TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...The most depressing fact was that the site cut 87 years ago was no closer to its original condition than the one cut 45 years ago...

...Male journalists (especially the TV pundits) who used to be noted for wearing lowstyle, rumpled, ill-fitting polyester and wool blends that had certainly been bought off the rack, and probably on sale, are increasingly seen in tailored suits of the purest and finest wool that, if they do not come from Saville Row, certainly cost somewhere between $500 and $1,000...

...On another Friday,” Priest added, “it offered broiled lobster tail, roasted ‘red bliss’ potatoes, asparagus, and poached pear with chocolate and raspberry sauce...

...All this costs the individual Treasury executive $4.75...

...Even a firm called Healthy Buildings, which is supposed to advise owners on how to make the air in their buildings cleaner, ha:;, according to NBC News, “strong ties to Phillip Morris...

...More than 20,000 of these Haitians could immigrate to the U.S...

...Department of Finance and Revenue, which handles real estate assessments, among other things...

...Meanwhile, D.C...

...What about the ethics of lending your name to such a person and to the corrupt organization that the UMW was at that time...

...As I scoured the article for clues to that fundamental difference, I began to fear my quest was in vain...

...He kept saying his own experience with Clifford raised no questions about Clifford’s character but instead inspired both affection and admiration...

...It’s tempting to believe the timber industry when it promises that all tho:se clear cuts despoiling the Pacific Northwest will soon grow back into beautiful forests...

...The man will walk up to one section-such as “Birthday” or ‘‘Anniversary”--and quickly pick out a card, buy it, and leave the store...

...If there’s a certain unpleasant aroma coming from under that stone, hold your nostrils and leave it unturned...

...Why not ask these worthies to get to work in the visa section until the backlog is cleared up...

...Actually, one of these men is a gifted writer and three others are very good...

...Getting no satisfaction, she went to the assessment office, where she found the District had her listed as the owner of a twobedroom condo next door...

...We want to warn the Democratic candidates that pandering to such selfishness will diminish their ability to make crucial reforms in education and in the bureaucracy...

...The bill on her condo should have been $1,763.32...

...For those who suspect that Dan Quayle’s Council on Competitiveness is up to no good but lack hard evidence, I offer this report from the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette to show what just one action taken by the council could mean to one community...

...Or perhaps it is because there is a deep collective aversion to even entertaining such suspicions...

...But we also criticize liberals whose faith in government blinds them to its defects...

...Certainly, we’ve got to do something to reverse a trend in which the most able people feel they have to leave government in order to maintain their selfrespect...

...Although the facts were clear, Warnke didn’t want to hear them...

...The explanation lies in the mission of this magazine: to discover why our system of government breaks down and what can be done to make it work so that we can attain the justice for all that this country is supposed to stand for...

...They would have been far happier spending their lives in government...

...The city says she owes that plus more than $200 in penalties...

...cities...

...public libraries spend $9.50 in operating expenses for every book circulated...

...In some cases, two employees reported to one manager...

...it was necessary to shut down the processing section, that much of the visa work couldn’t have been done behind closed doors on the basis of orderly appointments that wouldn’t have attracted long lines...

...She appealed to his supervisor, who agreed to change this year’s assessment but said she would have to appeal the previous years’ to the board of equalization...

...There they would have the necessary scope to exercise their talents...

...To me, it is one of the great tragedies of Washington that men of this talent have been convinced that money is more important than what truly fascinates them...

...They would not have had to be doomed to the tedium of corporate law, in which the only stimulation comes from dealmaking that is seldom related to any public good...

...The motive for doing so, I’m afraid, is big money...

...This means that the seven chemical plants in the Charleston area can now increase toxic emissions to a total of 3.4 million pounds a year...

...Why then do we criticize them as we do in this issue...

...embassy...

...Also, they would have been free of the pressure to lobby for the selfish interests that can pay the big fees that sustain lawyers...

...More than half the time, crews are routinely scheduled for what is called ‘reduced rest,’ ” the meaning of which Baskin illustrates with an Atlantic Southeast Airlines crew...

...Several years ago, it tried to deal humanely with the fears of the elderly that they would be driven from their homes by rising real estate assessments...

...Senior civil servants are now making $1 12,000 a year...

...The taxpayers’ subsidy is $126,048 this year...

...Thus, we feel it is important to take on groups like the teachers’ and government employees’ unions that oppose reform that might threaten their tenure even though it would help society as a whole...

...So this year the asse:ssment break was changed so that it does not apply to people with incomes of more than $100,000...

...The board agreed with Motherlee and ordered the city to change the assessment...

...If you’re traveling to any place other than a large city, you’re likely to find yourself boarding a commuter airline...

...But then, in June, she received a new bill from the city for back taxes on the one-bedroom apartment...

...For years I’ve noticed that when I needed an auto part or a repair and turned to the Sears ads, they’d say something like “25 percent off’ or “one third off’ without explaining off what, which is usually the tipoff that a con is being played at your expense...

...That ratio is, according to the Post’s Joel Garreau, “higher than any state and virtually all U.S...

...I see the case as does Robert Morganthau, the Manhattan district attorney, as an obvious bribery in which BCCI paid off Clifford and Altman to conceal its ownership of First American...

...Then there’s the case of the woman who called 9 11 after she was raped by an intruder in her home...

...If you work for a prominent Washington law firm, as have people like Warnke, Cutler, McPherson, and Rauh, or for a large trade association (as have Ignatius and Mrs...

...One has to wonder why, even if “Too many managers supervised too few people,” according to a recent Washington Post article on the local Metro subway and bus system...

...The Immigration and Naturalization Service has approved their visa papers and sent them to Port-au-Prince, where they are gai.hering dust at the U.S...

...Evidence of her government’s Another tale of ineptitude comes from the D.C...

...We wish we could report that the situation had improved during the reign of the new mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, but it has not...

...There, according to The New York Times, garbage is picked up seven days a week, 800 miles of streets are swept by hand every day, and if you’ve been there recently you know that potholes are virtually nonexistent...

...That is not good for them or for the country...

...Most males go to a store with a specific purchase in mind, such as a shirt or a pair of shoes...

...That’s fine, I thought, but what about the widows who got cheated by Tony Boyle...

...It is, I think, because they are part of a Washington culture in which something close to bribery is so common that one learns not to inquire when there are circumstances that would ordinarily raise suspicion about the activities of one’s friends...

...Of course, they wouldn’t have had to starve...

...This time she’s in Barcelona...

...o n e of the many signs that Washington reporters have joined the ranks of the affluent is their clothing...

...A nother observation about Warnke, Cutler, et al.: Although the military services manage to retain a good many of their stars for full careers, in much of the rest of government the tradition is that the stars leave after a few years, usually for private practice or a major corpora.te post...

...If you want to keep earning those big fees or high salaries, and if you want to keep your friends, you learn not to look too closely...

...The result: Healthy Buildings has never recommended a smoking ban...

...Take the relatively narrow territory of the greeting card rack...

...As Scott Shuger noted in a December 1990 article in these pages, “In the D.C...

...change the subject as quickly as possible, just as Warnke did with me...

...Veteran readers will recall that this problem is also severe in the District of Columbia’s municipal government...

...Quayle’s council not only scuttled the public review but increased the allowable amount to 490,000 pounds...

...One reason is the shortage of positions to which they can aspire at or near the top of the civilian agencies and departments...

...For example, a congressional subcommittee has criticized the District’s Department of Public and Assisted Housing for, according to The Washington Times, “bloated employment rolls, poor oversight of contracting, lack of maintenance staffs at occupied apartments, and [a] large number of units that sit vacant while waiting lists grow longer...

...Spolar of The Washington Post, “she had paid $2,488.22 in taxes on the wrong condo...

...Having known quite a few of these women, I realized that, as a group, they come as close as any I know to having erased all but the physical differences between men and women...

...In fact, in one important area, it’s pointing the way for the rest of the nation...

...Because the victim was speaking Spanish, the operator kept hanging up on her as she repeatedly called for help...

...Have you ever heard of a group -Charles Peters...

...Women tend to contemplate a broader range of possibilities as they enter the mall...

...The latest example comes from Haiti, where thousands of people have been risking their lives trying to get to the United States on boats that look like they couldn’t reach the other side of the Potomac...

...Whatever difference is left, I reasoned, must be eternal and biological, beyond the power of will or the conditioning effect of environment...

...The tragedy is that, except for the fact that she does not seem to be given to inhaling exotic substances in hotel rooms with persons of the opposite sex other than her spouse, this woman, in whom so many of us placed high hopes, has turned out to be little better than her predecessor, Marion Barry...

...legally...

...Women, on the other hand, tend to examine the entire row with due deliberation and often end up buying several cards...

...of men wanting a bus stopped so they could go shopping...

...Well, The washington Post’s Dana Priest listed the offerings on the menu at the Treasury Department on a recent Friday as including seafood bisque, shrimp and crab meat pasta salad, fruit salad, and strawberry sundaes...

...Hoopes’ husband, Tim), you are inevitably representing a mixture of good and bad...

...The EPA’s William Reilly had proposed that manufacturers be allowed to increase toxic emissions by 10,000 pounds for production reasons, but only after the public was given a chance to comment...

...A story in The Washington Post’s Style section the day after Clark Clifford’s indictment expressed the sympathy and support local insiders were according their old friend...

...Because the local real estate market has not exactly been soaring lately, she called the District government to complain...

...Or they could have become political journalists-and still afford at least a few $500 suits-using their knowledge and experience to write articles or books about public affairs...

...But then I found it: The women’s bus stops for “shop-ops...

...Our main enemies are those conservatives to whom “all” most definitely does not include the have-nots and to whom effective government is a threat because it might deprive them of their leg up on the rest of us...

...Those of us who were tom between admiring Margaret Thatcher as a champion of the entrepreneur and dismissing her as just another sell-out to big business have had the issue resolved in favor of the latter by her acceptance of $1 million from Phillip Morris...

...The study concludes that it will probably take the forests a very long time-if ever-to return to old-growth condition...

...I suspect the real scandal is more widespreadthere’s evidence emerging from Sears stores in other states-and has been going on for a long time...

...As another old Washington hand, I knew almost all the people quoted...

...If you conclude from all this that it’s not just Washington but “In two years,” writes Christine cities in general that don’t work anymore, consider the case of Paris...

...Both my mother and father grew up on farms in families that revered the Sears catalog, so I could understand the shock that many people felt when the company’s crooked auto repair practices were exposed recently in California...

...Most cities spend at least 50 percent more than that on books...

...The tragedy of the money motivation is that, when you talk to these men, you know that the world of public affairs engages them far more deeply than the worlds of commerce or law...

...The District, in case you’re from out of town, has a very large hispanic population...

...Some readers didn’t believe me when I reported a few months back that a lot of federal executives were eating fancy meals in taxpayer-subsidized dining rooms...

...In March, Karen Motherlee realized that the assessment on her one-bedroom condominium was $50,000 more than she had paid for it in 1990...

...shut down for several months, reports The Washington Post’s A1 K amen, “because officials did not want to attract crowds during the unstable political situation...

...The visa processing section was...

...A generous tax break was given to homeowners above age 65...

...You will not be surprised to learn that commuter airlines suffered a record number of fatalities last year...

...government, the average midlevel chief leads a tribe of just over three Indians...

...B u t th e llistrict isn’t doin-g everything wrong...

...Only 9.5 percent goes to books...

...Townsend Hoopes, who was also quoted, is the mother of a former intern here at the Monthly...

...I remember several years ago trying to talk to Warnke about a previous suspicious episode in Clifford’s life-the time around 1969-70 when he was fronting as a director of the National Bank of Washington for murderer Tony Boyle and his henchmen, who were using the bank to bilk the United Mine Workers’ pension fund [See “Moral Ostrichism: Blindness on a Bank Board,” John Rothchild, November 19701...

...None of the nine had returned to its original condition...

...Why don’t we establish posts comparable to the permanent undersecretaries in the British cabinet to which our most brilliant civil servants could advance...

...The differences between men and women have fascinated me since early adolescence...

...How much richer the nation would be if they had been willing to be poorer...

...Why do my friends see it so differently...

...Paul Ignatius, Harry McPherson, Lloyd Cutler, Joseph Rauh, and Paul Warnke are all men I have known and respected for years...

...The trust of millions of descendants of farm families has been Sears’ greatest asset...

...Then the city realized that some of these seniors were wealthy and could afford to pay their fair share of taxes...

...Craig Fuller, the former Bush staffer who is in charge of this year’s Republican, National Convention, now heads the company’s Washington office...

...Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac, spends $1.15 per circulated book...

...Such practices are not only evil but stupid...

...Or they could have taught government or contemporary history at a university that had enough common sense, as not enough do, to value experience more than a Ph.D...

...Phillip Morris seems to have its tentacles everywhere...

...Each of these people felt they had to have it, except for Rauh, whose position in the Clifford matter may have been influenced by the fact that his son is one of Clifford’s lawyers...

...The point is that, whether as civil servants, journalists, or professors-r in careers that, and I think this would have been the best use of these men, would have had them moving to and from all three jobs-they would have had a good chance of spending their lives dealing with issues that genuinely interested them...

...The city apparently reasoned that since she had been paying taxes on the two-bedroom unit, she still owes for the onebedroom...

...Seventy five percent of the District’s library budget goes to personnel...

...We would like to give you her explanations, but as we go to press, she’s out of town, as she has been during almost one third of her tenure...

...The rest of the country, including the federal government, should follow the District’s example and take away tax breaks arid other subsidies from those people who don’t need them, including Treasury Department officials with their pears in chocolate and raspberry sauce...

...But a study recently reported in the scientific journal Conservation Biology compared old-growth forests-those that had never been cut-to nine forests that had been clear cut from 45 to 87 years ago...

...incompetence continues to mount...

...She pointed this out to one functionary who refused to do anything about it...

...Also, if you know anything about life in our foreign services, you know that visa duty is avoided like the plague by the hot shots, who usually have plenty of time on their hands for long lunches, tennis, and swimming...

...So it was with keen interest that I read an article about women political reporters by Clara Bingham in the August issue of Vogue entitled “The Girls on the Bus...

...Her assignment, according to The Sunday Ernes, is “to help resist attempts to ban tobacco advertising and to fight tobacco taxes...

...I share this sympathy-who wouldn’t feel sorry for an elderly man who has to endure so much humiliation after enjoying so much respect-but I deeply disagree with their support of Clifford...

...After completing three flights in one day, the crew lands at Dothan, Alabama, at 9:45, goes to bed at 11 p.m., and leaves a wake-up call for 4:30 a.m...

...B ureaucratic bungling, as we keep trying to tell the world, is not merely amusing but can have tragic cons-quences...

...That you should do so with the gravest misgiving is suggested by this news from CBS correspondent Roberta Baskin: Commuter airlines can legally require their pilots to work six 15hour days in a row...