by JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, August 30, 2001 2:39 P.M. EDT

Where's the 'Lock Box' When You Need It?
An Internal Revenue Service contractor in Pittsburgh manages to "lose" as many as 40,000 federal tax returns along with checks totaling more than $800 million. An unnamed source tells the Washington Post that Mellon Bank, which ran the IRS's Pittsburgh processing center, was penalized for failing to process returns rather than rewarded for processed ones: "It gave them incentive to stick the payments in a drawer. It was almost cost-effective for Mellon to do that. There was no reward for timely processing."

A problem with privatization? Maybe not. The Post notes that "the situation is reminiscent of an episode at the IRS's own Philadelphia Service Center in the mid-1980s in which overwhelmed IRS workers stuffed returns into the trash because they could not keep up with the workload." The IRS says affected taxpayers--from New England and upstate New York--will be able to refile and have their returns counted as on time. Oh, and if you've written a check to the Treasury that hasn't cleared, you might want to stop payment.

Jesse Helms, 'White Racist'?
David Broder of the Washington Post, doyen of Beltway journalism, is usually a high-minded, even-tempered commentator. So his column yesterday, "Jesse Helms, White Racist," raised our eyebrows. (Oddly, the headline is missing from another copy of the column on the Post's Web site.) Broder calls Helms "the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country." Here's his evidence:

• Eighteen years ago, Helms filibustered a Senate bill to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday.

• Seventeen years ago, during his campaign for a third term, "Helms campaign literature sounded a drumbeat of warnings about black voter-registration drives," according to the late reporter Bill Peterson. On election eve in 1984, Helms said he feared a large "bloc vote," meaning that the black vote would come out for his opponent.

• Eleven years ago, Helms aired a campaign commercial against racial quotas. "You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota," said a narrator, as a pair of hands crumpled a letter.

This is a pretty weak basis on which to charge someone with racism, which is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." Granted, Helms's crusade against the King holiday seems small-minded, and it's fair to say that he made appeals to white voters on racial grounds. But Democrats appeal to black voters on racial grounds all the time. Imagine a TV ad aimed at blacks with a narrator saying: "You needed that job, but you didn't get it because Republicans refused to expand affirmative-action programs." Would that even be controversial?

Hillary Clinton, 'Zionist Whore'?
Even more intemperate than David Broder is Al-Ittihad, the Arabic-language newspaper of the Israeli Communist Party, which attacks another senator, New York's Hillary Clinton, after the former first lady called on Yasser Arafat to end the Palestinian Authority's "campaign of violence targeted at innocent families and children." In an article entitled "Worse than Your Husband's Prostitution, You Senator Hillary Zion," translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute and reported in the Jerusalem Post, the commies declare:

We will not be surprised or shocked if the senator, wife of the former American president . . . changes her surname to Zion, Moishele or Sharoni. Simultaneously with sexual prostitution and corruption, chronic political prostitution spreads in the U.S. ruling circles. Since Hillary Clinton was elected congresswoman [sic] for the state of New York, she has been practicing a kind of political prostitution that is even worse than her husband's sexual debauchery.

We are not surprised by the position of this political whore--a position that turns the facts upside down in order to win the love and support of the Zionist lobby in the U.S.

We never thought we'd say this, but it seems to us they're being too hard on Hillary.

Swiss to Palestinians: Attack America
An editorial in Geneva's Le Temps newspaper (11th item) poses the following question: "Does it require direct Palestinian attacks on U.S. interests for Washington to get involved in solving this conflict?" Gee, we liked the Swiss better when they were neutral.

Serial Mom
The state of Nebraska wants to send a six-year-old boy to prison. No, this isn't another story of zero-tolerance lunacy; the kid isn't even accused of doing anything wrong. This is child-custody lunacy. The boy's mother, Kimberly Faust, is a double murderer. Reports Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene:

On April 25, 2000, Faust--apparently jealous about a relationship she believed her estranged husband was having with another woman--led that woman to a remote area, stabbed her repeatedly, then set the woman's car on fire with the woman inside it. When a man who lived in the neighborhood saw the burning car, he ran to try to help whoever might be inside. Kimberly Faust shot the man to death as he tried to rescue the woman Faust had stabbed; Faust also shot the woman.

Last week Judge Randall Rehmeier ordered Faust's ex-husband, Bruce Faust, to send his son to jail for overnight visits with his mother and threatened to cite him with contempt. Incredibly, the murderous mom seems to have the law on her side; as Greene reports, "in Nebraska, children between 1 and 8 years of age may be sent to sleep in their mothers' prisons." In a follow-up column, Greene urges readers to contact Nebraska's Gov. Mike Johanns and urge him to "stop this insanity."

Carnival Knowledge
This Chandra Levy story is starting to get a little strange. On Tuesday Washington cops went to a New Jersey nut house to check out a tip from Eric Storm, a mental patient and carnival worker who claims he witnessed Chandra's murder by three hit men who were carnival colleagues on April 29. (Chandra actually was last seen April 30 and is believed to have disappeared May 1.) The cracked carny first told his story to the Trentonian newspaper:

He said the hitmen shot Levy three times in the chest and slit her throat. They then ordered him to run and open up the car trunk where some heavy clear plastic was contained. He brought it back and the three men wrapped her body in it several times. Then they dragged the body to a hole seven feet deep which they had dug the night before.

The makeshift grave, which was located near a park bench, was next to two other graves where young women who also had been murdered were buried, according to Storm.

The paper also reports Storm claims he knew Levy "from their past work together for the Democratic National Committee."

L.A. Times to Condit: Quit
Eighteen days after the Modesto Bee demanded Rep. Gary Condit's resignation, the Los Angeles Times calls on the concupiscent congressman to quit: Condit "should consider his loyalty and obligations to his Central Valley constituents and quit. Or at least he should end his political career by not running for reelection next year."

Sorry, Fresno
The Interior Department rescinds the designation of the Fresno Sanitary Landfill as a historic site. "Within the process, the National Park Service and the DOI were not made specifically aware that the landfill is a Superfund site," an Interior spokesman tells the Fresno Bee.

'Jump'
People in Seattle aren't just crazy, they're mean. A 26-year-old woman threatening suicide on a Seattle bridge tied up traffic for four hours--and prompted frustrated drivers to yell "Jump, bitch, jump!" USA Today says that reports of the taunting have prompted soul-searching in a city "once best-known for its laid-back charm."

Your Tax Dollars at Play
Taxpayers get stuck with the bill for more than $250,000 in expenses from a trip to Europe on a military jet by House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt and Rep. Charles Rangel. Of this, reports the New York Post's Deborah Orin, "$4,788.76 went for on-board supplies for the jet-setters, including a chocolate mousse tower, filet mignon, chicken stuffed with mushrooms and suntan lotion." (Stuffing a chicken with suntan lotion prevents it from getting burned in the oven.) In London, the congressmen stayed at Grosvenor House, where the corporate rate is $425 a night, the Post reports.

Blind Spot
Fred Tarrant, a city councilman in Naples, Fla., wants to remove from a city-owned art center two paintings satirizing Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Tarrant finds them offensive--or at least he's been told they're offensive. Tarrant is blind, but a friend assures him that the paintings, by Ted Lay, are obscene.

One of the paintings, "Famous Tongue Mona Al Monica," "depicts the faces of Albert Einstein, the Mona Lisa, and Lewinsky with their tongues hanging out," WKMG-TV reports. "Critics said that Lewinsky's tongue looks like a penis." The other painting, "Christmas Card for Monica," shows Clinton "with coat and tie, legs spread, and dressed in boxer shorts decorated with the Stars and Stripes."

It's not the first time Clinton-Lewinsky art has been controversial; we noted last week the case of Peter Langenbach, whose sculpture of the prurient past prez and the immodest intern was banned at the Sacramento state fair. Now Langenbach tells the San Jose Mercury-News the experience has been a "nightmare." He adds, "dryly": "I was hoping someone at the Clinton library might be interested" in acquiring the sculpture. "But I guess not."

'Glad to Be Rid of Him'
Ray Bradbury, author of the sci-fi classics "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles," is apparently no fan of Clinton. Asked by Salon what he thinks of President Bush, Bradbury says:

He's wonderful. We needed him. Clinton is a sh--head and we're glad to be rid of him. And I'm not talking about his sexual exploits. I think we have a chance to do something about education, very important. We should have done it years ago. It doesn't matter who does it--Democrats or Republicans--but it's long overdue. Our education system is a monstrosity. We need to go back and rebuild kindergarten and first grade and teach reading and writing to everybody, all colors, and then the whole structure of our education will change because people will know how to read and write.

What Not to Do About Education
Massachusetts' Republican governor, Jane Swift, comes up with an uncommonly unswift proposal: giving grants of $1,000 to the families of public-school students who repeatedly fail the state's standardized graduation test. Unlike school vouchers, which might help students escape failing schools, this plan seems designed to reward failing students.

Coarse Courses
Young America's Foundation releases its annual list of the most politically correct college courses, which feature "Marx, multiculturalism and malarkey." Example:

Columbia University students can enroll in Pirates, Boys, and Capitalism. Using the image of a pirate, this course "aims at introducing students to key problems in anthropological and cultural theory concerning colonialism, violence, homosexuality, rebellion, and the importance of the child's imagination."

Zero-Tolerance Watch
Salon weighs in with a pretty good article on zero-tolerance insanity, though the author, Johanna Wald, is on weak ground when she asserts that zero tolerance discriminates against minorities. She notes that black students, especially boys, are far more likely to be suspended from school than whites, but there's no evidence that this is the result of zero-tolerance policies as opposed to greater rates of misbehavior or even racial bias unrelated to zero tolerance.

Municipally Licensed Occultist Bunk
Columbus, Ohio, licenses astrologers. It even gives them a test to "prove" that they know what they're doing. Reports the Columbus Dispatch:

Ginger-lyn Summer is a licensed astrologer. The city of Columbus says so.

She took a test, filed the names of three references with the city and read the astrological chart of an employee of the city's license bureau.

Applicants must get at least 16 of the 20 true-or-false questions correct to pass.

A sample: The second house and its rulers is where you look for information about brothers, sisters, neighbors, papers and short trips.

Drinking Like a Fish
That'll teach us to rely on Ananova for information. Yesterday we noted a story of thousands of fish dying after the Coors brewery accidentally sent 77,500 gallons of beer into a river. Turns out that happened last year; it's in the news now, the Denver Post reports, because the Colorado Division of Wildlife has sued Coors, demanding compensation for the dead fish, which it values at $35 apiece.

Who Is Irving Slosberg?
Another item yesterday noted that Irving Slosberg, a Florida state legislator, is calling for a criminal investigation of Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County's elections supervisor. We'd forgotten that Slosberg was the guy who was caught by sheriff's deputies in November with a voting machine in his possession. No charges were ever brought against Slosberg in that incident.

Dispatches From the Porn Belt
Reed Hastings, handpicked by Gov. Gray Davis of California (Gore by 11.8%) to head the state's board of education, turns out to be a retailer of gay pornography, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Among the offerings of Hastings's company Netflix are "Barely Legal," "Mad About the Boy" and "Boy 2: Boys at Play." That last one is described as follows: "eight of Slovakia's most desirable males in an erotic fantasy spectacular." Another title is "College Boys," so, as the Chronicle's Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross quip, "at least somebody's thinking about higher education."

In Massachusetts (Gore by 27.3%), a former student at the prestigious Groton boarding school has filed a lawsuit against the school, "alleging that he and other students were routinely assaulted and sexually molested by predatory schoolmates," the New York Times reports (link requires registration). The plaintiff, Cannon Hawkins, now a junior at Brown, claims a Groton English teacher dismissed his complaints of homosexual assaults, "calling Mr. Hawkins 'stupid and arrogant' for complaining about 'behavior that some find pleasurable.' "

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Lew Prince, Jim Bruni, C.E. Dobkin, Jim Brehm, Yehuda Hilewitz, Richard Zuelch, Reagan Lynch, David Haberman, David Graf, Daniel Fox, Joe Littrell, Frank Nihill, Milton Turner and Michael Paranzino. If you have a tip, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: Another court strikes down racial preferences (link requires registration).
• Collin Levey: China comes clean about AIDS.
• Claudia Rosett: Condit's so revolting, I miss Princess Di.