot the cabbie while robbing him...

...Caron is the EPA official whose actual expertise has never been questioned but who had lied about his credentials...

...The latest illustration of this comes from FEMA, where last year, according to Knight-Ridder's Frank Greve, "parking came to absorb its leaders...

...The killers were drug enforcement agents...

...Hentoff, who was the moderator, started by saying the event was about free speech—Casey would give his position and the audience would then have the chance to question and argue with him...

...Not to worry, the feds and the industry chorused, there hadn't been a quake in the area in 10,000 years...

...The rancher's wife screams, "Please don't shoot me...

...If that doesn't convince you of the need for tougher government regulation of all the bandits out there masquerading as respectable professionals and businessmen, I offer one more example: A recent study reported in the British medical journal, The Lancet, found that a five-year delay in requiring warning labels on aspirin led to the needless deaths of 1,470 children from Reye's syndrome...

...To me, the most important lesson of Perot's campaign—one that I pray Bill Clinton absorbs—is that Perot attracted the most support when he was the most honest about the country's problems...

...Did you see Nat Hentoff's column about the crazies who shouted down Robert Casey, the governor of Pennsylvania, when he attempted to speak recently in New York on the subject of "How a Liberal Can be Pro-Life...

...James Q. Wilson says the civil service is "in a death spiral...

...Attracting better bureaucrats must rank high among Bill Clinton's priorities...

...More than one in four trucks inspected on Maryland and Virginia highways are found to have defective brakes, lights, and other safety features...

...Bill Moyers also played the role of unofficial chief of staff during LBJ's most successful years, 1963-65 The third most important job is head of the Office of Personnel Management...

...Sometimes it seems that the American judiciary is split between conservative Republicans who want to send all criminals to the electric chair and liberal Democrats who want to give probation to the vilest murderers...

...I agree with Susan Threadgill (see "Who's Who," page 18) that the director of OMB is the most important appointment that Bill Clinton will make...

...This should have chilled you with the memory of similar reassurances about the savings and loans...

...The men shout, "Put down the gun...

...Now the cases are being thrown out—not because there is a shred evidence that Caron's testimony was wrong, but because he didn't have the degrees he claimed...

...Outpatient clinics have found a new way to bilk their Medicare patients by billing the patient's share as a percentage of its inflated "list" price rather than of the Medicare-approved cost...

...Consider Ventura County in California, which was recently investigated by the Los Angeles Times, where 13 administrators were found to have padded their salaries by a total of $190,000 in just one year...

...We got stuck with these automatic raises through the timehonored legislative device of subsuming them in a bill the title of which, the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, not only gave no hint of the mischief it concealed but reeked of high-mindedness...

...cops were arrested after three witnesses said the officers had robbed them at gunpoint...

...With slippery corporate manipulators like Carl Icahn maneuvering to escape liability for employee pensions, I would guess that the chances we'll be stuck are pretty good...

...Why not eliminate franked mass mailings and use the frank privilege only for replies to constituent letters and correspondence between congressmen and other government officials...

...This is on top of a base pay that ranged from $79,274 to $112,008...

...For what...

...At about the same time, a D.C...

...The reason, however, goes beyond Kelly's inclination to devote more effort to increasing her vacation time than to increasing the efficiency of the D.C...

...Instead, the pro-choicers began "hooting, screaming, pounding, and whistling...

...Speaking of space, the latest foolishness from NASA was the space shuttle Columbia launch in October...

...During the debates, a questioner asked about the health of the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp., the government agency that insures private pension plans...

...Thirty other members of the D.C...

...At the time of the offense, the defendant had a record of prior arrests and was an escapee from a penal facility...

...According to The Washington Post, one in three inspected trucks has some defect...

...Unfortunately, only those who work in the worlds of sports and the performing arts have done SO...

...All 13 got a $6,000 annual car allowance plus 27 cents for each mile they drove on county business...

...Congressional salaries will automatically rise to $133,644 in January...

...Well, you guessed it: This year, an earthquake registering 5.6 on the Richter scale blew out the windows of the Energy Department's office building at the site, collapsed its ceilings, and cracked its elevator shaft...

...Remember, the chance for catastrophic failure on these missions is one in seventy-eight...

...For the last decade, the nuclear power industry and the federal government have been assuring the people of Nevada that the nuclear waste dump planned for Yucca Mountain would be absolutely safe, even in the event of an earthquake...

...The essential characteristic he brought to his role was the ability to inspire confidence in both JFK and administration officials that O'Donnell could be trusted to deliver messages accurately, with good sense about what should take priority and without any input of self-interest that might distort content...

...I am pro-choice but I understand why many wise and caring people worry about abortion on demand and want to find some way at least to encourage the woman involved to reflect on the choice she is making...

...This burdened the postal system with roughly 500 million pieces of mail...

...But what I learned was that the insecurities that produced the false claims were irrelevant to the main question which was, "Does the'person have the talent to play the part, dance the steps, sing the songs, or direct or choreograph this company...

...So in Elyria, Ohio, a middle school teacher who was also the wrestling coach, and whose talent at both jobs was vouched for by 60 parents, was fired because he didn't have a teaching certificate or the right degree...

...But the most absurd example of credentialism gone amok has to be the case of Robert E. Caron...

...So, to take one example offered by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a California patient who paid 20 percent of the clinic's list price of $7,314 for therapy for a pinched nerve had to fork over $1,462.80 to the clinic...

...Since President Bush issued the executive order authorizing the raise before November 3, the NTU seems to have a pretty good case...

...After much debate, they spent $225,000 to subsidize headquarters parking and drop the monthly rate from $137 to $20...

...Let's hope someone else comes along, who doesn't have Perot's more bizarre qualities but who does have the common sense and candor that I think Americans yearn to find in their leaders...

...Just as the depositors were bailed out then, the pension plans may have to be bailed out soon...

...I learned my first lesson in the silliness of the meritocrats when I was working in the theater in the late forties and early fifties...

...Not only was the money for the Columbia launch wasted pointlessly, but the lives of the astronauts were needlessly put at risk...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Your suspicion that rich people have different standards from the rest of us will be confirmed by the headline that their favorite publication, The Wall Street Journal, ran over a report that George Bush's retirement income will be $577,000 a year: "Comfortable, Not Lavish...