Bureaucracy

Vice President Albert Gore's announcement Monday that government shall henceforth use plain, understandable language is, to us bureaucrats, subversivity at its worst. Clarity of communication leaves no maneuvering room, whereas fuzzification provides the safety of flexible interpretations. Professional language is the poetry of bureaucracy, the music of staff meeting boobidoodles. Simple language is the mark of a rank beginner in any profession. Gore knows we are the masters of bureaucracy.

In the shattering and unforgettable film Shades of Doubt, writer/director Aline Issermann delicately explores a possible case of father/daughter incest. When the 11-year-old child of an antiquarian and a nurse stops eating and writes a classroom essay about a king so obsessed with his princess daughter that she tries to become invisible, her teacher grows concerned. Is this a case of an overactive imagination, as her mother suggests? Is the melancholy girl projecting her own Oedipal longings onto her father, as the magistrate worries?

Sometimes you can't fight City Hall, even when you're in it, as businessman Thomas J. Knox learned after he signed on as Mayor Rendell's efficiency guru at a salary of $1 a year. Knox hadn't reckoned with the stubbornness of the very bureaucracy he was supposed to tame. First, he was instructed to fill out a form so taxes could be deducted from his annual dollar. Reluctantly, he did that. Then he was told that, like other city employees, he must complete a time sheet each day to ensure that he truly was earning his municipal pay - which works out to about 2 cents a week.

As an employee in the health-care field for the last eight years, I have seen a decline in health care for the elderly that has appalled me. The bureaucratic system leaves much to be desired. How can a totally blind, elderly diabetic person be responsible to fill his or her own insulin syringes? Is this the system's way of getting rid of the elderly because they are living too long? The elderly have much to contribute and should not be pushed aside. When are the policymakers going to realize that if they live long enough (God willing)

It is no minor accomplishment that the Wilma Theater secured the U.S. premiere of Leaving, the first new play in 20 years by former Czech dissident, playwright, poet, and president V?clav Havel. It also, however, fits naturally with director Jiri Zizka's absurdist leanings, his own ties to the Velvet Revolution (subscriber's bonus: last season's Rock and Roll, by Czech-born Tom Stoppard, is almost a primer for this work), and the Wilma's reputation as a home for new plays of international importance.

Grace DiGiorgio Linkmeyer, 79, of Drexel Hill, a teacher and reading specialist who fought government bureaucracy for 23 years after her husband's death from the effects of radiation exposure, died of pneumonia Jan. 11 at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. Mrs. Linkmeyer's husband, Gene Linkmeyer, died in 1971 from lymphoma. The couple's four children were ages 5 to 11 at the time. He had been sick for 2 1/2 years, their son Paul said, and she had hospital bills and a mortgage to pay. Though there was little medical evidence at the time, her son said, she was convinced that her husband's illness was caused by exposure to radiation when he was an Army observer at nuclear testing in Nevada in 1951.

Before you condemn the hard-line Commies who tried to squeeze out Gorbachev, put yourself in their state-produced shoes. Ask yourself how you would feel if threatened, possibly for the first time in your life, with the terrible prospect of having to do something useful. In other words, do some work. Even worse, to think. Imagine for a moment that about 75 years ago, we had changed our system of government and became the United States of Bureaucracy. Let's say we made the postal workers the ruling elite.

Richard Riordan knows what he wants - oatmeal, for starters, and a steady stream of forgiveness. The mayor is a fountain of aphorisms ("Implementation counts for 97.3 percent of success in government, 'vision' for the rest") and this morning's is: "It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. " This city's Mayor's Office is weak relative to the City Council and bureaucracy, but he can impart motion to the creaking machinery of government by sheer brassiness in bending rules and ignoring others.

During last year's campaign, it became known as The Speech He Never Gave. It was a speech on "entrepreneurial government," a new way of organizing the bureaucracy to cut down on wasteful spending and excessive staffing - and improve the delivery of services. It was always somewhere just over the horizon in Bill Clinton's campaign - a subject of humor to some insiders and of regret to others. Some blamed the influence of public employee unions, which endorsed early in the game, for inhibiting Clinton from suggesting that government was an overstuffed couch.

In the wake of the scandal at Penn State, we are forced to consider how such an egregious abdication of responsibility could occur. It is too easy, and ultimately unhelpful, to call those involved depraved and rest assured of our superiority. Penn State's administrators are not monsters, and yet we must reckon with accusations that they acted monstrously in failing to protect the most vulnerable among us. One of the most infamous instances of moral neglect involved the 1964 assault and murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese over a half-hour period in Queens, New York.

The sentencings of the last three people found guilty of criminal charges in the 2006 death of Danieal Kelly - the 14-year-old girl with cerebral palsy who starved to death in her mother's squalid West Philadelphia apartment - were sidelined this morning by what the judge called bureaucracy. Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart told lawyers that incomplete presentence investigation reports made it impossible to sentence Daniel Kelly, 40, the girl's father; Dana Poindexter, 54, the city Department of Human Services social worker supposed to have investigated reports of Danieal's neglect; and Mickal Kamuvaka, 62, head of a DHS contractor paid to send a social worker to Danieal's house twice a week to make sure she was safe.

By Victor Davis Hanson For the last 235 years, on the Fourth of July, Americans have celebrated the birth of the United States, and the founding ideas that have made it the most powerful, wealthiest, and freest nation in the history of civilization. But today, there has never been more uncertainty about the future of America - and the anxiety transcends even the dismal economy and three foreign wars. President Obama prompted such introspection in April 2009, when he suggested that the United States, as one of many nations, was not necessarily any more exceptional than others.

On Tuesday's primary ballot, voters will see a question asking if they want to create a 17-member Jobs Commission to take a comprehensive look at fostering private-sector employment in the city. The chief sponsor of the commission, Councilman Darrell L. Clarke, said it would be tasked with examining how government and other agencies could best tailor and coordinate their efforts to retain and create jobs. But to Zack Stalberg, the commission could be another unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, permanently attached to city government and open to patronage abuse.

IT'S A CASE of bureaucracy, paperwork and procedure trumping decency. It's a case of the state punishing one of its own front-liners, with 19 years service, who was injured during an undercover drug bust nearly five years ago. It's a case draining the resources of a family of four now enmeshed in litigation, living without health insurance and facing a $41,000 "bill" that the family is told it owes the state. It's not pretty. It started in January 2006, when State Trooper Scott Hawley, of Towanda, in Bradford County, 140 miles northwest of Philly, was rammed head-on in his undercover car by a fleeing drug dealer near Wilkes-Barre.

In voting to spend $10 billion to save schoolteachers' jobs last week, Congress bailed out government employees who have fatter paychecks and pensions than those doing the same kind of work in the private sector. The money came on top of hundreds of billions of dollars in government-employee bailouts that preceded it, and it won't be the last such bailout, either. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employees make more money than private-sector workers in 83 percent of comparable occupations.

Last week, a draft memo surfaced from the Homeland Security Department suggesting ways to administratively circumvent the law to allow illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and, indeed, for some to be granted permanent residency. Most disturbing was the stated rationale. This was being proposed "in the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. " In other words, because Congress refuses to do what these bureaucrats would like to see done, they will legislate it themselves. Regardless of your feelings on the substance of the immigration issue, this is not how a constitutional democracy should operate.

By Michael Pakenham A governance grab is afoot in Pennsylvania. If approved by the state legislature, it would constitute the most volatile graft accelerant since the plain brown envelope. It would balloon the payrolls of the state's 67 counties. It would obliterate more than 2,500 local governments. And it would generate massive new state and county agencies. If you have never been terrified by gobbledygook, you haven't read the title of the state Senate's version of the proposal: "An Act amending Title 53 (Municipalities Generally)

I'm still catching up on the news after two weeks down the Shore. It's amazing how ocean breezes and glorious sunsets can ease one's cares. As Springsteen sang in "Jersey Girl," "down the Shore everything's all right. " But back on the Streets of Philadelphia, it's the same old song. Mayor Nutter is still trying to balance the budget without harming the sacred city bureaucracy. He did shave $47 million from the $3.8 billion budget. That's a start. If only Nutter had the fortitude to cut an additional $86 million, then the city could avoid a 10 percent property-tax hike and be better positioned for a recovery.

It is no minor accomplishment that the Wilma Theater secured the U.S. premiere of Leaving, the first new play in 20 years by former Czech dissident, playwright, poet, and president V?clav Havel. It also, however, fits naturally with director Jiri Zizka's absurdist leanings, his own ties to the Velvet Revolution (subscriber's bonus: last season's Rock and Roll, by Czech-born Tom Stoppard, is almost a primer for this work), and the Wilma's reputation as a home for new plays of international importance.