The Week.

President Clinton recently sent cigars to Senators Lott and Byrd. Our advice to the would-be smokers: Skip the surgeon general's warning and go straight to the Starr report.

Congress made it official U.S. policy to deploy a missile-defense system as soon as the technology is ready. A similar attempt had failed last year because of stiff opposition from Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton. This time the Pentagon stayed silent, knowing that the Rumsfeld Commission and North Korean missile tests had made the case for SDI more compelling than ever. Indeed, the White House even endorsed the bill after winning two face-saving amendments. The debate was notable for the hysteria of the bill's media critics, who seemed unable to accept that Ronald Reagan might have been right all along. Among working politicians, the liberal position on missile defense is now indefensible.

Jesse Jackson announced he will not run for president in 2000. His announcement testified to the exhaustion of the Left, to the Democrats' desperate drive for unity, and to Jackson's low price of sale (all Clinton had to do, as far as we know, is give him a plane, call him his special envoy to Africa, and let him brag about their face time on television). But it is also, and less happily, a sign that the Left may be leaving politics for the greener pastures of corporate America. CEOs are easily mau-maued in an age of diversity training, and they have more cash to dispense than can be extracted from Congress. Jackson has successfully shaken down Wall Street; two years ago, he pocketed $2 million from Viacom in exchange for the end of a lawsuit against it. The Left may give up on getting people's votes, but it is still eager to take other people's money.

Jack Kevorkian was convicted for his televised murder of Thomas Youk, a sufferer from Lou Gehrig's disease. Kevorkian chose to conduct his own defense, and so at last the hubris that led him into a career of taking life put him in jail. The moral statement of the verdict is diminished by the fact that the jury found him guilty only of second-degree murder (how could a spectacle filmed for 60 Minutes not be premeditated?). The bogus rhetoric of mercy, which allowed him to evade convictions for assisting suicide, evidently softened his punishment even when he himself tripped the fatal switch. But at least despairing patients will be safe from his ministrations. Kevorkian has said that he will starve himself to death in jail, so pro-lifers must debate the question whether to send him food packages or let him, without help from others, take his own medicine. n Meet the Press hosted David Duke, who is seeking (with slight chance of success) Bob Livingston's congressional seat. Duke and Tim Russert had the usual edifying discussion-is the Talmud like Mein Kampf, and so forth. But the main point of the show seems to have been Duke's on-screen ID: "DAVID DUKE, (R-La.)." Yes, Duke is a Republican state senator and a would-be Republican congressional candidate. But he has also been a would-be Democratic presidential candidate (1988). In fact, Duke identified himself as a Democrat more recently than he wore a Nazi uniform. Duke is an opportunistic infection, seeking any available partisan slot for publicity. If it suited him, he would run as a Libertarian, or a Perotista, and Tim Russert should say so. But as long as Duke calls himself a Republican, he will always have a home on Meet the Press.

That Democrats will seize every opportunity to brand Republicans as racist rednecks is to be expected. What is peculiar is that Republicans are going out of their way to give credence to this smear. It took a week of bad press to get Trent Lott to repudiate the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white- supremacist group he had addressed and perhaps even joined. When a resolution condemning the group was introduced in the House, Republicans objected on the demure grounds that it was wrong to "single out" the council. J. C. Watts introduced his own resolution denouncing "all those who practice or promote racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic prejudice, or religious intolerance." Democrats voted against it, and Republicans started calling them soft on racism-a too-cute spin bought by nobody. In reality, Republicans have set back their goal of attracting more blacks to the party, probably undermined Watts's ability to help them achieve it, and dragged out a damaging story for over three months and counting. All this just to protect Trent Lott?

After more than 257,000 Americans filed formal complaints, often through e-mail, the government dropped a proposed regulation to fight money laundering. The plan, dubbed "Know Your Customer" and endorsed by the Federal Reserve, would have required banks to keep customer profiles based on transaction patterns. Any unexpected deviation-such as a larger-than-normal deposit or withdrawal-would have forced banks to alert law-enforcement officials of the "suspicious" activity. Since criminals always figure out ways to hide their dirty work, however, ordinary citizens would have been surrendering financial privacy for no discernible benefits. Indeed, the very ineffectiveness of the regulation would probably have led to yet another privacy grab. It's a good thing Internet activists decided to be tough customers.

Republicans in the Florida house passed the country's first statewide school- voucher plan, with the senate expected to follow suit. Under the plan, based on Gov. Jeb Bush's campaign proposals, schools are rewarded for success; failing schools get overhauled, and their students have the option of enrolling in a better public school or receiving a scholarship to a private school. Four public schools have already been judged failures, and the number will approach 165 when heightened standards go into effect. The Bush plan has flaws, such as its restrictions on parochial schools, but it represents a willingness to take on rotten bureaucratic establishments that Bush might apply to other issues-racial preferences, for instance.

The federal appeals courts have been keeping themselves busy. The Sixth Circuit says that local boards of education cannot open with a prayer, but the legislature can. The Fifth Circuit says that student-led prayer is permissible at graduation ceremonies if it's nonsectarian but under no circumstances can be allowed before football games, which are "hardly the sober type of annual event that can be appropriately solemnized with a prayer." All of this, you understand, is in the Constitution. Two students at a heavily Mormon school in Idaho challenged the graduation prayer, saying it made them feel like outcasts. Is there a self-esteem clause in the First Amendment? The judges on the Ninth Circuit threw up their hands and turned the case over to a higher power-no, not that one.

A panel of experts at the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, released a study on the medical uses of marijuana, finding that it can help relieve some symptoms and side-effects of AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and chemotherapy. This was no news to doctors and patients, who have been turning informally to pot for years, nor to the people in eight states who, by hefty margins, have approved recent medical-marijuana referendums. It did come as a surprise to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which commissioned the study after years of discouraging research and belittling all accounts of first-hand experience. The panel pointed out that pot smoke is even more toxic than tobacco smoke. But there are sick people whose problems (e.g., inability to eat) are more serious than potential lung damage. Washington should stop demonizing substances (an attitude as irrational as pot-heads' worship of the weed) and adopt the common sense of scientists and voters.

Cuba's All-Stars bowed to the Baltimore Orioles, 3-2, in 11 innings in Havana; the powerful Latino hurlers and batsmen go to Camden Yards for the return engagement in May; and what is lost? Nothing but truth. Castro was rewarded with a PR coup at one of the most repressive stages of his regime. Average Cubans gained little-the Communists controlled the guest list. And probably the first string won't be sent to Baltimore, since too many of them would defect. Havana deserves a World Series-once Castro is safely in the South of France.

Lawrence Kudlow tells us two under-reported facts about Japan: Its stock market has performed better than any other big country's in the year to date, and, not coincidentally, its taxes are going down. The top personal-income-tax rate is scheduled to drop from 50 to 37 percent, and corporate tax rates are also being cut. The capital-gains tax on land and the securities-transaction tax both "lock in" unproductive arrangements of assets; the former is to be reduced, the latter abolished. The yen started to appreciate after the tax-cut package was first announced. After a decade of destructive tax increases and futile Keynesian public-spending splurges, could the sun be starting to rise again?

On March 24, England's highest court decided that Augusto Pinochet could not be extradited from Britain for crimes committed before 1988, the year Britain signed an international convention banning torture. This excludes the bloodiest period of Pinochet's crackdown against Chile's Leninist Left, and he may now be able to block extradition. But the principle has been established that controversial leaders from any country are vulnerable to arrest anywhere for alleged offenses anywhere. Reagan over Grenada? Kissinger over Indochina? Or, for that matter, Clinton over Sudan? If the administration is at all worried about this, the time to speak up is now.

A study finding discrimination against female tenured professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Science has been much hyped. Institute president Charles Vest said it made him "sit bolt upright in my chair." Feel free to slump again. Ignoring younger women on the faculty, who weren't complaining of unequal treatment, the report focused on the 22 women belonging to a tenured faculty of 274. The sample shrank further when "several" of those 22 reported no problems. The study admits that any discrimination reported by the remaining handful could be "ascribed to . . . special circumstances." And since salaries weren't released, the study could suggest only "possible inequities." If this report is any indication of what passes for science at the school, maybe it's the students' parents who should be sitting bolt upright.

The United Methodist Church suspended the Rev. Greg Dell, a Chicago minister, for performing a homosexual marriage. In 1996, the Church's "Book of Discipline" added the sentence: "Ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions shall not be conducted by our ministers and shall not be conducted in our churches"; and in August 1998 the Church's highest court ruled that the sentence had the force of law. So the decision was no surprise. What is interesting is that it comes from a denomination conspicuous for its middleness. The consensus of Protestant opinion on gay marriage seems to be in the direction of traditional teaching. But the pressures for change, issuing from the surrounding culture, will continue. The likely result will be schisms, possibly leading to a liberal Church of Gayness. That should satisfy believers all around. The Almighty, as always, will have the last word.

For over 25 years William Gribbin has been one of the most powerful weapons in the conservative political arsenal. If you have never heard of him, there's a reason: He wanted it that way. Out of the media spotlight, Bill operated as a brilliant policy maven, strategist, and-most important-the writer of numerous Republican platforms. Alas, all good things must end . . . sort of: Gribbin, a top aide to Senate majority leader Trent Lott, and a staff veteran of Sen. James Buckley, Rep. Henry Hyde, President Reagan, and Vice President Quayle, retires next week. He promises, however, to stay involved in politics-behind the scenes, of course.

A member of the Norwegian royal family was rebuked for going to the hospital nearest the palace, instead of the one in the family's official home district, as the rules of Norwegian socialized medicine require. Things have changed since the days of the sagas, when kings with nicknames like Broadaxe spent more time putting people in hospitals.