This does not exhaust the areas in which Alabama education needs improvement. But they are starting points for those looking for what needs to be done now that the lottery is off the table, which ought to include everybody on both sides of the issue.

A new mayoral race

However, moral victories don't get you elected. In less than three weeks, Birmingham voters will return to the polls. With only two names on the Nov. 2 ballot, the nature of the contest changes.

Bell and Kincaid not only have to get their old supporters to mark new ballots, they have to find new supporters among either the supporters of other candidates or the people who didn't bother to vote the first time. That's not as easy as it seems.

Although Bell has to be the favorite at this point, it is a brand new election that either man could win. Let the campaign begin.

YOUR VIEWS

Educators refuse to admit failings

THE MAIL

While school uniforms might sound like a good idea, they are nothing more than a coverup for the unwillingness of educators to face the fact that they don't have a clue about how to educate our children or combat violence in schools.

I had my share of mediocre teachers in school but they did teach me to read and do my numbers. My school principal could walk into any math class and teach while at the same time keeping us kids in line. Problems were nipped in the bud. We were expected to show respect to our teachers or any adult for that matter.

A good education system is based on intelligent people making decisions with the goal that the students learn. Not based on some politically correct nonsense or the preservation of a bloated education bureaucracy.

Donald Dunlap
1335 Montevallo Road
Irondale

Not concerned

We might even agree. We know he's referring to those ''other" religions.

Armond ''Si" Simmons
104 Wadsworth Lane
Pell City

Confused thinking

This revision looks more like a budget maneuver than a strategy. It also opens the door to further downsizing of the military. The National Security Council staffers are guilty of confused thinking.

During the air campaign in Yugoslavia more of the Air Force was tied up in the Balkans and other deployments than was used during the height of the Vietnam War. If North Korea had decided to invade South Korea in the middle of the Kosovo War, we would have found it difficult to successfully intervene.

It is time to begin again to look at our defense requirements realistically. We don't need to be misled further by the National Security Council.

Peter Kenney
606 Devon Drive

Repeats itself

Many years before our time, on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, a group of our forefathers, also bold, daring, firm and intrepid, organized the Boston Tea Party, protesting a British tax on tea, and in President John Adams' diary, he wrote, "I can't but consider it as an epoch in history!" Subsequent events bore him out.

Whether it be the Boston "Tea" Party of 1773 or the Boston "Tee" Party of Sept '99 ... it's a wonderful feeling to have patriotism alive and well! May pride in country never become outdated!

M.J. Schnepp
2021 10th Ave South

Sick-minded

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the likely Republican candidate to oppose Hillary Clinton in the upcoming New York Senate race has stated that he will cut all city funding to support the Brooklyn Museum of Art because of the museum's decision to display a piece of (I refuse to refer to this thing as art.) garbage entitled "Sensation." Who could describe a painting of the mother of Jesus Christ that is tainted with impressions of fecal matter of an elephant along with porno cutouts as art?

Clinton stated that while it is inappropriate for a reputable museum to display such, the funding should not be cut. I am not a Catholic, but I have the utmost respect for the Catholic Church, and if such junk offends me, I can only begin to imagine how Catholics feel about it.

At some point and some point soon, Clinton will need to realize that a politician hoping to win an election cannot stay dead-center of the road with statements and comments, especially on matters of church, controversy or ethnicity. Such a practice can and will work against you.

H.C. Hall
4309 Meadowbriar Court
Montgomery

Kashmir is probably cause of coup

Then, as now, the military leadership of Pakistan was obsessed with the issue of Kashmir in the Himalayas, which was partitioned between West Pakistan and India. Now deceased Royal Air Force Air Vice Marshall Peter Williamson (No. 2 in the RAF) was an air group captain in the UK's Air Advisor (ie, air attache) to the government of Pakistan while I was stationed there. Pete made the honest mistake of saying how absurd the whole Kashmiri issue between Pakistan and India was. Williamson said at a social function that the nation of Pakistan was desperately poor and badly needed to focus on developing its infrastructure and a public education system vs. harboring designs to take over all of Kashmir. Pete was declared person non-grata and kicked out of Pakistan.

A Pakistan army coup overthrew the elected prime minister of Pakistan Tuesday. the prime minister's sin appears to have been requiring the Pakistan army chief of staff to take early retirement. I "suspect" that the just "involuntarily retired" Pakistan army chief of staff was behind Pakaistan's recent incursions into India's side of Kashmir that brought Pakistan and India to the brink of a nuclear confrontation.

The fact that Pakistan's basic democracic system remains so fragile since its creation in 1947 is a threat to world peace. Pakistan's military-driven nuclear proliferation is something we in the United States should not want and do not need. Ditto for India's military arsenal of atomic weapons.

Pakisan was created in 1947 by a convoluted religion-based formula of Muslims and Hindus devised by Lord Mountbatten as then viceroy of India. West Pakistan, with the port city of Karachi as its capital, and East Pakistan, with the port city of Dacca as its capital, were the original two wings, separated by all of India.

Today, all that is left of Pakistan is the former West Pakistan. East Pakistan had a revolution and became independent. It is now the nation of Bangladesh, rated the poorest nation on the face of the Earth. India's military played a role in supporting the overthrow of East Pakistan's government.

The continuing absurd struggle dating from 1947 over meaningless Himalyian mountain tops in Kashmir between Pakistan and India can yet lead of a world-consequences nuclear disaster. Both Pakistan and India are now nuclear powers. India is ready to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Test Ban Treaty this year. This is desirable and good. Otherwise, the now 52-year-old struggle over Kashmir which I think created yet another military coup in Pakaistan can lead to a world scale catastrophe none should wish for.

George L. Singleton
2509 Matzek Road

OTHER VIEWS

Ventura solves the problem of dignity in government

By GEORGE WILL

Jesse Ventura, a human Vesuvius who does not believe in hoarding himself, has Minnesota so well in hand he has time to give interviews promiscuously — 25 a week, he says. Nowadays these include interviews to tidy up after interviews, such as the one in Playboy wherein he said organized religion is for the weak-minded (such as Mrs. Ventura, he later explained), and that the military-industrial complex killed President John Kennedy because he supposedly had decided to withdraw from Vietnam.

This Ventura glut is on the verge of making him� boringly exciting. This matters because the folly of public financing of presidential campaigns has put $13 million dollars on the table to be pocketed by whoever captures whatever the Reform Party is nowadays.

It may be little more than a mailing list in Ross Perot's computers in Dallas. Ventura, elected as a Reform candidate, is not conversant with the party's platform or presidential nominating process. But he knows he does not feel warmly toward Ross Perot. Perot may like Pat Buchanan primarily because Perot dislikes the idea of a Ventura-backed candidate — enter Donald Trump, on a trapeze with Oprah Winfrey — thinking about trying to take over his, Perot's, toy.

The platform is akin to sauerkraut ice cream, a jumble of incompatible ingredients. The party fancies itself libertarian: It wants nothing to do with abortion and the other social issues that cause Buchanan's pulse to race almost as much as the thought of $13 million does. But it is anti-libertarian in favoring protectionism and government rationing of political speech ("campaign finance reform"). And get this: The party favors generous subsidies — dependence on government — for public television "so that it does not become too reliant on corporate sponsorship and in turn compromise its news coverage."

Ventura's mind is quick and his temperament constantly pops the clutch that connects his mind to his mouth. However skewed his conclusions, he is steeped in the arcana of the Kennedy assassination controversies. He knows next to nothing about the Constitution. Asked by Playboy about his statement that government should not create jobs, he indicates no awareness of rather a lot of history surrounding the clause that says Congress shall "provide for ... the general welfare." He says: "Have you read the Constitution? Does it say anything about government's ability to create jobs?"

But what makes him a leading cultural indicator is precisely his aversion to calculation, an endearing spontaneity that produces pratfalls. He rose from a realm of honest, no-bones-about-it-fakery — professional wrestling — to become an embodiment of authenticity.

The danger is that fame — "the frenzy of renown" — will become a drug that deranges him, turning his supposed authenticity into a form of fakery. Having insulted his religious constituents and others with his musings in Playboy, he says his problems stem from being "truly honest."

But that "Aw, shucks, I'm just too forthright for my own good" is arrogance in drag. There is no vanity quite like that of a populist man-of-the-people who is too darn humble to concern himself with anything as highfalutin' as manners. And it is plain bad manners to insult and embarrass constituents.

"Hell, we got too much dignity in government now," said George Wallace in 1968 as he worked to rectify that defect. Seven years of the Clintons have banished that worry, replacing it with a recognition of a dignity deficit in public life. That deficit is exacerbated by Minnesota's governor saying that he would like to be reincarnated as a 38-DD bra.

Wallace's 1968 expostulation about dignity continued, "What we need is some meanness." Ventura seems to be a meanness-free zone in today's politics. He is a genuinely friendly man, curious about the world, and without pretense, other than the delusion that it is a public service for him to give public tours of the mansion of his mind, regardless how sparsely some rooms in it are furnished.

Coming months will tell whether he will discipline his entertainer's impulse enough to respect the public's thirst for some decorum. If so, politics can accommodate a beguiling amateur uncontaminated by careerism. Meanwhile, try an experiment:

Watch the Senate on C-SPAN with the sound turned off. Just the body language of many of the ganders, who can strut while seated, will make you understand how a plurality of Minnesotans came to vote for Ventura. Even after the Playboy interview, a majority of Minnesotans are glad that a plurality did.
— Washington Post Writers Group

George F. Will can be reached
c/o Washington Post Writers Group
1050 15th St. Northwest
Washington, D.C. 20071-9200

Medicare, Medicaid system made for rampant fraud

By DAN THOMASSON
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

The congressional General Accounting Office says that some contractors have filed false claims, destroyed backlogs to reduce work and been involved in any number of shoddy and deceptive practices. The Department of Health and Human Services, which administers Medicare and Medicaid, has 19 contractors under investigation after four companies pleaded guilty to criminal charges of defrauding the government.

Actually, the giant entitlement program for the elderly and its sister, Medicaid for the indigent, have been victimized by fraud and abuse almost since the day they began in 1965. Like much of what the government does, they were ready-made for charlatans, the unprincipled and the greedy, a huge number of whom supposedly were dedicated to providing the health services to millions of elderly and poor Americans.

In 1975 on the tenth anniversary of the programs, my partner, Carl West, and I spent a year delving into the many scams and schemes that were making doctors and pharmacists and laboratory operators and all sorts of medical providers wealthy beyond their wildest imagination.

We estimated, with the concurrence of experts on both the House and Senate committees assigned Medicaid and Medicare oversight, that at least 10 percent of their annual costs were being lost to fraud and abuse. At that time, the programs were spending a paltry $30 billion yearly, so the loss to the taxpayers was $3 billion.

Now the combined programs are in excess of $300 billion annually and still growing at a high rate, but despite all the publicity and pledges of reform, the cost of the waste and downright thievery still is estimated at 10 percent. This time, however, that means a whopping $30 billion, the cost of the entire programs 24 years ago.

While the Clinton administration, like those before it, has launched a cleanup effort, there is no real sign that it has made much of a dent in the way the programs are bilked. In fact, we are now told that even those entrusted to paying the claims and to ferreting out the fraud were doing just the opposite. Eight companies reportedly have paid the government more than $275 million to settle charges of defrauding Medicare, falsifying records or misusing Medicare trust funds for costs that should have been paid by private insurers.

In the old days, the practices of double billing and so called gang visits at nursing homes, we discovered, were rampant. In Medicaid, nonmedical entrepreneurs set up storefront clinics and ping-ponged poor patients from one doctor to another at a huge cost to the programs.

Laboratories, pharmacists and medical suppliers all got into the act of taking advantage of the government's seemingly unending generosity. In some poor states, for instance, doctors who had been making $20,000 a year suddenly were reporting incomes of $250,000 largely off their participation in the two programs. And that is no exaggeration.

Chiefly as a result of the government' new role and its initial failure to foresee the need for due diligence, the costs of health care in this country soared. Add the rapid development of expensive medical technology into this inflation equation and the figure was 12 percent a year, year after year.

The mistake, of course, was not to anticipate that anything as large as these programs were expected to be would not need an entire apparatus designed to protect them from the unscrupulous. At one point in the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the predecessor to HHS, there were only a handful of full time investigators. They had to rely on so-called peer review groups to keep things in line.

But then again, when Medicare and Medicaid finally made it into reality after years of congressional struggle, it was naively estimated that they would cost only a relatively few billion at their zenith. So what would be the need of an elaborate, expensive anti-fraud system? Mostly in those days, medical care providers, from administrators to physicians, were thought to be above reproach. Mainly, they were and are.

But the amounts of money are so staggering and so easily manipulated that it is confounding for even the most honest. Perhaps it is time to rethink the way these plans are administered and to establish the means to finally rein in the cheaters and end the abuse. The expense would be tiny compared to the savings.

Dan Thomasson can be reached
c/o Scripps Howard News Service
1090 Vermont Ave. Northwest
Washington, D.C. 20005
or thomassonyd@shns.com

LOOK BACK

Federal court jury finds 11 top leaders of American Communist Party guilty of conspiring to overthrow government by violence.

Four Black Muslims kill security guard and seize Montgomery radio station, broadcasting for more than two hours an appeal to join their revolution before being captured in gun battle with FBI.