TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...He is especially welcomed at this time because, as Jessic:i McBride of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel puts it, “jaywalking tickets are back in vogue as part of the ‘quality of life’ policing strategy” adopted in many cities...

...A NEW MOVIE, “HOODLUM," depicts the late Thomas E. Dewey, the former racket-busting prosecutor, governor of New York, and Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948, as a crook who regularly took bribes from criminals...

...Incidentally, deal-making between statehouse Republicans and big-city Democrats wasn’t confined to New York in those days...

...And the less they want to spend on taxes that help the rest of the community...

...SPEAKINGO F DOPE LEGALIZAtion, whenever you mention it, you’re told horror stories of what it will cause, beginning years ago with “Reefer Madness...

...DID YOU SEE WHERE THREE OF the biggest HMOs are aslung for tougher government regulation...

...But we can’t just laugh when what’s involved is a government function that must be performed...

...Practically the entire government is wiped out-just what wocdd happen if we prosecuted everyone who has sold access...

...You can read the story in a new book Being Red in Philadelphia by Sherman Labovitz...

...Much of the income that the state would normally be asking the rich to contribute for those services is no longer required because the poor are footing the bill through the lottery...

...But so long as the only sure case against the White House is one of selling access, the defense that everyone does it, while it may have its imperfections, does seem a convincing reason not to single out Bill Clinton and Al Gore...

...It was the pardon of Lucky Luciano in 1946...

...Why not document...

...The Virginia lottery actually has an ad featuring Lady Luck, who has a magic wand that turns people who do not play the lottery into chickens...

...Income must be provided for the young people, the conscientious partner will tell you, although sometimes you suspect income for himself is also a consideration...

...Dan Burton's daughter was admitted to veterinary school, according to Greve, after Burton had intervened to protect a $23 million grant to the school...

...THE LAW FIRM THAT MAKES the most money through lobbying for tobacco companies is Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand...

...But why can’t he tell the young lawyer he’s hiring, “We’re going to run the firm in a way that you can be proud of...

...Now just as we go to press comes the news that The Wkshington Post has uncovered a videotape of Ronald Reagan fund-raising in the East Room...

...So their fellow conservatives would be wise to listen to Kristol and Brooks...

...Forty-nine detectives, roughly half of those in the unit, failed to close a single case in the first six months of this year...

...One result is the art museums that were quiet backwaters in the 1940s are now crowded, and long lines wait patiently to see even minor new exhibits...

...One of the few things that troubled me at all was his obvious intense dislike of Bill Clinton...

...Overtime brought in the extra dough-in one case giving the officer a total income of $150,119...

...The bed, by the way, was not even located in the District of Columbia...

...detective...

...I hope so, because the nation needs to wake up to the evil of government-sponsored lotteries which already exist in many states, although the federal government has not gotten into the act as it has in Baldacci’s novel...

...But too many of them seem to see that duty as confined to unpopular clients who have the kind of money the tobacco industry has been paying Verner Liipfert$4.7 million in the first six months of this year...

...The bed, by the way was not even located in the District of Columbia, but in Prince George’s County, Maryland...

...One U.S...

...A NEW THRILLER, The Winner, BY David Baldacci, has a plot that’s based on the corrupting effect of a national lottery...

...I know a case where Harvard changed a rejection to an acceptance after a phone call from an alumnus whose potential as a donor was immense...

...AND BACK TO THE cigarette companies, thev don’t iust use Washington lobbying fh-ms to influence officials and they don’t confine their efforts to Washington...

...There’s a lot that’s desirable in having more people know about good art and good food...

...The Virginia lottery actually has an ad featuring Lady Luck, who has a magic wand that turns people who do not play the lottery into chickens...

...That's why I was incensed when an Associated Press report on the death of one of my boyhood heroes, Johnny Vander Meer, said that while he had pitched the only two consecutive no-hitters in major league history, he had had "an otherwise average career...

...Another, pointed out in an article by Karen Lehrman in U.S...

...At the height of the McCarthy period, leading members of the Philadelphia bar volunteered to represent nine of their fellow citizens who were charged with violating the Smith Act, a law that made it a crime to advocate communist theory...

...The latest example to be exposed is Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who, according to the MilwaukeeJourna1 Sentinel, took trips to England, Australia, and southern Africa that were paid for by innocent-sounding foundations such as the New York Society for International Affairs, which turned out to be largely funded by Phillip Morris...

...we will not take clients that you’ll be ashamed of and therefore you might not earn as much as you might at a firm without scruples...

...Since retirement pensions are based on the retirees’ highest three consecutive years of pay, excessive and probably fictitious overtime is most prevalent among employees nearing retirement age, reports The Charleston Gazette...

...satellite was struck an average of 5,000 times a year during its six years in orbit, Harper adds, noting that “smaller Russian and U.S...

...Not coincidentally, Phillip Morris executives accompanied Thompson on those trips...

...Even the best can go bad...

...NOTO NLY DID RONALDR EAGAN make that fund-raising pitch in the East Room, he also made phone calls to congressional fund-raisers according to the Associated Press...

...It crashes in to the House of Representatives during a joint session with the Senate to hear an address by the president...

...Why would Dewey, who had helped put Luciano in jail, unleash this evil man on a world that Luciano proceeded to poison with narcotics for almost two decades...

...As Morton Mintz pointed out in these pages last year, state officials are also targeted...

...And in case you think law enforcement ineptitude is just a problem in the District, consider the recent horror stories from the IRS and the FBI’s performance at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Olympics...

...It does not even keep a record of what he did wrong...

...It certainly looks like it, judging from a recent poll by the Los Angeles Times that found the higher premiums were supported by 59 percent of respondents 65 or older and opposed by only 32 percent...

...Senators pay less than half for cups of coffee and almost a third less for a bowl of soup at the Senate restaurant than they would have to pay at a comparable nearby restaurant The Monocle...

...According to a memo obtained by The Wall StreetJoumal‘s Laurie P. Cohen, former FBI Deputy General Counsel Stephen Robinson told Justice Department investigators that “the FBI does not document poor work performance but transfers poor performers to other duties...

...ARE THE U P AND OTHER lobbies for seniors misrepresenting their members when these organizations oppose higher premiums for the affluent as a way to save Medicare...

...It’s the Book-oftheMonth-Club choice for December, so it could be a bestseller...

...Did you ever think you’d see the day when private groups asked to be regulated...

...All this is happening as the disparity in income between rich and poor continues to rise...

...AS YOU GROW older, you find yourself taking an increasing interest in the quality of obituaries...

...It's funny how people who hate affirmative action for black childredn love it for their own...

...What they buy has to be the best and differentiate them...

...There are solutions to these problems, but we’ve got to get a lot more smart people, including conservatives, trying to think about them...

...BECAUSEW E A.RE CONCERNED about the roots of Snobberies that make some people feel superior to others, this magazine has long been interested in the way taste began to be widely used as a measure of class during the 1950s, a trend that has grown steadily until today...

...Is the problem that those fellows are underpaid...

...One of the most effective of these horrors in recent years has been the specter of crack babies...

...YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE it, but I have something nice to say about lawyers...

...The Post Office, which was a marvel of efficiency when I was a boy in the O OS, had become a disaster by the ’70s...

...The strategy is based on the belief that zero tolerance of smaller crimes prevents larger ones...

...Their view, now shared by most hip journalists, is expressed by an editorial that appeared on September 22 and began, “the need for an independent counsel to ;look into White House fund-rais:ing during 1996 has long been obvious...

...To him, the evil lies in having the government pick the pockets of the poor and being corrupted by attempts to fix and cover-up the fix of the national lottery...

...What are the officers doing when they’re worlung so hard...

...The defendants were not spies or saboteurs, simply enthusiastic Marxists...

...There is some wisdom in the strategy but none in deeming prudent jaywalkiiig a crime...

...The explanation may be that lobbies often are controlled by the loudmouth extremists who are feared by the’ headquarters staff in Washington...

...What’s going to happen to those astronauts...

...And guess who suggested he make the calls...

...Now it develops, according to a study recently reported in the health section of The Washington Post, that the “children of cocaine-abusing mothers are no worse off than others in urban poverty...

...Others will say, “We’re doing it for the firm...

...According to Jennifer Harper of The Washington Times, millions of pieces of orbital debris cruise around the world at 22,000 mph...

...What does seem obvious to me is that the wise course is to reform campaign financing to eliminate the need to sell access...

...It does not respond well to intellectual rigidity...

...So far, the argument is similar to the one for legalizing dope, to which I’m sympathetic...

...The only f i r alternative would be to turn independent counsels loose on everyone who has sold access, which would have much die same effect as the Japanese 747 in Tom Clancy’s latest thriller...

...The upwardly mobile, explains a consumer pollster to Louis Uchitelle of Thc New York Times, who recently wrote a related story, like to “buy what others can’t afford...

...satellites have been lost after collisions in the past few years...

...The more people want to spend, the less they want to save...

...I never heard of a credible accusation of Dewey’s acceptance of a cash bribe, and since I was intensely interested in politics, and intensely disliked Dewey, and was eager to believe anything bad about him, I’m sure any evidence of his wrongdoing would be engraved in my memory...

...Twelve earned more than $100,000...

...Should we put him in jail too...

...IN SOME PLACES GOVERNMENT is so bad, it’s a joke...

...Similar common interests were often found by the Daley machine in Chicago and Republicans in Springfield whose dedication to the public service was frequently tempered by a keen interest in cash...

...The author’s prose is occasionally contaminated by the communist rhetoric of his past, but the story he tells is important and inspiring...

...West Virginia has discovered that overtime abuses in just one of its agencies, the Department of Highways, could be costing as much as $26 million a year...

...Most recently, a Times op-ed piece by Erika Niedowski described how Republicans who serve on the fund-raising investigation committees of both houses of Congress have themselves committed violaticm of election laws so blatant that they have been fined by that toothless tiger, the Federal Elections Commission...

...IRONICALOLNY T HE SAME DAY The Wushington Post broke the story about the videotape of Ronald Reagan’s fund-raising pitch in the East Room, The New El-k Times op-ed page devoted its most prominent position to a piece by Lyn Nofziger asserting that Reagan had never done what the East Room tape shows him doing...

...The lesson is that agencies need to be looked at critically and regularly with an eye to whether they’re performing their mission well and whether their mission still needs to be performed or redefined or abandoned...

...Bill Keller, who is now with the The New York Times, did an excellent piece on this phenomenon for the Monthly some years ago...

...But the times were such that eminent jurists like Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter upheld the Smith Act, even though it was a truly horrible assault on the First Amendment...

...What the GAO really means is that profit-hungry school operators are exploiting the desire of thousands of young women to work in what we used to call beauty parlors even though there aren’t nearly enough jobs awaiting them...

...This seems like another example of the Oliver Stone approach to history with which Hollywood is misinforming entire generations of American youth...

...See “Lowest Common Denominator Lobbying,” May 1983...

...In Virginia, the lottery took $924 million this year...

...Not exact ly...

...A similar change has happened with food...

...Another is when a rich alumnus intervenes on behalf of the child of a friend...

...HERE’SS OMETHING ELSE TO worry about-outer space is littered with junk...

...This is as indefensible as advertising dope would be...

...News 6 World Report, was Julia Child...

...It was a warm occasion, full of fun and marked by unusual rapport...

...The homicide unit of Washington, D.C.'s police force is an example...

...You don’t have to think very long to see that freedom of political discussion is the heart of the First Amendment...

...You want them to be fair to your friends' reputations and, when the time comes, your own...

...He lets Luciano out, the Democrats put up a weak candidate for governor and Dewey coasts to re-election...

...A RECENT REPORT BY THE U.S...

...There is a strong strain of Huck Finn’s common sense in this country...

...A FEW DAYS AFTER WRITING THE previous item saying the federal government was not involved in the lottery business came the news that, if it is not now involved, it certainly wants to be...

...Over the years this has become a problem, particularly because his feelings are shared by two of the op-ed page’s most influential columnists, Maureen Dowd and William Safire...

...Maybe I should teach them how to jaywalk...

...Tilting at Windmills BY CHARLES PETERS The Joy of Jaywalking beauty School Dropouts How Luciano Got Lucky D.C.'s Under-the-Cover Cops Lowest Common Denominator Lobbies IF YOU'RE A DRIVER, RIGHT-ONred is a blessing, but to pedestrians-especially those of us who are less nimble than we used to be-it is just plain bad news...

...For me, the central evil lies in the advertising of the lottery...

...Much of it is not working well, having suffered for too long from a shortage of constructive criticism as the liberals couldn’t find anything bad to say about it and the conservatives anything good...

...It’s at least arguable that, since some people are going to gamble anyway, the state should try to keep the profits from falling into the hands of criminals and earn a little bit of money for itself by offering people the opportunity to gamble through a state-sponsored lottery...

...Maybe government is making a comeback...

...So [’m delighted to report that at least one official has joined our crusade: Jeff Pawlinski, an alderman in Milwaukee...

...One influence 1 hat changed this was the trip to Europe, itself a badge of taste, that became standard in the ’50s...

...NOT ONLY DO WE PAY OUR SENators more-than-adequate salaries, which just got raised by the way, and more-than-generous pensions, we also subsidize their and their staff‘s lunches to the tune of $20,000 per senator per year, according to Ann Reilly Dowd of Money magazine...

...Georgetown University, which since 1980 has received $89 million in grants courtesy of the House Appropriations Committee has admitted four children of Appropriation Committee members during that time...

...No, it transfers the employee to another job...

...It certainly does not seem obvious to me...

...Department of Education Inspector General revealed that in just one year, taxpayers and students spent more than a billion dollars on training cosmetologists even though there were already one million more cosmetologists than were needed...

...The state is saying that not only should you dav the lotterv, but you're chicken if you don't...

...Why do they do it...

...It will become so if and when evidence is produced that Bill Clinton was bribed to act against the public interest...

...Certainly one impressive sign that it is came in a recent column in The Wall Street Journal by William Kristol and David Brooks, which asked, “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government...

...Unfortunately, like so many of our causes, it has not been widely embraced by respectable authorities...

...And they weren’t a bunch of guys who couldn’t find other legal work...

...The state’s transportation secretary complains, “We’ve had 65-year-old men who were averaging 70-hour weeks-30 hours of overtime- SO weeks a year...

...An explanation often given is that it’s a lawyer’s duty to represent unpopular clients...

...Dan Burton, the chairman of the House campaign finance committee is under investigation by the Justice Department as to whether his own fund-raising practices have been legal and no less than six of his committee colleagues have been fined recently by the FEC...

...A RECENT HEADLINE IN The Washington Times, “Israeli intelligence in disarray after mishaps,” carries a lesson about government agencies...

...If you’re a conscientious senior partner, as some of those at Verner Liipfert certainly are, you’ll worry about the firm’s obligation to the young associates it has taken on...

...Could it be that Dewey had made a deal with the mobdominated New York City Democrats...

...The top regular pay is only $52,000...

...in Maryland the take will be more than $1 billion...

...Perhaps the most common example is the alumni legacy where preference in admission is given to the offspring of graduates...

...So not only have we had an increase in snobbery, it has been accompanied by a trend toward more expensive and upscale ways to spend your money...

...In one case, thanks to an indignant citizen, we know...

...If you doubt the universality of guilt, the Times itself has over the years documented that everyone does in fact do it...

...It has taken on a roster of senior stars-people like Bob Dole, Lloyd Bentsen, George Mitchell, and Ann Richards-whose names and influence are meant to attract big clients but in the meantime are costing the firm big bucks...

...Of course, Verner Liipfert has a bigger problem than paying its young associates...

...And the General Accounting Office suggests that student loan default rates for proprietary school students, which are twice that of students attending other schools, “may stem in large part from a mismatch between their training and the skills employers demand...

...To be sure, the good deed happened a long time agoin 1953-but it was a really good deed...

...And by the way, doesn’t it help you see how indefensible cigarette and liquor advertising are...

...The truly important role for them is not to attack government but to fix it...

...THE OVERTIME RACKET IS NOT confined to the District of Columbia police department...

...Now comes the journalist Frank Greve with another example of how affirmative action is embraced by the priveleged when it favors the priveleged: admission assistance for the offspring and friends of government officials...

...Practically everybody ate standard American dishes in the ’40s and practically no one knew anything about wine...

...They were the cream of the local bar...

...Newt Gingrich...

...They believe a federally mandated patients’ bill of rights is the only way to restore faith in the managed care industry...

...The forces that separate us from one another seem to be winning...

...There was, however, one episode in his career that did strike me as a tad suspicious...

...However, I was relieved the next day to see that The New York Times got it right, noting that Vander Meer had led the National League in strikeouts for three seasons, and had been named to the All-Star team four times...

...But advertising the lottery tempts people who are not already gamblers...

...During my early years in Washington in the 1960s, the IRS was one of the most respected agencies in town...

...He found his girlfriend in bed with a supposedly on-duty detective...

...And The Monocle, while a perfectly nice place, does not provide nearly as spacious nor as grand a setting as the Senate dining room...

...So we are in effect subsidizing both the senators’ meals and their sense of importance...

...Crossing in the middle of the block often malres more sense, which is why prudent jaywalking, which we define :is not taking the remotest risk of having a car run into you, has been advocated by this magazine for many years...

...He found his girlfriend in bed with a supposedly onduty D.C...

...They include Robert Bennett and Robert Smith of the Senate committee as well as fellow member Arlen Specter, whom the FEC ordered to pay $233,000 for accepting illegal corporate contributions...

...IT’S FUNNY HOW PEOPLE WHO hate affirmative action for black children love it for their own...

...Just as liberalism came close to destroying itself by being blindly pro-government for so many years, conservatives have been in danger of losing touch with the American people by being reflexively antigovernment...

...WHENTH E FBI FINDS IT HAS AN incompetent eniployee on its hands, does it fire him...

...THE ONLY TIME I EVER TALKED at length with Howell Raines was at a lunch we had shortly before he went to New York to take over the Times’ editorial page...

...Sam Brownback, another of the Senate committee Republicans, is the subject of a pending FEC case...

...That’s why the Smith Act was so bad and why it now seems so incredible that not only Hand and Frankfurter, but the distinguished Second Circuit bench of which Hand was a member and Frankfurter’s United States Supreme Court upheld it...

...Because, explains Cohen,"there's concern that written evaluations might get into the hands of defense lawyers who might use them to impeach FBI witnesses or overturn convictions...

...According to a report in The Washington Post, the Postal Service just spent $20,000 to sponsor a convention of the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries where the service pitched lottery operators to use the mail to increase “player participation...

...State-sponsored lotteries are really just another con game by the rich, a way to shift the burden of paying for state services from themselves to the poor...

...You can lose every other liberty, but if you can say anything you want in the realm of political ideas, you have the means of regaining whatever other freedom has been lost...

...But as Lehrman points out, “Many of Julia’s pupils who learned to appreciate the finer points offoie gras and to choose the best wine to accompany it also learned to disdain the benighted proles who were still eating Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz...

...An interesting sidelight to the story is that the official justification for Luciano’s pardon was that he had helped the Allied war effort in Sicily...

...Those Philadelphia lawyers were courageous...

...In fact, I once got a ticket for it...

...But if you lose the freedom of political discourse, you’re helpless...

...This was testified to by a Navy officer who was then rewarded with an appointment as Commissioner of Air and Marine for the City of New York by one of the mob‘s greatest friends, Democratic Mayor William O’Dwyer...

...Published in 1961, her Mastering the Art of French Cooking quickly replaced Irma Rombauei-’s Joy of Cooking as America’s culinary bible...

...Motorists have become so accustomed to making the turn that they barely slow down, so as you attempt to cross the street at an intersection you can find yourself in danger from three directions and wishing you had one more eye or a head that swiveled...