Wednesday, June 6, 2001 1:47 P.M. EDT

Clinton Claims Another Victim
Los Angeles has a new mayor. City Attorney James Hahn has beaten ex-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, 53.5% to 46.5%. Both men are Democrats; mayoral elections in L.A. are nonpartisan. As the L.A. Times notes, "Hahn overcame his opponent's support from much of the political establishment--including Gov. Gray Davis; Mayor Richard Riordan; the county Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO; and the California Democratic Party."

Kausfiles.com attributes Villaraigosa's loss to a Hahn campaign commercial attacking Villaraigosa for a letter he wrote urging Bill Clinton to pardon of cocaine trafficker Carlos Vignali. "Do you doubt that if Clinton hadn't commuted Vignali's sentence, Villaraigosa would today be mayor-elect of L.A.?" asks Mickey Kaus, who calls the loser "the latest (last?) victim of Bill Clinton."

The L.A. Times' Steve Lopez takes up the same theme:

If Hahn holds onto the lead he had Tuesday night when editors ripped this column out of my hands, someone will write the story that says Los Angeles wasn't ready to embrace a Mexican American mayor.

What might be closer to the truth is that it wasn't ready to embrace a flawed Mexican American candidate--a man who wasn't up to the challenge when Hahn turned Villaraigosa's 1996 clemency plea into a letter bomb and dropped it in his lap.

The Best City for Blacks
George W. Bush's Texas is a terrible place for blacks, at least if you believed the anti-Bush hype during last year's campaign. Most famously, Paul Begala observed: "You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart--it's red." Well, guess which city Black Enterprise magazine has just named "the nation's best city for African-Americans to live, work and play"? You've got it--Houston. Dallas finished in eighth place; New York and Los Angeles didn't even make the top 10.

Black and Blue
Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Washington Monthly, takes on another racial stereotype: the notion that antiblack prejudice is at the root of police brutality. Coates examines the aggressive policing in solidly middle-class Prince George's County, Md., where "the county executive, the state's attorney, and the chairman of the county council are all black, as are 41 percent of the police officers," and finds that "like their white counterparts, African-Americans will countenance a few police thrashings if that's the price of keeping their Jags from getting jacked."

Alvin Thornton, a professor of political science at Howard University and a resident of Prince George's County, tells the Monthly, "In many ways black people are no different than whites. There is a certain impatience with crime, and when police pounce on people there is some understanding." The race of the police officers and the political leadership won't make that big a difference in police behavior, Coates suggests, paraphrasing Ronald Hampton, executive director of National Black Police Association, saying that "diversifying police departments like P.G. County's won't make them any less violent."

Spike Him
In a Los Angeles Time op-ed, the Cato Institute's Tom Palmer offers a powerful rebuke to California's Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who recently said, referring to Kenneth Lay, chairman of Enron Corp., "I would love to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, 'Hi, my name is Spike, honey.' " Writes Palmer:

Here's why Lockyer should be removed from his office of public trust: First, because as the chief law enforcement officer of the largest state in the nation, he not only has admitted that rape is a regular feature of the state's prison system, but also that he considers rape a part of the punishment he can inflict on others.

Second, because he has publicly stated that he would like to personally arrange the rape of a Texas businessman who has not even been charged with any illegal behavior.

Lockyer's remarks reveal him to be an authoritarian thug, someone wholly unsuited to holding an office of public trust.

Bertolt Brecht for City Council
In a 1994 referendum, voters in the District of Columbia gave 62% approval to a referendum limiting members of the D.C. Council to two consecutive four-year terms. Now the council has decided to dissolve the people and elect a new one. "Nine of the council's 13 members--a veto-proof majority--voted to abolish term limits for the mayor, the council and the four elected members of the D.C. Board of Education," the Washington Post reports. "They argued that the 1994 measure was on shaky constitutional ground and interfered with the right of D.C. residents to choose their leaders." It's the first time an elected body has overturned a voter-approved term-limit measure anywhere in America.

Risks of the Crime
Two men shot in the parking lot of a Florida Ramada Inn while they were allegedly conducting a drug deal are suing the hotel for $1.7 million. A Miami Herald editorial notes that Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Celeste Muir "excluded all evidence of the suspected drug deal--including the previous drug conviction of one of the men suing, an electronic scale and $38,000 in cash found at the scene." A jury found in favor of the plaintiffs. But an appeals court pointed out that "Florida law does not allow people injured while engaged in criminal acts to recover damages." We read about the case on Overlawyered.com.

Five Bullets and Out
Navy recruits since 1997 have never fired a live bullet during boot camp, and only now will recruits start shooting five rounds of live ammunition, columnist Tanya Metaksa writes, picking up a report in the Navy Times. The Navy training is less than what's required for a concealed-carry permit in Nevada.

Kristol's Contribution
Weekly Standard editor and publisher Bill Kristol tells Fox News Channel's Brit Hume: "I regard myself as an agent of reconciliation between the president and John--and John McCain! If my lunch [with McCain aides last week] inadvertently led to this nice dinner they're going to have this week and an ability for them to work together, I've done my little bit for the country, Brit." More seriously, Kristol says the Democratic control of the Senate actually increases the chances of a cut in the capital gains tax, because such a cut could be packaged as a compromise with an increase in the minimum wage.

Investigating Chuy's
"The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is investigating Chuy's restaurant to determine how one of President Bush's daughters and another 19-year-old were served alcohol last week," the Houston Chronicle reports. Austin police cited Barbara Bush and a friend for illegal possession of alcohol; Jenna Bush got a ticket for using a fake ID. "They served two minors, and I want to know why," David Ball, the commission's Austin enforcement supervisor, tells the newspaper. But the Chronicle reports "the investigation of Chuy's has been difficult to conduct," because, as Ball says, "Everybody's too scared on this thing to talk."

Meanwhile, The Smoking Gun unearths the bankruptcy records of Mia Lawrence, the Chuy's manager who snitched on Jenna. "Included in assets that Lawrence claims are exempt from liquidation are about $9000 in cash, household goods totaling $4000, a Chuy's pension worth $6700, and a $2500 Volvo. Oh, and she values her dogs at an exempt $100."

Wobegone in Tennessee
Middle Tennessee's 21 counties produced 169 high school valedictorians overall, up from 147 last year. At Murfreesboro's Oakland High School, there were 18 valedictorians, the Nashville Tennessean reports. Smyrna High had seven valedictorians. The practice of naming many students as the top of the class is "leaving some valedictorians questioning the worth of that title," the newspaper says.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
A student at Columbus, Ohio's Groveport-Madison Middle School North will miss the last four days of class while school officials "look into the meaning of marks he made on the pictures of fellow students in his yearbook," the Columbus Dispatch reports:

"He said: 'These were kids I don't like. It's my hit list.' He was angry,'' said Assistant Superintendent Rich Playko of the boy, whose name and grade level were not released. "We're following our procedure. We're on alert status."

That includes locking classroom doors and assigning teachers to monitor hallways, he said.

Principal Leanne Yoakum alerted Playko about the book after a student told her about it early yesterday morning.

The boy had placed a dot on the photographs of students he liked and a dot under the photographs of students he did not like, Yoakum said.

"He said he wasn't going to hurt anyone. But other students perceived it as a hit list,'' she said.

"You mention 'hit list' in a school and people get nervous.''

Had the phrase "hit list'' not been uttered, the boy probably would not have been suspended, Yoakum said.

In an apparent effort to turn this childish gag into a full-blown panic, Playko "has begun calling the families of the students whose photos were marked negatively," the Dispatch adds.

The Brady Law Backfires
Newsmax.com's Wes Vernon reports that "the Brady anti-gun law has resulted in denial of a firearms purchase to a former policeman who is an honored war veteran." Reason: "A juvenile record from 42 years ago that was supposed to be "sealed” nonetheless came back to deny him the right to buy a gun for his wife’s protection."

Michael Bruce Williamson was charged with burglary in 1959, when he was 16. He stayed out of trouble during his one-year probation, and a judge ordered that the charge "is hereby dismissed and the defendant is . . . released from all penalties and disabilities resulting from the filing of said charge." But because of a bureaucratic foul-up, the charge showed up in Williamson's Brady background check, and he was declared "ineligible to purchase or possess firearms."

This incident points to another danger of zero-tolerance insanity. In some cases, children much younger than 16 have been forced to plead guilty to "crimes" that are really nothing more than innocent play--charges that will follow them into adulthood. If Williamson is still haunted by a charge from 1959 that was supposed to be expunged, who's to say we won't still be reading of the consequences of today's mass hysteria come 2043?

Dispatch From the Porn Belt
OK, Canada isn't technically part of the Porn Belt, but we all know Canadians would have voted for Al Gore if they could have voted in last year's U.S. election. Columnist Tom Brodbeck of the Winnipeg Sun reports on a group of 15-year-old high schoolers who signed up for "a mini-university course at the University of Winnipeg in April":

The teenage girls thought they were going to get a lesson in art history from a one-week "Women in Art" course designed for high school students.

What they got instead was an orientation on lesbian lifestyle and how women can satisfy themselves sexually without men using a variety of fruits and vegetables.

"People were shown fondling objects such as carrots and/or cucumbers and saying you could use this, you don't need a man," said John Carlyle, superintendent of River East School Division. "The message was not one of art, it was a message of 'girls don't need men, you can get along without them quite nicely--use the following kinds of paraphernalia and you'll be OK.' "

In a written statement, University of Winnipeg president Constance Rooke acknowledged that the material wasn't "age-appropriate" and said, in Brodbeck's words, "that greater care will be taken in the future to ensure this doesn't happen again."

CBS: Cliché Broadcasting System
Did CBS News legal consultant Andrew Cohen enter some sort of contest to see how many clichés he could use in a single commentary? This piece on Timothy McVeigh's appeal is riddled with them (emphasis ours):

The government put its money where its mouth is. . . . Federal prosecutors didn't pussy-foot around. . . . The feds pulled no punches. . . . Government lawyers think that the issues now before a federal district judge are a slam-dunk cinch for their side. . . . We'll know in a few days whether this unusual, in-your-face filing succeeds. . . . No amount of legal chest-thumping hides the undisputed fact here that the government didn't play by its own rules. . . . Last week, the defense accentuated whatever positives McVeigh has going for him. . . . At the same time, they essentially glossed over the trouble spots in their arguments. On Monday, prosecutors did the same; focusing upon the black letter of the law. . . . So the battle lines are drawn.

(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds, Brian O'Donnell, Frank Banecker, John Lott, John Mueller and Owen Handy. If you have a tip for Best of the Web Today, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Shelby Steele on President Bush's quota conundrum.
• Seth Gitell on Joe Moakely and the future of the Democrats.
• Pete du Pont on how to save Social Security.