GOOD DEBATE: SHALL TRIAL LAWYERS PROFIT FROM GOVERNMENT LITIGATION?

What is at stake in a lawsuit such as the one I filed seeking to invalidate Attorney General Jay Nixon's contract hiring outside counsel to pursue the state's claim against tobacco companies? Fascinating information keeps coming to light from other states to help answer this question. Recently, from Maryland: Trial lawyer, Democratic fund raiser extraordinaire and Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos got the contract to pursue Maryland's stake in the tobacco litigation. He has recently claimed a fee of $1 billion for his work.

We need a riveting national debate on the question: Shall our trial lawyers become billionaires through government-sponsored litigation against companies that sell legal products? The only way deals like these can go down is if the public isn't made aware of them. Where is the news media outrage?

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Gephardt comes through for a socialist: Little-noticed by the national news media was this morsel from the last few weeks, culled from my reading of the Washington Times: House minority leader Richard Gephardt arranged for the only socialist member of Congress to have a seat on the powerful and prestigious House Appropriations Committee. That would be Rep. Bernard Sanders, who is officially an independent but is also a self-identified, far-left socialist who lines up with the Democrats.

Look at it this way: We're entitled to assume that Bernie Sanders has the courage of Dick Gephardt's convictions.

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Morris the diabolical genius: An interesting book to take a look at is "VOTE.com" by Clinton consultant Dick Morris. It is a fascinating look at how the Internet is changing everything: business, marketing, advertising, politics and campaigns, eventually, representative government itself. Morris offers many good morsels, and here is one on one of his main themes, the decline of network television:

"On television, ABC, CBS and NBC no longer rule. While in 1978, 90 percent of American households were tuned in to their programming, only 45 percent are now. More people get their news from the Internet than tune in to watch Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather." And, he makes clear, steadily fewer will be in the future.

Items such as these are undisputed facts. What is less clear are the other themes of Morris' book, including these controversial conclusions:

Money won't matter in politics because the free Internet will replace paid, political TV advertising.

The Internet will kill lobbying as the focus of special-interest groups turns from elected officials directly to the public.

America will be governed by direct democracy as people express their opinions directly on the Internet, forcing Congress to heed their will.

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Hillary, hard leftist: The current National Review features a fascinating cover story on Hillary Clinton entitled "The Perfect Liberal."

Writer Jay Nordlinger describes Gail Sheehy's new book on the first lady, "Hillary's Choice." "This is the Hillary Clinton we think we know: manipulative, paranoid, ferocious, power-mad, self-pitying, vindictive, willful, ideological, undemocratic, dishonest chilling." In describing Hillary's education, Nordlinger writes:

"While at Yale Law School, Hillary spent a summer working for Robert Treuhaft, the Communist attorney and defender of Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif. ... Hillary was only mildly interested in the Panther cause,' Treuhaft says, but she did want to work for a left-wing law firm. Anyone who went to college or law school would have known that our firm was a Communist law firm.'

"As for the Clinton marriage, it seems barely fathomable ... .

"What kind of wife is she? The wife of Bill Clinton's wildest fantasies, that's what kind. She seems never to have really held him responsible for anything."

Quoting author Sheehy's description of the 1992 campaign during which the famed "bimbo eruptions" increased: "Mrs. Clinton hired an old acquaintance, Jack Palladino, a private detective from the Bay Area who had worked for the Black Panthers. His job was to track down various of Clinton's women and ensure, through the black arts, that their mouths stayed shut. Mrs. Clinton might have been the first wronged wife in history to hire a detective for the purpose, not of unearthing the truth, but of burying it."

"... During the Clintons' first presidential run, the future First Lady and super-feminist protested that she was no Tammy Wynette, standing by my man,' But would even Tammy allow herself to be so used? Would Bess Truman have? Would Nancy Reagan?"

Of course, none of these shared Hillary's absolute thirst for power. This lady truly believes, in the words of an old poet, that she was born "booted and spurred, to ride mankind."

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Arnold for governor? "I think it's just much easier to buy a Yankee hat and to run for the Senate from New York." Arnold Schwarzenegger on running for governor in California, on NBC's "Tonight Show" Nov. 22. 1999.

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The Clintons and China: The authors of the bestseller, "Year of the Rat," have written a new expose entitled "Red Dragon Rising: Communist China's Military Threat to the U.S." The thesis of the work is simple: We are about to be surprised by the emergence of a hostile, expansionist, non-democratic superpower armed with the most modern weapons and it will be our fault. In short, through a misguided foreign policy that has sacrificed national security for money and personal political power, the Clinton-Gore administration has materially assisted Beijing's military ambitions. Photos of Chinese generals smiling with President Clinton in the Oval Office have run on the front pages of almost every major Chinese and Hong Kong newspaper, sending a clear message to Chinese patriots: The United States government at its highest levels endorses the Chinese people's oppressors.

The authors sound the alarm about a serious new national-security threat to America: Our economic, political and other systems are extremely vulnerable to what they call "information attacks." Information warfare will be a new frontier of 21st century conflict between nations. The authors say the Chinese are already targeting vulnerable American computer systems and that senior Chinese military commanders are beginning to talk among themselves of a pre-emptive strike using information warfare.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.