TIDBITS AND OUTRAGES

...an attack on free enterprise and unfair competition by the government...

...Marxism in the Doghouse Here’s something new for our conservative friends to worry about: socialized animal medicine...

...Here’s how The New York Times played the story on January 28: Below the fold on page 15 under the head, Krogh Says Dean Reported Cover-up To Nixon in March “. . . is the name, meaningful dialog is the game...

...One of the rare pieces of recent good news for President Nixon was Egil Krogh’s statement on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on January 27 that John Dean had told him last March 20 that the President was unaware of the Watergate cover-up...

...Council to establish a lowcost pet sterilization clinic to prevent unwanted animals was attacked by the County Veterinary Medical Association as “the first step in socialized medicine...

...Tidbits and Outrages Holiday Recess In June we have the spring spending spree, when government agencies desperately hand out contracts to anybody to do anything so that they can exhaust their appropriations for the fiscal year and not be exposed before Congress as having asked for more money than they needed...

...Making Tracks toward Unprofitability The Washington Post recently ran this letter from Bruce E. H. Johnson of Cambridge, England: Spurred by the energy crisis and continuing bankruptcies, Americans are finally beginning to do something about their decaying railroad network...

...John Cramer of The Washington Star-News estimates that during the last three weeks of the year between 30 and 50 per cent of all government employees are on leave...

...Now as this process has continued, rail business in Britain has continued to worsen and the road haulers have begun to introduce juggernaut lorries to handle the freight forced off the rails...

...Next to its memoranda, the government press releases are probably the outstanding source of bureaucratic prose at its best...

...There is another kind of spree each December...

...With the recent creation by Congress of a Consolidated Rail Corporation under the new federally financed United States Railway Association, a long-overdue revitalization of the nation’s rail system has made its first step...

...It slashed “unprofitable” branch lines in the name of efficiency which, naturally enough, cut the volume of traffic flowing into other lines, which made them, in turn “unprofitable” and forced further cuts all along the rail network...

...A recent example from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare announcing the appointment of a new special assistant for external affairs said that the appointee “will be responsible for enhancing the opportunities for a continuing meaningful dialog between the department and interest groups, and for insuring departmental responsiveness to concerns for input into the formulation of HEW policies and programs as well as ,requests for information...

...The Washington StarNews reports that a proposal by the nearby Montgomery County (Md...

...I am disheartened to hear, however, that the new corporation will begin its life by paring 7,000 to 11,000 miles of “unprofitable” tracks from the 26,000 miles acquired from the seven railroads included in the recent act...

...To say the least, this tended to support Nixon’s contention that he didn’t know of the cover-up until March 21 and was made even more newsworthy by advance prediction in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that Krogh would blow Nixon out of the water...

...Nattering Nabobs of Negativism The White House’s paranoia about the “Eastern press” is not without foundation...

...The reason is a law that says federal employees can carry forward only 30 days of accumulated leave to the next year...

...British Rail, which took over the British railway network several years ago, made this same mistake...

...It practically shuts down the government as thousands of employees go on leave...