Tilting at Windmills

...In Congress, the members of the House have only two years or less of job security...

...The Times' Washington bureau was so blind to the significance of this story that New York had to rely on the Associated Press for the news...

...The small print at the bottom of the ad contains a reference to "referral fees," which is the polite term for the kickbacks that assure the referring lawyer will not have to wait until he reaches heaven to receive his reward...

...And yet, except for one paper that I know of, Newsday, the press has completely ignored what Moynihan said...

...While the Roosevelts were neither sexually nor temper-mentally compatible, Eileanor was almost always a benign influence on the way her husband carried out his public responsibilities, constantly reminding him of his duty to blacks, Jews, and the downtrodden as more and more of his time was consumed by preparing for and winning World War II...

...In how many countries do we really need a covert presence...

...even if Simpson is guilty...

...if white, 58...

...Doctors and other professional groups, even morticians, take these deductions...

...Why not require at least 10 hours a week...

...Want to know why many congressmen are secretly hoping that health reform can be kept alive as an issue for the next session...

...In the case of the First Lady, this doubt is especially unfortunate, since many of us had counted on her as the steady and clear-eyed partner who would balance her talented but erratic husband...

...But now, many lawyers take three, four, or five trips annually under the guise of "continuing legal education...

...Listen to what she says: When I first wrote crime fiction in the early eighties, the stories turned to air in my hands...

...When they don't want to know, they don't want to know...

...Charles Peters...

...If you like mysteries and don't know her, go to your bookstore tomorrow and buy one of her books...

...And besides, I know the LAPD isn't above framing a suspect.' I can't stress enough that this was a very levelheaded guy saying this...

...A recent edition of The Texas Lawyer, for example, carried an advertisement headlined "Sun, Sand, Sea and CLE" offering a combination of "fun and information in Montego Bay, Jamaica, a lush setting ideally suited for recreation and reflection...

...If your child wants to get in, he or she, if black or Hispanic, has to score 53 on an admissions test...

...Consider the lawyers...

...That a spouse can have a great and good influence on a president is illustrated by Doris Kearns Goodwin's absorbing new book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt from 1940 to 1945 (see the review by Chalmers Roberts on page 58...

...I later learned that the ad was part of a larger story that definitely does not add luster to the Mercury News' reputation...

...morgue...

...The dedication and wisdom they brought to leading this nation set a standard I pray the Clintons will strive to meet...

...Speaking of higher education, the new 30-year student loan is one of the most underreported social revolutions in my memory...

...The New York Times, for example, put the story on page 11 of its July 3 edition...

...I could not grasp the characters nor understand what they felt...

...In fact, there were 13 pages of regulations with 700 pages of background material...

...A. The C.I.A., like so many government agencies, needs radical surgery to rid itself of both bad apples and pointless work...

...Still, it's hard to imagine anybody else of Moynihan's eminence getting this kind of a break—think what would happen if Bob Dole or Dan Quayle talked about "speciation" in a Senate hearing...

...Refer Your P.I...

...There's almost no time for doing what I hoped to do, which is to take a systematic overview of the government, figure out what needs to be done, and do it...

...At the July hearings where the administration presented its welfare plan, Senator Moynihan claimed that welfare recipients are undergoing "speciation," that is, becoming a separate biological species, and that in the ghettos 9-year-old girls are having babies...

...Another bit of support for a Monthly cause comes from Patricia Corn well, the mystery writer...

...The following night, he went on Charlie Rose and repeated the speciation theory, and it turns out that he has been saying it around Washington for months at meetings on welfare reform...

...The one drawback was that when you had to leave town, going west or east, you were forced to pass through ugly chemical plants that belched fumes that smelled so bad you were scared to take another breath...

...The lesson of my life is that firsthand experience with any group makes it impossible to think in terms of innate inferiority...

...By the way, did you know about the C.I.A.'s great triumph in Africa...

...That just doesn't sound like the Mercury News I had come to know and admire...

...Of course, the young medical student who chooses radiology because he wants to get rich will still do so...

...Is this equality of opportunity...

...One hesitates to think how much of the deficit has been wasted by subsidizing all these vacations...

...And from time to time, that means letting someone else take the lead role...

...I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, a lovely town set between green hills with a river running through it...

...But I see no reason why the rest of the faculty should not have enough courage to be willing to risk firing after the expiration of their contracts, which range from one to five years...

...No matter how well I may do, I can never forsake the work that got me where I am—the dogged research into time of death, the slides in the lab, the slab in the morgue...

...Crying wolf is the name of their game...

...But we definitely do not need a C.I.A...

...Just outside Charleston, 240,000 pounds of MIC is stored...

...People with low incomes can choose a plan with monthly payments of 4 to 15 percent of a salary...

...You've read about how the leaders of the C.I.A...

...so] I spent 12 hours a day in surgical scrubs, assisting forensic pathologists as they performed autopsies in a Richmond, Va...

...Another writer whose work was based on experience was the late Judge Lois Forer, many of whose articles appeared in this magazine...

...Would it be possible for such attitudes to take hold if it weren't assumed that the people Moynihan is talking about here are practically all black...

...For that reason Charles Murray's forthcoming book might be healthy because, if as rumored, it attempts to prove black intellectual inferiority, it will bring the whole subject out into the light of day to be wrestled with...

...Of course, there is some legitimate junketeering, but if the primary motive for these trips is truly educational, then why are so many to glamorous destinations and so few to Buffalo or Indianapolis...

...I will never forget the first time I placed my gloved hand in a chest cavity and was startled to find that the blood was cold...

...But no one will blow the whistle because so many influential people who benefit from the hustle will piously proclaim that the expense is "educational...

...The change from the 10-year limit, which has been the standard, means that student loans will no longer imprison their recipients, forcing them to make career choices on the basis of potential income instead of whether they really care about the work...

...It put Idi Amin on its payroll...

...It used to be that they had only one tax-deductible vacation a year, to the state bar association meeting, which didn't cost the rest of us very much because it was usually held at a hotel within the state...

...The prosecution is doomed, I think...

...I'm not accusing Moynihan and his allies of being consciously racist, but an unconscious or semiconscious assumption of black inferiority does seem to be seeping into the liberal media and political culture...

...I am delighted to see that the Chronicle, which has had some dismal days in its history, now appears to be on the upswing, much better than when I last read it...

...One, in Cyprus, had stolen an icon from a church...

...But the one who really wants to be a family doctor in a small town is now free to do just that...

...It was caused by 50,000 pounds of a chemical called MIC...

...Lowell High School is San Francisco's best...

...So we are left with Whitewater, a scandal that isn't evil, to which the administration's reaction, while not evil, has been so unwise as to inspire serious doubt about the people who are leading us...

...So when a client comes to me with a personal injury case, I make a referral to Sieben, Grose, Von Holtum, McCoy & Carey...

...Instead of relying completely on other people's facts or what she guessed the truth was, as most writers do, her points were based on what she had actually seen in her courtroom...

...An FCC official recently witnessed an illustration of this practice when a cable company executive complained that his lobbyist had told him 700 pages of new regulations had been issued by the FCC...

...friend's black friend, who would acquit O.J...

...station chiefs have been removed from their posts in recent years because of unsavory personal or professional activities...

...In fact, are not political and economic reporting supposed to be among their primary duties...

...Whether she was arguing against mandatory sentences or in favor of orphanages, you knew that she knew what she was talking about...

...Bennington College is by all accounts in desperate fiscal shape...

...Being a lawyer is sort of like being in a choir—you do your part to make sure things stay in harmony...

...You do start worrying about how and why some groups can create problems for themselves, but an assumption of innate inferiority seems to be behind what Moynihan is saying...

...is closing 15 of its stations in Africa...

...And although neither party in this marriage was perfect, it is amazing how little that is ignoble can be found in their story...

...And the press wouldn't be giving him a break if it didn't share the same lurid idea...

...The tenure issue is growing in importance because the end of mandatory retirement at 65 means that tenured old codgers who can't or won't do their share of the work are hanging on and keeping bright young teachers from being hired...

...And, I might add, isn't it a shame that the time television devoted to the relatively unimportant Whitewater hearings wasn't at least matched by time devoted to truly important hearings such as those on health care...

...Lobbyists must find problems that require their services to fix...

...The "education" feature was a "practice skill" video that "lets you sharpen practice skills at your own leisurely pace," which is code for "only you will know if you don't watch it...

...A White House official recently confided to a friend his amazement at how reactive life can be at the top...

...if Chinese, 62...

...This is a move I applaud for all colleges when the professors have become so arrogant that they refuse to teach a reasonable schedule...

...There may be a need for good reporting of political and economic developments, but why can't the State Department's Foreign Service officers do such reporting...

...My voice had no authority...

...And DuPont's plant has a tank that contains 40 million pounds of ammonia that would kill those within 25 miles...

...Another of its advocates is Milton Friedman, who has shared many of this magazine's concerns, including the waste of Social Security payments on those who don't need them, the need to give money to the working poor through a negative income tax, and the need to free the country from the dead weight of its tenured civil service...

...is running an advertisement in a lawyers' magazine that features a photograph of Jack Vigoren, an attorney who is also the choir director of a Lutheran church...

...In its June 30 edition, there was a full page color ad entitled "10 reasons why you should purchase your new or used car from a factory-authorized dealer" which included the line, "The Mercury News is proud of its long-standing partnership with the Northern California new car dealers as we work together to meet the area's unparalleled transportation needs...

...But the CLE champion may be two judges from the 5th Circuit of Louisiana who took a legal study tour of Southeast Asia, the brochure for which, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "displayed a cover photograph of sampans floating on a placid sea, advertised a sunset cruise in Hong Kong Harbor and promised participants they would 'Bask on the Beautiful Beaches of Bali.'" In the judges' case, Louisiana taxpayers paid the bill of $7,642...

...My own experience tells me that blacks are not inferior but that there are real problems with black performance—witness San Francisco's Lowell High School— and with black attitudes—witness my L.A...

...To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, remember the Bhopal Chemical leak in India that killed 3,000 people...

...She got her experience as a medical examiner before she attained success as a writer...

...One qualification 1 would make to the Bennington approach is to retain some tenured positions— maybe 15 or 20 percent—as an absolute protection for free speech and eccentricity...

...The O.J...

...peaking of professional piety, the law firm of Sieben, Grose, Von Holtum, McCoy & Carey, Ltd...

...Yet another example comes from David Corn's illuminating new book, reviewed on page 52 of this issue, which shows what bad news for the Republic was the career of Ted Shackley, who despite repeated errors in judgment, was repeatedly promoted by the C.I...

...The ad I had seen was part of the paper's effort to kiss and make up which also included a follow-up article saying the original story could have been better written and should have included dealer comments...

...It would have been perfectly natural for him not to want an enemy of the Clintons in a position to persecute them...

...Or, in the event some kind of bill is enacted this year, it will surely be deemed "imperfect," requiring new legislation to remedy its defects which, even if they are not apparent to the public, will surely be discovered by the lobbyists who got rich this year and—like the congressmen—want to keep the issue alive so that they can get rich again...

...It quickly became clear that he doubts government is ever the best solution to any problem, while I think that it can be the right answer as, for example, I do in the case of health care...

...Wouldn't it be nice if the press took equal care to educate the public on important legislative issues such as health care, explaining, for example, reforms that are working, such as those in Hawaii, Canada, and Rochester, New York...

...Think about it...

...Even though reform legislation is pending, I doubt that congressional junkets are seriously threatened...

...Car dealers don't strike me as the right "partners" for a newspaper...

...Now comes the news that Michael Dowd, who was robbing drug dealers and dealing cocaine while serving as a police officer in New York's 75th precinct, drove a bright red Corvette and, according to Joseph Treaster of The New York Times, "sometimes had a limousine pick him up at the station house for gambling trips to Atlantic City"— all without arousing the slightest suspicion in the minds of officials who were supposed to be overseeing his work...

...The scandal today is that many big shot professors teach fewer than five...

...Since it takes millions of years for a species to form, it seems to me that the throwing around of "speciation" by the Senate committee chairman in charge of welfare legislation is, to put it mildly, big news...

...I had a chance to chat with Friedman not long ago and, having agreed on the things we agree on, we began to explore where we disagreed...

...It's hard to imagine that the fellows will let this cash cow die...

...To me, the only plausible explanation is that Moynihan's friends and admirers in the press have decided to bury the story on the grounds that a) he must be on to something that most politicians don't have the guts to talk about, and b) because he took such an unfair beating for the Moynihan Report, he deserves to be spared the exaggerated attacks from blacks and the left that a front-page story about "speciation" would inevitably bring...

...They have to keep their clients in a constant state of panic in order to justify their existence, not to mention their high fees...

...Not only do the members love them, but too many influential Americans benefit from similar rackets...

...The New York Times ran the hearing comment four days later as the second item in the "Political Notes" column in the Metro section...

...I needed more than library articles and interviews...

...Instead, virtually every moment is consumed with reacting to today's news...

...Anyway, the only concession I was able to get from Friedman is that the post office did work well in the thirties, forties, and fifties...

...was guilty—just by the way he looked in court when they showed the pictures of the bodies, and by the fact that it took him a month to mount a campaign to hunt for the killers of his children's mother—but that even so (and this is the kicker), if he were on the jury, HE WOULD VOTE NOT GUILTY...

...So many of the answers of Steiner, Ickes, and Altman, as well as Stephanopoulos', were patently calculated and unnecessarily evasive...

...At the August hearings, almost all the administration witnesses seemed determined to imitate the First Lady...

...Moynihan wouldn't be saying this if he didn't have the kind of lurid idea of welfare mothers that only someone who has never met one or who has been away from firsthand contact for a long, long time could entertain...

...But I'm troubled to note an apparent decline in what has long been one of my favorite papers, the San Jose Mercury News...

...presence in every geographic entity called a nation...

...This means the reform may face the same deadbeat problem that has plagued previous student loan programs...

...And did you also know that, according to Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, "At least seven C.I.A...

...another, in Peru, had threatened his staff with a pistol...

...It seems that a May 22 article by Mark Schwanhausser that gave advice on how to see behind the sticker price had infuriated local car dealers, who had then pulled their ads from the Mercury News...

...In fact, Friedman acknowledged that it was crucial to romance in the days when you could count on your girl getting a letter at a certain time if you mailed it at a certain time...

...When I asked why, he replied, 'If it was good enough for the Menendez brothers, it's good enough for O.J...

...In an effort not only to halt the escalating cost of higher education but actually reduce it, Bennington is cutting back its faculty and eliminating tenure...

...I hope it closes a lot more around the world...

...In my view, the most serious problem in American government is that no one wants to face how widespread is the need or how deep the cuts must be if we are to have truly efficient public institutions...

...Simpson case has demonstrated how the press can educate America on an issue: Within a few days in July, points out our friend Ted Marmor, most Americans became experts on the Fourth Amendment's protections against search and seizure...

...Of course, liberals have richly contributed to this atmosphere themselves by engaging in a lot of pretend outrage and trying to prevent things from being discussed...

...If it is released, it will kill people within 9 miles of the plant...

...The C.I.A...

...And the lobbyist had also failed, as he set up his client for a bigger retainer for next year, to mention that the regulations in question are largely favorable to the industry, including one that permits cable operators to increase their prices with inflation...

...But the dangerous chemicals that produced it are still there...

...And these days they don't just go up the road a piece...

...managed to avoid becoming suspicious when Aldrich Ames wheeled into the agency's parking lot in a Jaguar that retailed at half his annual salary...

...Yes, there are a few places that pose either a military or a terrorist threat where a covert presence is necessary to keep an eye on what the bad guys are doing behind the scenes...

...In the case of the Texas lawyers who played golf or reflected in Montego Bay, as in other continuing education conferences, it's the federal taxpayers who get stuck with a hefty portion of the burden because of the tax deductions the participants take for their expenses...

...And the press generally failed to point out the loan program's crucial defect: collectibility by the IRS, a feature Clinton had wanted, was omitted from the bill by Congress...

...The long-term income-contingent loan is an ancient cause of this magazine...

...The Washington Post, as far as I know, has never mentioned it...

...Cases to a Higher Authority," says Vigoren, shown clothed in his Sunday robes...

...I recently spent several weeks in the San Francisco area and had a chance to catch up on the local newspapers...

...Fundraising for congressional races is skyrocketing," reports Roll Call, "with receipts for this year running $18 million ahead of the same point in 1992...

...As regular readers know, I have consistently viewed Whitewater as a trivial story that was fanned into dangerous flame by a relentlessly partisan GOP, scandal-hungry reporters, and a paranoid First Lady who kept heightening suspicion by so grudgingly conceding her tiny sins...

...Today, the odor has been eliminated...

...She shares our belief in a writer's need to acquire experience in the field he or she writes about...

...Even if it appears to have breathed its last, it almost certainly will be revived for another major milking in time to finance the '96 campaign...

...They have discovered it is the Comstock Lode...

...And in journalism, most reporters have to exercise their First Amendment rights without any guarantee of job security...

...Instead of saying "I can't recall," why didn't George Stephanopoulos admit he wanted to fire Jay Stephens...