Tilting at windmills: carrot addiction; the price of pro-bono; downward devolution; all in the family; new-class nuptials.

Of all the tobacco industry's attempts to defend itself, my favorite was supplied by Andrew Schindler, president of R.J. Reynolds, who told a plaintiff's lawyer that he didn't believe that tobacco was any more addictive than coffee or carrots.

"Carrot addiction?" asked the lawyer.

"Yes," replied Schindler. "There was British research on carrots"

Equally incredible, for me at least, was this recent headline in The New York Times. "GOP Panel Sees No Major Flaw in Fund-Raising Rules." In other words, they're outraged by what Bill Clinton and Al Gore have done in their campaign, but want to remain free to behave similarly.

I have more evidence for our campaign to get lawyers out of the practice of law, leaving behind the small minority that are both decent and dedicated to justice. It comes from an article by John Greenya in The Washington Lawyer, which is the official publication of the District of Columbia Bar and therefore cannot be accused, as some would say I can, of prejudice against practitioners. Of the local lawyers who left their firms to go into health care, teaching, computer software, and even songwriting, Greenya wrote: "All report solid satisfaction with their career move. In fact, with one slight exception, none of them has serious misgivings about leaving the practice of law, or plans to return."

Continuing in the realm of the unbelievable, Vanessa Williams of The Washington Post reports: "If he were the least bit certain that Republican leaders of Congress had launched last week's raid on home rule in an effort to rout him from office, Mayor Marion Barry says he would step aside" If you believe that one, I've got a lovely bridge to sell you.

One reason I try to persuade lawyers to leave the law is to save their souls. Another is to save the rest of us from the harm they do as lawyers. Consider what the lawyers have been up to in the District of Columbia, where the number of auto accident-related lawsuits has risen 137 percent since 1985. During the same period, the number of auto accidents fell by 22 percent.

My wife often asks me how I can say I'm against violence and still be a pro football fan. Sometimes I have to admit she has a point. An example occurred here a few weeks ago when Michael Westbrook of the Redskins assaulted his teammate Stephen Davis during a practice session, striking him several times while Davis was down.

The incident, by the way, was taped by a television crew for a local station that doesn't carry pro football games. Interestingly, it was not taped by crews of the stations that do telecast the pros. George Michael, a sports reporter for one of those stations, explained that he had gotten access to the Redskins' practices by promising "we wouldn't use anything that would embarrass them."

Sports journalists, it appears, are just another species of the celebrity journalists who, as Joshua Wolf Shenk pointed out in these pages last year, too often purchase access with the promise, most often quietly implied instead of baldly explicit as it was here, of treatment that will not be too tough.

According to The Washington Post's Judith Havemann, the devolution of authority over welfare, which a year ago went from the federal to the state level, is now proceeding further down the political ladder as states hand off responsibilities to counties and other local jurisdictions. One problem with this is the same as with the public schools: The greatest need is concentrated in the poorest counties and localities, which often have the most inadequate resources. Another problem is that local welfare offices are often not very good. The New York City child welfare agency, even after a supposedly radical overhaul and reduction of caseload, was still found in a recent study to have closed one in every four cases where children were still at risk of abuse. In one in seven cases, welfare investigators actually interviewed children in the presence of their alleged abusers, according to Rachel L. Swarns of The New York Times.

And if you have doubts about the federal civil service, don't assume local merit systems are better. Linda Blackford of the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette looked at the county school system and found that merit principles are circumvented by administrators who decide who will get a job before it is advertised and then tailor the advertisment to fit the applicant they want. Over the years I have found this technique used to evade merit principles at every level of the civil service. But I must concede my fellow West Virginians bring a little local color to the practice:

Jack McClanahan, the county's deputy superintendent, is the brother of Paul, who is principal of a county high school, and the husband of Joyce, who works at a county high school, as does Joyce's sister, Joan. Joyce's sister-in-law, Marlene, teaches at a county elementary school, and her brother, Sam, is a retired junior high principal. Sam's wife, Kay, is principal of a county elementary school. Meanwhile, Jack McClanahan's brother Paul's wife, Kathy, teaches at a county junior high, and her first cousin Gary Hendricks works as food service director for the county schools.

What happened to the Republicans' drive to abolish the Department of Commerce? The answer is that they discovered how they could use the department's Economic Development Administration to supply pork for their states and districts. More than half of the fiscal 1998 projects singled out for EDA funds by the Senate Appropriations Committee, according to Russell Tisinger of Congressional Quarterly, are located in the home states of Republican members of the committee. Those divvying up the spoils include Judd Gregg, Pete Domenici, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Conrad Burns, and Mitch McConnell. (For more on Senator McConnell see Michelle Cottle's article beginning on page 14.)

An ancient curse of both the civil and military service has been inflated performance ratings. Everyone who isn't satisfactory is clearly outstanding. Raters are kind to those they rate in the hope that those who rate them will also act benignly. But some fantasize now and then about what they would say if they were candid. A few examples posted on the internet include, "He has the wisdom of youth, and the energy of old age," "He has carried out each and every one of his duties to his complete satisfaction," and "She sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them."

"Did he do better or did she, or was it an equal match?" That was the question being explored by the teenage sister of a friend I was visiting in the early '60s as she read aloud some of the wedding announcements in The New York Times. Back then, the issue was resolved on the basis of ancestry and badges of social class such as the right schools and clubs. But what was interesting was how often the marriage represented a match of equals. In other words, each party had struck a good bargain in terms of the social values of the time or at least they had enough regard for these values to want the match to appear equal when their friends read about it in The New York Times.

Since that long-ago Sunday morning, I have followed those Times wedding announcements with interest. Over the years, the standards have changed. The right clubs no longer count nearly as much as the right jobs. When the meritocratic elite that Nicholas Lemann wrote about in our last issue gets hitched, it's not the bride's or groom's bloodlines that are matched, it's their resumes. If a job was mentioned in the old days, it was only the groom's. Now the bride's is just as important to the equality of the bargain.

In recent years I've tried without success to persuade one of our young writers to look into this development. But I'm happy to report that City Journal has published an article entitled "New-Class Nuptials," in which its author, David Brooks, says: "The definining characteristic of the people mentioned on the [Times's wedding] page ... is their profession. In our sample, 18 percent of the individuals are doctors, 23 percent are lawyers, 23 percent are in media or communications, and 28 percent are in finance of one sort or another."

What strikes Brooks is how few are entrepreneurs. The groom may work at Morgan Stanley and the bride at Sullivan and Cromwell, but neither is likely to have founded Acme Widget. (Computer-genius tycoons are the sole exception, probably based less on their risk-taking than on their ability to ace the SATs that are so crucial to the meritocracy.) What worries me just as much as the risk averseness is the meritocratic class's lack of interest in public service. They don't become public school teachers or work in government, unless it's a brief stopover at the SEC or a district attorney's office to get their career ticket punched. And, of course, you won't find a bride or groom who's in the military. Nor have I ever found a nurse in the group, although in the years I traveled around the world for the Peace Corps looking at volunteers perform practically every kind of job, the nurses impressed me most.

All of which raises the question: Does the meritocratic society recognize real merit? Shouldn't the teacher in Harlem, the air traffic controller, the ER nurse, the Marine lieutenant, and the person who creates a company that makes a good product and offers good jobs to its employees be recognized as at least equal to investment bankers and Wall Street lawyers? And, of course, just comparing resumes means such life essentials as common sense, kindness, and humor aren't being given the attention they deserve.

Speaking of nurses, their only problem back in the 1960s was that there was a ceiling on what they could do that was held firmly in place by doctors who didn't want competition. Today the situation has improved. There are now 71,000 nurse practitioners who perform many of the tasks that once belonged solely in the domain of the physician. But as we pointed out in June, we have far fewer nurse midwives than most countries. The number is only 7,400 midwives thanks to resistance by the ob-gyn doctors who want to keep the delivery business to themselves.

And speaking of resisting reform, the higher-education community is providing a case study of how to do it. Last year, congress members who were concerned about the ever-higher cost of higher education provided for a commission to be set up to investigate. But by the time the membership of the commission was announced, it was clear that the higher-education lobby had done its job. Eight of the 11 members are either university officials or lobbyists.

I admired the ACLU's effort to get women admitted to the Citadel. But did you see the amount its lawyers billed the Citadel: $6.15 million. The fee included the cost of a going-away party for an ACLU staffer who worked on the case and up to $450 an hour plus expenses for the ACLU's New York law firm, Shearman & Sterling. Pro bono luris consultus.

When I heard about Jesse Helms's refusal to hold hearings on William Weld's nomination, I wondered why he had the power to do that I vaguely remembered that a couple of decades ago there was supposed to have been a reform that put an end to such arbitrary exercise of power by committee chairmen.

The Washington Post's Helen Dewar was similarly curious and consulted prominent authorities on the Senate's rules and history. The answer, she discovered, is that a chairman can be forced to hold meetings -- in the case of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it would take a vote of all eight Democrats and at least two Republicans. The catch, according to Dewar, is that when the meeting is held, "the chairman can preside, control the agenda, and block a vote."

I wish history would be taught with as much emphasis on the lessons it teaches as on the stories it tells. The student should be able to see its relevance. An example of what I mean is a recent paper prepared by Alexander George and Jane Holl from the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, that focuses on the ignored warnings and missed opportunities that have led to wars. By showing, as George and Holl do, why and how we failed to act on warnings that North Korea would attack South Korea in 1950, or that Iraq would invade Kuwait in 1990, history becomes not just something we study, but something we can learn from.

The differences between men and women, other than in physical equipment, seem to be shrinking. But a few linger on. My wife likes to shop more than I do. Control of the TV remote seems to be more vital to my inner well-being than to hers. But even that difference may be vanishing. Recently, an Arlington, Va., woman stabbed her boyfriend in a fight over the TV remote. According to The Washington Times, "He wanted to watch the Chicago Bulls and she wanted a movie."

Incidentally, the woman's defense when she was brought before the court was that it was just an accident: "He was lifting his hand as she lowered the knife." The argument has a certain appeal to me, but the judge didn't buy it, finding her guilty of misdemeanor assault and battery.

We have long supported drug legalization -- not because we approve of drugs but because we want to get rid of the crime that is encouraged by the fact that drugs are illegal. An example is the corruption of airline employees, seaport workers, and customs officials who are bribed by racketeers to facilitate the smuggling of drugs. An even more troubling result of illegal drugs comes from a recent report in The Washington Post that "24,377 black men 18 to 35 -- or nearly 50 percent of the city's black male population in that age range -- were in the District's criminal justice system from January through April." You don't have to be a criminologist to know that most of their offenses are drug related.

But while we're for legalization, we have no sympathy for those who intend it as a wink of approval for drug use. The Californians who are laughing as they use "medicinal" marijuana for fun are only strengthening the hand of the prohibitionists.

Like so many Americans, I found myself rooting for the UPS workers during the strike. I'm sure this was partly because many of us feel the tide has run too strongly against labor in recent years. And almost everyone knows parttime workers are often used so employers can pay lower wages and avoid paying benefits. But the latter, at least, was an unfair rap against UPS. It does pay benefits to part-time workers.

Another fact about part-time work that was not noticed in much of the coverage is that most parttime workers want to work part time so they can also go to school or take care of their children. Or they're semiretired and want to keep their hand in while not having to work too many hours. R.A. Zaldivar of Knight Ridder, who did get this part of the story, reports, "Government figures show that four out of five people who work part time aren't interested in fulltime employment." So the point is not that part-time work is in itself wrong, but that it should be fairly compensated and have decent benefits. And of course every effort should be made to give full-time work to that 20 percent of part-timers who want it.

What bothers me most about UPS is that it works its employees too hard. They dash in and out of those brown trucks so fast that they're practically breathless when they reach your door, and too often they're carrying staggering loads. Shouldn't the strike have been more about that? Sometimes strikes are about the wrong issues. Remember the air traffic controllers Reagan fired? Their big issue was wages when it should have been the safety risks caused by overwork at several major facilities.

In 1965, Congress Passed the Highway Beautification Act. It was designed to restrain the excesses of the billboard industry. How then is the industry able to get away with clear-cutting trees -- even though they are on public land -- if they obstruct the view of a billboard? Because lobbyists got an amendment passed that allows for "vegetation control" by billboard owners.

I've complained before about Bill Clinton's indifference to the operation of the federal agencies he's supposed to oversee. The latest example comes from Bill McAllister of The Washington Post, who reports that "seven months into President Clinton's second term, about 30 percent of the top 470 political jobs in his administration remain unfilled." And that number doesn't even include the scores of vacant judgeships and ambassadorial positions that you no doubt have already heard about. But it does include such major jobs as deputy department heads.

These jobs are usually harder to fill as a president's second term approaches its end. So Clinton's delay in making appointments will become an increasingly serious problem as time passes.

Two headlines that qualify for our Why Haven't They Done That Before? department ran in The New York Times in recent months. One was "FAA Going Public on Airline Faults;" and the other, "EPA Is Pressing Plan to Publicize Pollution Data." Of course, the reason you haven't read about it before is that the airlines and the polluting industries didn't want the people to know what they were doing wrong, for the same reason you recently discovered that the meat industry is not eager to have its failings subject to the public spotlight. As Nurith Aizenman points out in her article beginning on page 24 of this issue, the main problem with regulation is not that it's too burdensome (although occasionally it is) but that it's too tender, too solicitous of the regulated industry. By the way, just in case you don't know, the federal government does not now have the authority to order a recall of bad meat. After the latest e-coli incident, Dan Glickman, the secretary of agriculture, asked Congress to give him that authority. Of course, his effort is being resisted by the American Meat Institute, which represents packers and processors.

The teachers unions are finally getting around to cleaning up their act. One example is the Montgomery County (Md.) Education Association which, according to The Washington Post's Dan Beyers, no longer wants pay and job security issues to dominate contract talks. Instead, Beyers reports that "the teachers want to engage the school officials on numerous issues that affect the quality of classroom life, such as reducing class size, dealing with unruly students, and helping administrators root out poor teachers -- even if they are union members."

The problem is the unions may be too late. There are a number of signs that they're in deep trouble. They are attacked in a new book, Teachers Unions, by Myron Lieberman. And a new poll shows that for the first time there is majority public support for vouchers. Those in favor have risen in just the last year from 49 to 55 percent.

More significantly, support is highest -- at 62 percent -- among blacks who are victims of the worst public schools, which are seldom located in suburban areas like Montgomery County, but are frequently found in the inner cities.

This magazine now supports vouchers for students in those inner cities where the schools are really bad. But unlike the conservatives, whose enthusiasm for vouchers is not accompanied by equal dedication to improving public education, our main aim continues to be to make public schools better. We favor vouchers for inner-city kids because we don't think they should continue to suffer from the snail's pace of reform.

Did you know that George Mitchell, the former senator from Maine, and Ann Richards, the former governor of Texas, who many of us have considered among the good guys of politics, lobbied for the tobacco industry to get a tax credit for the money the industry will have to pay in the national tobacco settlement? The passage of this tax credit indicates the tobacco gang still has a few tricks up its sleeve. One sign is its ability to turn decent politicians like Mitchell and Richards into hired guns. Another is the bizarre twist of chic that has attractive movie stars lighting up on screen and hip columnists like Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Ferguson, and Maureen Dowd making fun of tobacco opponents.

If you treasure quiet Saturday and Sunday mornings, you will be delighted by the news that the push lawn mower is making a comeback. According to The Wall Street Journal, sales of the push mower are up 150 percent from five years ago. Maybe the fellow next door will join the trend and you'll be able to once again enjoy sleeping late on weekends instead of having the peace disturbed by the unlovely sound of his power mower. Of course, the trend I am most devoutly praying for is the return to simple rakes. I'm sure those leaf blowers have already damaged my hearing.