Tidbits and Outrages

...While Daniel Horn of the National Clearinghouse on Smoking is paid by the government to encourage people to give up cigarettes, Hugh Kiger is paid by the same government to encourage people to smoke more...

...Last month, a New York Times reporter, Ben Franklin, reported that the hot line had not been working right for two months...

...The Bureau said it would take action the next working day after the calls...

...Three examples are listed below, and readers are urged to try to top these...

...In California, for instance, landowners in the Imperial Valley benefit to the tune of about $14 million a year from cheap irrigation water that turns their desert into a fertile crescent...

...The mutual nullification has produced many candidates for the Most Absurd Contradiction Award...

...The taxpayers foot the bill because the project enriches the nation’s breadbasket...

...His job is to promote tobacco products abroad, although the effort is currently active in only two countries-Thailand and Australia...

...The Bureau explained that an overworked staff had caused it to be unattended from November 5 to December 26...

...Tidbits and Outrages The Renegotiation Board is charged with recapturing excess profits in defense contracting...

...The most publicized contradiction involves smoking...

...But, according to a recent study by the House Government operations Committee, the 100 largest contractors who receive about 70 per cent of the weapons business are so mammoth that they have been excluded from examination almost entirely-because of understaffing on the Board and loopholes in the law...

...At the White House, Presidential aide Harry Dent still spends a lot of time trying to deal with the threat of Japanese imports on the U. S. textile industry...

...In a similar vein, while President Nixon imposed a 10 per cent import surcharge to quell the flow of foreign cars into the country, the State Department negotiated a $13.5-million loan with Toyota Motors to allow it to increase production and thereby increase exports to the u. s. Over at the Bureau of Land Reclamation, they spend about $384 million a year to convert useless land, such as deserts, into farms...

...It is the polar effect-where a federal agency on one side of Washington is steadfastly dedicated to undoing the work of an agency on the other side...

...Next door, a Treasury official explains how the U. S. made Japanese textile production what it is today, by loaning the industry $300 million over the past five years...

...From Campaign Insight: A poll conducted by political technicians Joseph Napolitan and Michael Rowan gives us a look at what voters who see a candidate only on TV expect from him: Honesty: 47% Compassion: 14% Capable and qualified: 9% A good person: 7% Aleader: 5% Intelligence: 4% Understands the issues of the time: 3% The Bureau of Mines recently installed a telephone hot line which gives any miner in the nation five minutes after the beep to explain where he is and why he thinks his mine might cave in...

...From Jim Clark, The Miami News: Aside from bureaucratic inertia, we have come across a new reason why government can’t accomplish much these days...

...But while the Bureau gives the farmers the irrigated land, over at the Department of Agriculture the farmers get paid millions more to take the breadbasket out of production...

...Two weeks after the Franklin story, we called the hot line, to be greeted with buzzing static...