Tilting at Windmills
Tilting at Windmills The decision-making group on the recent $1 1,400 pay raise for the nine top White House assistants was, we hear, the nine top White House assistants. Midge Costanza, who...
...Charles Peters...
...Fortunately, this is relatively easy...
...If few reporters understand the point of political campaigning, even fewer understand what politicians have to do between campaigns...
...There is one catch...
...When Joe Califano’s enemy at the White House-we’ve heard it was Mark Siegel-leaked the story about Califano’s cook, he probably was on his way to one of the most comfortable restaurants in Washington, the White House mess, which is staffed with Filipino stewards who give the place a charming colonial quality...
...We’ve done an analysis of Jimmy Cart e r ’s published appointments schedules from January 25 through March 31...
...Investment syndicates,” reports Lindsay, “are buying homes as fast as they are built in some communities and selling them a year or so later at prices that often double the money...
...Last year James Henry suggested in these pages that the Treasury call in all bills over $50 and exchange them for smaller denominations...
...But most government work does not involve high stress...
...The name of Zbigniew Brzezinski appears 57 times...
...As for the liberals, they are right in wanting to eradicate the social roots of crime and to rehabilitate the criminal but wrong in thinking we know how to do either in the near future...
...The word is out that President Carter has promised the government employees’ unions that he will support a 6.5 percent pay increase for civil servants in October...
...Crooks...
...Other executive dining rooms are at the Pentagon- as you would expect, it has the biggest-the Justice Department (breakfast $1 SO, lunch $2.50), and the Treasury Department...
...Of the $80 billion in paper currency now in circulation $21 billion is in $100 bills...
...This prospect is so delightful and so simple to put into effect that one wonders why neither William Simon nor Michael Blumenthal has done anything about it...
...To protect society from violent crime, we need to identify the people who commit violent crimes...
...And the evidence that capital punishment actually deters is slight indeed...
...In Washington, for example, the officials of the National Geographic Society work in luxurious surroundingspaneled offices with built-in bars, multi-course luncheons served by white-coated waiters in private dining rooms-that are subsidized by those of us who pay taxes...
...Where was the ACLU when Anita Bryant’s planned television show was cancelled because of her campaign against homosexuals...
...It is simply unbearable that the United States government, through patriotic-pitched advertising, has continued to con the average man into this inferior investment for over 35 years while offering the rich and sophisticated much better deals...
...To put the violent criminal in jail, you have to arrest and convict him...
...W,, San Francisco, Calif...
...Another cause of inflated property taxes is the huge number of churches, charities, and other non-profit organizations that use public services but pay no taxes on their property...
...A mediator, on the other hand, can bring people together and help them understand the legitimate points on each side and prevent life-long antagonisms that poison both the couple and their children...
...One great problem with the Washington press corps is that, like the Washington bureaucracy, it tends to forget that there are real people out there with real problems that government decisions affect...
...The citizens of a rural county in New York have found a way to deal with the problem...
...They own one third of all the potentially taxable property in the country...
...Walter Mondale at 18 and Bert Lance at 14 are the runners-up...
...When we were last there, excellent wines were available by the carafe...
...Homeowners are finding their assessments rising so rapidly that those on fixed incomes can no longer afford to pay their taxes...
...Midge Costanza, who declared she simply couldn’t live on the $44,600 she and the other eight had been getting, led the charge up the fiscal heights...
...Still, it represents the current White House’s idea of what a “presidential” schedule should look like and is thus disturbing evidence that we’ve got another White House gang that finds foreign affairs more glamorous and worthy of attention than domestic issues...
...One of the more dramatic developments of the last ten years has been the escalation of real estate prices beyond the point where the average man can afford the old American dream of buying his own home...
...We were reminded the other day of one of our great national scandals by this Q. and A. in Eliot Janeway’s column of financial advice: “Q: Why do you consider ‘E’ -G...
...It seems to us that we should look at what will protect ‘society now...
...These are the kind of things a politician learns when he’s campaigning among the people...
...What is less commonly realized is that even if he already owns his own home, and even if he’s paid off the mortgage, soaring real estate prices can still take it away from him because they are accompanied by soaring property taxes...
...Liberal solutions tend toward eradicating the social roots of crime and rehabilitating the criminal...
...They’re proclaiming themselves clergymen and dedicating their homes to untaxed religious use...
...Although Carter has publicly endorsed revision of the Hatch Act to permit political activity by civil servants, he is said to be acting out of political debt to the AFL-CIO, not conviction...
...Tax evaders whose coffee cans can hide a lot more in big bills than in little ones...
...Celeste is made to seem vulgarly cynical as he and his wife address invitations to a party for other delegates or as he instructs his staff to try to identify delegates who will be coming back for future conventions...
...We hope so, because Carter should realize that if the political power of civil servants as campaign workers were added to their power as voters, no politician could resist their demands...
...If she had been fired for speaking out for gays, we bet ACLU attorneys would have been marching arm-in-arm into court with her, noble expressions wreathing their faces...
...What it says about our country-that under Roo s eve 1 t , Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the average man has been victimized-is not heartening...
...Most are in their teens and twenties and most of them are repeaters...
...Even a relatively conservative court like the present Supreme Court can be conned by pro-criminal, anti-victim reasoning...
...Thus President Carter’s Saturday phone-in on CBS and his subsequent appearance at the * * * Clinton town meeting were important reminders of what concerns the people, from the loss of work through the Defense Department’s closing of an arsenal to the loss of hope through the FDA’s denial of the drug laetrile to a terminal cancer patient...
...It would avoid the pointless vindictiveness of keeping them in jail in their forties and fifties, during which years, all the available evidence suggests, they are a threat to no one...
...In other words, the usual justification for increasing government salaries-that high salaries are needed to attract and keep high-quality personnel-was totally inoperative in this case...
...Thus we are delighted to report a couple of recent setbacks for the legal profession...
...Conservative solutions to violent crime range from protecting the family with a gun of one’s own to deterring the criminal with the threat of capital punishment...
...To sell the raise to Carter, who is said to have resisted it, the group agreed to take $1,500 less than the maximum to which they could have been raised...
...No one else comes close...
...And postponing retirement to age 60 scarcely seems harsh in a society in which most people don’t retire until 65...
...Bribers who can secretly slip judges envelopes of cash...
...At last we have a cop who uses his intelligence instead of his fists-he actually got the confession without asking a direct question-and the Court says, ‘No, you can’t do it that way either.’ Well, what way can you do it...
...To use one of the President’s favorite words, this is a disgrace...
...Since names like Powell and Jordan do not appear at all, the schedule is obviously far from complete...
...This means we need competent police who do not waste their time on victimless crime, and a system of justice that understands the problems even the most decent and intelligent policemen encounter in trying to nail a murderer or robber or rapist...
...The irony of these White House raises is that many on the staff were already making twice as much as they had ever made before, and all of them would have crawled on their hands and knees from Plains to Washington to get a White House job...
...Other executive dining rooms are hidden around the government...
...Even better news is that the American Arbitration Association is offering mediation services to couples who are contemplating divorce...
...It is said, by the way, that during the government reorganization several years back the real reason the Treasury opposed the transfer of the Coast Guard to Transportation was that it didn’t want to lose the Coast Guard dining room...
...One cause, already apparent in Southern California, is, according to Robert Lindsay of The New York Times, “a new kind of commodities speculator who deals in new homes...
...The IRS would receive a statement of each exchange...
...When are the taxpayers going to wake up to what the civil service is doing to them...
...They explain why Carter is so right to try to break out of the Washington cocoon and why more reporters should be similarly concerned...
...If you don’t see them, who does...
...He was smart enough to get the confession without beating the defendant half to death, without even threatening him-which is what the Fifth Amendment is supposed to protect defendants against...
...How often do you see a $100 bill...
...Brock Adams had promised to abolish the dining room when he took over but has since decided to “study” the matter further...
...This would keep them out of circulation during their dangerous years...
...This sacrifice will doubtless be a source of continuing inspiration to the junior White House assistants whose raises were held to $6,000 below the maximum by the same decision makers...
...Even the best of the political reporters, Richard Reeves, is guilty...
...There is no better example than the Court’s recent decision in Brewer u. William, in which the murderer of a ten-year-old child, having been read five times the Mirundu warning, voluntarily confessed his crime in circumstances that did not convey the slightest hint of physical coercion or of the threat of physical coercion...
...On the scale of human greed, American doctors are approached only by American lawyers...
...Those who chose not to participate would find themselves with worthless currency on their hands...
...First, the Virginia Bar Association is having to pay $200,000 to homeowners who were overcharged for real estate title searches because of a minimum fee schedule that had people paying $500 for a title it took a lawyer 15 minutes to check...
...For instance, while a State Department spokesman denied to Warren Brown of The Washington Post that there was “an executive chef’ at State, there certainly is an executive dining room-on the sixth floor, where assistant secretaries and such gather for lunch daily...
...Washington is already the richest metropolitan area in the country because of all the increases of the last 15 years...
...What this case reveals is that a majority of the Court-it was a 5 to 4 decision-does not understand that they should have given the detective a medal...
...The murderer had his conviction overturned because he had been psychologically manipulated by a detective, although the detective had even managed to adhere literally to an agreement he had made with the defendant’s lawyer under which the detective was not to question Williams...
...There should, of course, be exceptions permitting early retirement for people like combat infantrymen and air traffic controllers...
...The simple solution to violent crime is to give those convicted mandatory 20-year sentences...
...In his new book, Convention, he depicts Richard Celeste, the lieutenant governor of Ohio and one of the better young public officials in the country, as ridiculous for trying to get to know his fellow delegates to the 1976 Democratic convention...
...Our adversary legal system encourages the parties to a divorce to hate one another...
...Filipinos also staff the very pleasant dining room the Coast Guard maintains for executives at the Transportation Department...
...One wonders what Reeves thinks the decent practice of the politician’s craft is if it is not things like these...
...What we should do is offer the civil servant who wants to participate in politics the same deal his boss the President has-freedom to participate freely in politics as long as he is ready to give up his job if his side loses...
...Because when a jury acquits a criminal defendant the prosecution cannot appeal, and because rich criminal defendants have the benefit of lawyers like Edward Bennett Williams, who are paid enough to appeal and appeal, and because appellate judges usually have liberal young clerks whose sympathies go to the defendant, the criminal law has tended to develop in a way that gives the criminal far more protection than it affords his victims or society as a whole...
...A couple of months ago we recommended that military pensions be paid only after 30 years of service have been completed, instead of the present 20...
...A: Because the returns they pay just aren’t competitive with the market rates the Treasury is paying on the securities it offers to sophisticated investors...
...The problem is that the gun the conservative keeps in his house kills a lot more wives and children and lovers than it does criminals...
...Upon further consideration of the cost of government pensions, it seems to us that both civilian and military pensions ought to require a combination of 30 years of service and 60 years of age...
Vol. 9 • May 1977 • No. 3
