TIDBITS AND OUTRAGES
Tidbits and Outrages By the Book The military mind is trained to go by the book. But it is also trained to rewrite the rules when they become inconvenient. The Navy, for example, recently...
...Pettiness at the Post “President Nixon urged former Attorney General John N. Mitchell to ‘stonewall it’ and to ‘plead the Fifth Amendment...
...Asserting that Bruce was a “sexist, dirty-joke comedian,” the women urged the 1,300-members of the Manhattan Women’s Political Caucus to support Kuh in his race against Robert Morgenthau . In a related developmen t, . the Connecticut General Assembly has passed eight bills to eliminate sex discrimination, one result of which is that women now have the right to witness executions...
...Tidbits and Outrages By the Book The military mind is trained to go by the book...
...Straight had arranged for Mr...
...The Supreme Court has dealt a death blow to class action by requiring that the plaintiff pay the cost of notice to everyone in the class...
...In the escrow suit this would have cost around $5,000, or enough to have kept the suit from being brought in the first place...
...It is comforting to note, however, that the Defense Department, in commenting on the bill in un de rs t at e d if not unfathomable bureaucratese, displayed some guilt about the effect of this sort of thing: “. . . the enactment of such Federal legislation, by assuring reappointment of a retired Regular or Reserve officer of the Armed Forces who had resigned his commission to accept an office for which a retired Regular or Reserve officer is ineligible because of a State constitutional or statutory provision, appears to avoid the intent of that State constitutional or statutory provision...
...The Washington Star-News ran the story on page 24...
...Garment to rent a 17-acre Fairfax County estate, which includes two ponds, a red brick colonial house, a barn, and a caretaker’s house for $275 a month...
...a shlp...
...will count its sailing time only after it has reached the fleet operating area...
...This story has appeared in both m e Washington Post and The Washington StarNews without one word in either to suggest any impropriety, even though this tidy arrangement saved Garment about $25,000 in rent since 1969, Had a less wealthy government official showered his boss with such largess it would be a majoI scandal...
...The Average Man Loses a Double Header Of the multiplicity of screwings that are visited upon the average homeowner, two of the more maddening are: -the title search fee, usually several hundred dollars for work that seldom takes the lawyer more than 15 minutes -the escrow account, into which, instead of paying taxes and insurance directly to the government and the insurance company when due, the homeowner is forced to pay the lending institution in advance for taxes and insurance, thus permitting the lending institution rather than the homeowner to receive the interest on the payments...
...But hark, just as the fair damsel of privilege was about to be run over by a juggernaut of Caspar Milquetoasts, our higher courts came to the rescue...
...But when the culprit was someone as socially prominent as Straight, it was all seen as the kind gesture of a friend...
...The reason does not become clear until the ninth paragraph of the article, which reveals that the story had been broken, not by the Post but by The Los Angeles Times...
...Another inconvenience was a South Carolina law which forbids governors to hold any other state or federal position...
...which] had been calculated from the time a ship left port until it docked again...
...From 1969 until last month Mr...
...Still,other papers are worse...
...The Double Standard Leonard Garment has from the early days of this Administration been the White House’s man in charge of the arts...
...Front page...
...The court said, “We have no doubt that the primary aim [of the fee setting] was to benefit the public...
...Michael Straight works under him as deputy chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts...
...It means that if former Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland is elected governor this fall, he will have to resign his commission and give up his generous retirement pay...
...In early June, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a bill offered by John Tower to grant automatic reinstatement of retirement pay and benefits to any retired officer who had been forced to resign his commission to serve in an elected state office...
...The irony is that the Post had been the victim of similar treatment by other newspapers during the early months of the Watergate story and might be expected to be above such pettiness now...
...No, page nine...
...Until a few weeks ago it seemed like progress was being made toward doing away with both...
...In the minimum fee case the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the judge who said minimum fees violated the antitrust laws...
...The Dirty and the Dead Manhattan mtnct Attorney Richard H. Kuh recently won the endorsement of a group of feminists on the ground that in 1964 he had prosecuted the late Lenny Bruce on obscenity charges...
...The Navy, for example, recently announced that as part of its fuel conservation program it had reduced sailing time by 20 per cent...
...In Washington, D. C., two lending institutions agreed, in settlement of a class action suit brought on behalf of 38,000 property owners, to give the homeowners the right to make the insurance and tax payments directly instead of through escrow accounts...
...began the story in The Washington Post of June 14,1974...
...But UP1 got the real story behind the announcement: “The Navy, trying to make it appear that it has been cutting back operations drastically to save fuel, has ordered its ships to change their records on sailing time...
...A federal judge in Virginia held that the Fairfax County Bar Association’s minimum fee schedule-under which homeowners were charged one per cent of the purchase price for a title search regardless of the amount of work performed-was a violation of the antitrust laws...
Vol. 6 • July 1974 • No. 5
