TILTING AT WINDMILLS

Peters, Charles

TILTING AT WINDMILLS K e e p i n g the family together isn’t always best, Lois Forer wrote a few years back [“Bring Back the Orphanage,” April 19881, arguing that children might sometimes...

...The other women said Smith had been drinking...
...So is the administrators’ excessive compensation in comparison to teachers...
...But Cheap Chic is another matter...
...The second, presumably, will tell it like it isn’t...
...Should we let the lawyers escape this month...
...He was driven in his limo to visit one local neurologist...
...In addition, some time shall be reserved for other topics of relevance to psychiatry, hopefully such as fit in well with the operatic themes which center on seduction, narcissism, and the dolce vita...
...Army study of the service’s role in the Persian Gulf war was commissioned after the first one was declared too negative by General Gordon Sullivan...
...Another problem is that the automatic raises for employees whose salaries shouldn’t be increased uses up money that should go for other purposes, such as larger salaries for the truly outstanding or money to hire additional clerks who are needed to take care of the people standing in line...
...Most judges prefer 9:30 to 4:30 with 90-minute lunch breaks, and there are more 10-to-4ers than there are Still, Judge Lupo displayed the Lupos...
...The Candidate S Wqe, a highly readable new .political novel by Patricia O’Brien, makes a case for pro-choice that is on the whole persuasive but also shows the absurd extremes to which the argument can be carried...
...The key is to turn this desperation into what professor Zenas Block of New York University’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies calls “creative dissatisfaction...
...Much of the entrepreneurial stimulation comes from outright desperation, as out-of-work people realize they have no alternatives...
...You’re basically innocent until proven broke...
...It would have ruined your life...
...And past experience provides a solid basis for this hope...
...I want a real shark I can count on to take my side regardless of what she says...
...Even Donald Trump, according to Adweek, shops at K-mart...
...The earlier episodes had occurred indoors...
...R o w a n Scarborough of The Washington Ernes reports that a second U.S...
...T h e preceding items do not mean I scorn all lawyers...
...For example, in one Montana school district last year the average pay increase for teachers was $23, while the average administrator’s raise was $1,500...
...Consider, also, the case of Dr...
...A n d fr om Florida, we have a colleague’s description of William Kennedy Smith’s lawyer, Roy Black: “Roy represents people who can afford him...
...Smith’s degree of undress differed in each account...
...And Knight-Ridder’s Frank Greve quoted a worker at the Department of Labor’s Division of Industrial Relations Analysis who described how employees spend their days: “You walk up and down the corridor and drink coffee, you’re on the phone to your friends...
...That there is indeed some fat in Washington is suggested by two recent news items...
...And what will they discuss...
...It also helps if the friend wrote the job description with your credentials in mind...
...All four said he initially struck them as a nice man until he got them onto his turf, where a Jekyll-and-Hyde change occurred in his personality and he forced himself on them...
...Or Roanoke, Danville, or Lynchburg...
...The fact is that the average American earns less than $28,000 while the average civil servant in Washington gets more than $42,000...
...A recent case from Buffalo, New York, illustrates Forer’s point...
...Practically everyone who has ever worked, as I once did, in an agency having anything to do with national security or foreign affairs has a strong suspicion that there are a lot of classified documents that contain information the government has no legitimate reason for keeping secret...
...An executive of TCI, the nation’s largest cable operator, was quoted by The Washington Post as telling one such official: “We know where you live, where your office is, and who you owe money to...
...You’re both good guys...
...I hope the people losing their jobs will think about starting their own businesses...
...In the upper levels of the bureaucracy, members of the Senior Executive Service make as much as $112,000 and get such generous perquisites as the right to retire as early as age 55 and to shelter up to $13,000 a year from taxes...
...If you read John R. MacArthur’s op-ed piece in The New York Times revealing the phony testimony engineered by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton concerning the incubator babies in Kuwait, you probably assumed that the story wouldn’t enhance the firm’s reputation...
...It’s time for conservatives to face the truth on this issue...
...A reporter from the Minneapolis StarTribune noticed him during the Super Bowl weekend because he was so hard not to notice...
...service that is not being met and try to fill it...
...Here are the dissimilarities that Black persuaded Lupo were significant enough to ban the three victims’ testimony...
...w m e n Brookes died in December...
...Although on most issues Paul Tsongas has won the tell-itOne fact that federal civil like-it-is prize, Brown is the clear victor on the money issue...
...All together now) Of course not...
...Well, assume again...
...Government at all levels should start the kind of slimming down that has been taking place in corporate America...
...If you hire a clerk at $20,000 a year, it won’t be long until he is making $30,000 as a result of COLAs and other automatic and semiautomatic raises such as the government’s “step” increases...
...Some cynics say that a supervisor is most likely to approve the selfcertification on a 171 for applicants who are 36-24-36...
...He was riding around Minneapolis in a blue-and-gold, chauffeur-driven Rolls...
...This possibility isn’t open to everyone, but I suspect it is to a very large percentage of the middle-level managers who are losing their jobs in the current wave of downsizing...
...Liberals are more inclined to believe in health care for all, but too many liberal politicians are still afraid of offending the American Medical Association...
...Why was Dr...
...Some of you may have seen our debates on C-Span and will not be surprised that, even though we disagreed on most issues, I felt great affection and respect for Warren...
...The Los Angeles office of Hill & Knowlton, Inc.,” reports the Los Angeles Business Journal, “appears to be benefiting from recent publicity about the company’s controversial, prewar public relations campaign for Citizens for Free Kuwait...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS K e e p i n g the family together isn’t always best, Lois Forer wrote a few years back [“Bring Back the Orphanage,” April 19881, arguing that children might sometimes be better off in a foster home or even in a decently run orphanage than if left in the care of their natural parents...
...with short lunch hours...
...greater number of new business startups during depressions and recessions,” write Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell in The Washington Times...
...The prosecutor argued that there were plenty of similarities: The three victims and Bowman were all brunettes Smith met while they were unescorted in a social setting...
...In New York City, the record in the last decade is similar-a 25 percent increase in the number of bureaucrats with only a 3.5 percent increase in population...
...You can howl at the moon about how bad things are, but you can also look at the world and say, how can this be better and what can I do about it...
...How would he justify the tax deduction...
...Twelve days earlier The New York Times ran a long article entitled “For the Nineties, Lavish Amounts of Stinginess,” which noted: “Advertising agencies, newsletters, and New Age visionaries are promoting the joys of the simple life, cheap chic, and fashionable frugality...
...This reminds me of the time that an acquaintance who wanted a divorce from his wife called to ask me to recommend a lawyer...
...Associated Press disclosed that a federal pipeline inspector had been earning more than $100,000 a year even though the pipeline he was supposed to inspect had not been built...
...Kerrey, by the way, is also the only candidate who favors the kind of radical surgery on the bureaucracy that the Monthly has advocated for two decades...
...You read the paper...
...If you disagree, please write...
...So let’s start with the Virginia State Bar...
...I think his $100 limit on contributions and the 800 telephone number he offers are inspired...
...One thing you’d think the government would test for sure is your typing ability, if the job calls for typing skill...
...Yet many organizations are doing so because of these annual increases...
...The New Idealism we proclaimed in March 1980 sank without a trace in the Reagan years...
...As you know, doctors are just as guilty as lawyers in the matter of fraudulent tax deductions taken under the guise of continuing education...
...I’m not kidding...
...Not necessarily...
...Perhaps Charlottesville, Richmond, or Norfolk...
...A few are marvelous men and women dedicated to the pursuit of freedom, justice, and fair play...
...Agencies can permit applicants to self-certify on their 171 form...
...Get a home equity loan-it used to be called a second mortgage-im your house...
...As practically everyone who followed the trial understands, Lupo threw the case to Black when she barred the testimony of three other victims of Smith because their cases were not “strikingly similar” to Patricia Bowman’s...
...Last fall, The Philadelphia Inquirer devoted a cover story to it...
...If the franking privilege is given to congressmen solely to allow them to communicate with their constituents, as many of them claim, why are members allowed to use it to send mail outside their present district but within the redrawn boundaries of the district where they are seeking reelection...
...bench’s fundamental flaw: excessive sympathy for the arguments of counsel for the wellheeled...
...Day, on the other hand, is the kind of conservative for whom a special place in hell should be reserved...
...I hope my conservative friends noted the conclusion of a long article on the Canadian health insurance plan that appeared in The Wall Street Journal on December 3: “Canadians are almost universally devoted to universal health insurance...
...They scorn public assistance for everyone else but are deeply moved by the plight of their own special interest group...
...We proposed it in June 1990...
...Guess where it’s holding its summer Continuing Legal Education Seminar this year...
...A somewhat larger group-still, alas, a minority-consists not of crusaders but of thoroughly decent and reasonable people to whom you would naturally turn for advice in a dispute...
...He was rare among columnists because he believed in basing his opinions not on an arrogant regard for the magic of his own insight, but on his own hard work as a researcher and reporter, digging up the fresh facts that make opinions worth listening to...
...One would hope that psychiatrists, the guardians of our mental health, would refuse to participate in such chicanery...
...Thriftiness is Back in Vogue...
...We are the largest cable company around...
...This is often not the case, especially in midand upper-level jobs where eligibility is determined by an evaluation of your credentials...
...This is called the buddy system, and it has played a far greater role than political patronage in determining the composition of the civil service...
...These Virginia lawyers are going to Cambridge, England...
...We are having your house watched and we are going to use this information to destroy you...
...B ecause Jerry Brown is such a strange bird, the press has far too cavalierly dismissed his crusade against big money in politics...
...He was rare among conservatives in having a heart...
...Quickly picked up by Time, the term soon began to appear in other publications...
...But more often, what putting up some of your own funds does is help attract other potential investors by convincing them that you’re really committed...
...Such COLAs are common in many organizations, but they don’t make sense...
...Maybe at halftime we’ll talk about the neurology of football injuries,” he said...
...Senator Robert Byrd has been ridiculed for seeking to transfer parts of the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies to West Virginia...
...Although I can understand why the judge was less than captivated by Moira Lasch’s icy incompetence, Lupo should not have allowed herself to be conned by the warmer, cleverer Black...
...He got further with some than with others...
...According to Formal Opinion No...
...This gives bureaucrats a chance to meet some real people and get a first-hand feel for the problems the government is supposed to be dealing with...
...Bruce Kuhn was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl-a rape he videotaped and then showed to his two sons, aged eight and eleven...
...The ineptitude of school administrators is one of the great scandals of American public education...
...The recession may also be a major factor in finally bringing about the explosion of entrepreneurship that the Monthly has so long promoted...
...troops in Europe...
...But you can be sure they won’t discuss the ethics of sticking the rest of us with a large share of the bill through the tax deductability of the trip...
...It then helps if you have a friend in the agency who will pick your name from the list...
...Their leader, Alan Day, brother of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, is fighting an effort led by Democratic congressman Mike Synar to require ranchers to pay market prices...
...servants might learn is how generously they are paid compared to most people...
...I hear your pleas of “No, no,” imploring me to suppress my normally gentle instincts so that the scoundrels can be thoroughly savaged with as many twists of the knife as I can manage...
...Legal ethics...
...He didn’t jump on them all in the same way...
...But I regret to report that the Northern California Psychiatric Society’s Professional Education Committee is offering the following tax-deductible conference on July 10-12 in Santa Fe, New Mexico: “The tentative program includes two operas, on Friday and Saturday nights (Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Johann Strauss’s Die Fledennaus), both superb, delightful, and psychologically sophisticated...
...Most outsiders think federal civil servants are selected and promoted on the basis of rigorous written examinations...
...Do you know who the Welfare Cowboys are...
...Our proposals to draft the rich and take away their social security have not been adopted even though we’ve been recommending them for 20 years or so...
...I don’t want one of those nice, reasonable guys who will tell me I have to understand my wife’s side of the story...
...Or even a bit of a lark at Virginia Beach...
...I n January, members of Congress got a $4,400 pay raise...
...Synar, like Day, is a cattleman, but he is willing to compete in the market without government help...
...During the eighties, the District of Columbia bureaucracy increased by 20 percent even though the city’s population shrank by 5 percent...
...There is not a hint of awareness that her educated, capable husband might have been better off without the tedium or moral marginality of the typical law practice...
...Obviously, the recession is the main cause...
...The other women had not been kissed first...
...Most people on the right are there because they are selfish, but Warren was generous, with a Dickensian sense of the fickleness of good and bad fortune...
...On the health-care issue, Bob Kerrey, who supports a Canada-style program, wins the campaign‘s candor award...
...It is stamped “Confidential” and kept under lock and key...
...He was sentenced to just eight weekends in jail because he was the only family member available to care for the boys...
...On Saturday and Sunday morning, panel discussions of the two operas are planned...
...In other words, the greatest sin of all is to take bread out of the mouth of a fellow attorney...
...Helman in the Rolls...
...until 6 p.m...
...It may be going a bit too far to move the White House to Wheeling, but I applaud the idea of getting federal agencies out of Washington and spreading them around the rest of the country...
...Of course, it doesn’t make sense to pay a clerk $30,000...
...They are cattlemen who are allowed to pay far less to graze their animals on federal land than they would have to pay to rent private property for grazing...
...D o n ’ t think we claim exclusive or even a major share of the credit for the triumph of Cheap Chic...
...In the Smith case, there was one notable departure from the customarily abysmal standards of the bar: Judge Mary E. Lupo did work hard, keeping her court in session from 9 a.m...
...1991-2 of the Committee on Professional and Judicial Ethics of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York: “A lawyer may not advise or encourage a client to approach a represented party directly...
...There was little publicity because it was an automatic cost-of-living adjustment, which they will continue to get for years on end...
...If they fit the job description of the position you seek, you are placed on a list of eligibles...
...A Pentagon spokesman noted that the purpose of the first version “was to tell it like it is...
...I can imagine many of the latter group wanting to say to me when I tell them of a problem I’m having with some other fellow, “Why don’t you just talk it over with him...
...The heroine tells her husband that if she hadn’t had an abortion just after the couple graduated from college, “It would have meant you giving up law school...
...Dale Helman, a neurologist from Monterey, California...
...The only use of the frank in these cases is to send the new people literature that will persuade them to vote for the congressman...
...He took three others to the game...
...They may have gotten a glimpse when they read that Gennifer Flowers was making only $17,000 as a state employee in Arkansas and that Bill Clinton was getting only $35,000 as governor...
...The problem is that they are forbidden to do this by a majority of their colleagues who don’t want to risk losing a fee for themselves or their buddies at the bar...
...It is a sad truth that Monthly causes do not always win widespread acceptance...
...None of these distinctions strikes me as even marginally significant...
...Charles Peters...
...Its date: April 15, 1917...
...So he rented the car at $1,200 a day and bought four Super Bowl tickets on the SO-yard line for $1,550 each...
...KnightRidder’s Tim Weiner recently found a file in the National Archives that suggests the suspicion is not unwarranted...
...You made a big mistake messing with TCI...
...I’m sure you can work it out together...
...If you need capital, I have a suggestion from my own experience...
...Its subject: US...
...A January 27 headline in The Washington Times read: “Extravagance Loses Allure...
...Your own money may be enough to get you started...
...Because his accountant told him he needed a $10,000 tax deduction...
...One reason cable television companies get away with increasing your fees is that they don’t hesitate to play hardball with local officials who stand up for the public interest...

Vol. 24 • March 1992 • No. 3


 
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