In any event, the piece asserts that, while progress had been made in the interim, it was insufficient. Within the previous month, the hospital board had insisted on selecting a new business manager handpicked by the Superintendent, Dr. J. A. Saunders, rather than one appointed by the existing general business manager of the institution.

The Legislature, with Governor Gregg Cherry's support, then went about trying to pass a bill drafted by the existing business manager and the assistant budget director, to select board members at all state hospitals from Congressional districts and to eliminate the executive committees then extant at each institution. Thus far, however, the bill had languished in committee, meeting substantial opposition, primarily from the existing hospital board at Morganton. A compromise was being sought.

The piece advocates that some bill of the sort be passed.

The editorial cites the difference in reference to the President's speech of the previous Thursday regarding the Yalta Conference and the prospect of chartering the United Nations at San Francisco, the conference slated to begin on April 25. The President had asserted that the charter would not be perfect, could be amended through time, but was a definite need as a starting point to maintain world peace and avoid another world war.

It ventures no opinion as to why Americans were loathe to tinker with the Federal document while more than willing to change state constitutions.

The primary reason, we suggest, is that it is much easier to get consent in a statewide referendum on constitutional changes in any given state than it is to obtain national solidarity of three-fourths of the states, necessary to ratify proposed amendments. The population of the country is far more diverse politically than the population of any given state. The tendency is that birds of a feather flock together, for the most part. And, some of the birds are patently crazy, obviously--which is why we have proposed flag amendments and prayer-in-school amendments, and other such nonsense having no place in anyone's constitution, meant as a structure for government through time, setting forth its powers and limits on power. No constitution should be a forum for inevitably transitory moral stands and premises, to limit freedom of the people. None of the founding document's wisdom does that. For the Founders were not silly ninnies running around thinking their way or the highway, the Hitler Doctrine.

Since 1945, incidentally, the Constitution has been amended only five times, to limit to two elected terms the holding by any one person of the office of the presidency, to allow the District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections, the abolition of the poll tax, the affording of the ability of the President to appoint a new Vice-President upon the vacation of that position by the existing Vice-President, and the lowering of the voting age to 18 from 21.

A 27th Amendment, of some doubtful validity, albeit moot in any event, has to do with the effective date of Congressional pay raises being beyond the term of the Congress passing them, and, technically, may have been ratified in 1992 despite its having been proposed in 1789. But its doubtful validity has not been tested thus far in the courts, the issue being whether there is in fact a point at which the doctrine of laches serves to wash out any prospect of ratifying moribund amendments never ratified in the time of their passage, the only reasonable result which would avoid sneak attacks on society by smart alecks.

The piece recommends a study of the legislation to try to straighten things out, that too little compromise between wet and dry forces had been the rule of the day.

Mr. Rankin pointed out that within the previous week, a leak had developed on the Western Front whereby the Germans were made aware of Allied plans. Mr. Rankin believes the source to have been just such a Communist. He likewise asserted that some Japanese within the armed forces may have tipped the Japanese on Iwo Jima of the coming invasion. Thus, the Marines were dying by the thousands on that island.

Despite Mr. Short's ready lapdog concurrence to everything Mr. Rankin stated, neither offered, at least in the abstract from the Record printed, a shred of evidence to support the claims.

Nor would it have made any sense for Communists to be aiding either the Germans or Japanese, especially the Nazis, who hated the Communists with a passion and vice versa. Nor was there any evidence that any Japanese-American soldier had done so.

As usual, Mr. Rankin had let his emotions rule his reason to the point of complete idiocy in his stark pronouncements against, not only an invaluable ally, but also against brave men in service, tending to create suspicion and disrupt morale. Just how much the Congressman's Nazi sponsors paid him to do this bit of rebel-rousing is not stated, but we speculate on it with a good deal more probity than that of the Congressman in his exercise in pure speculation.

As to the other boy, Short, he may have simply been stupid.

None of these proposals, however, had, as yet, been undertaken.

He next recounts a colloquy between Senator McCarran of Nevada and Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes during confirmation hearings of Nathan Margold to the Federal bench. Mr. Ickes had stated that he was amicable and peace-loving, did not like fights, legal or otherwise, to which Senator McCarran suddenly interrupted to inquire as to what Mr. Ickes had said. He repeated it and Senator McCarran asked him whether it was a statement of fact, to which Mr. Ickes gave assurance that it was. Senator McCarran smiled and told him to proceed.

Finally, the column relates that, in addition to the fact of Count Sforza's anti-monarchical stand in Italy, Churchill had vetoed his appointment as Foreign Minister of Italy during the fall for the reason that, while head of the Italian war crimes tribunal, Count Sforza had deliberately leaked information that two of those on trial, Generals Roatta and Carboni, had provided intelligence to both the British Secret Service and the Germans at the same time, following the Allied invasion of Italy in September, 1943. The fact proved embarrassing to the British Secret Service and, as a result, the Prime Minister nixed any role for Count Sforza thereafter in the Italian government.

The men of the Army were disturbed by reports that the war might be over in a few days, suggesting that the fight ahead was merely cleaning-up operations, when, in fact, hard fighting still lay in store to achieve victory. There had been signs of crumbling German defenses, such as along the Roer River, but to what extent that condition would become pervasive was not yet known. And Berlin surely could not be taken without a prolonged fight, one calculated to be as the Russian defense of Stalingrad against the Nazi onslaught in 1942-43, by every man, woman, and child, regardless of age. The Russian siege recently of Budapest had taken some six weeks to crumble German and Hungarian will to resist. Moreover, even before Berlin, the Allies had to exceed the formidable Nazi defense lines strewn along the Ruhr and Rhine.

Mr. Grafton asks whether price controls should be allowed to lapse at the end of the war when it would take industry 6 to 12 months to convert back to peacetime production. It would take the automobile industry four years, by estimates, to reach the pre-war production stream. Housing starts were off during the war by 1.2 million. Following World War I, New York State had continued rent control for about eight years.

He suggests that arbitrary deadlines for ending price control be abandoned in favor of a sensible study to determine when civilian demand roughly would match production after the war. The original reason for price control was not just that a war was on, but that the conditions had created an artificial imbalance between supply and demand, in need of control therefore to avoid inflation.