The Hot Seat Our Weekly Look At Who’s In Trouble

We’re coming out, with our hands up

Red alert. Red alert. Media enemy No. 1, Joe McCarthy, has returned. Somebody gave him a wig, and made him Speaker of the House. And darn the luck, before the liberal media conspiracy could switch off the microphones, he exposed us all. Socialists, he blabbed, have infiltrated newspaper editorial boards. Boris! Natasha! Out from under your desks, we’d best surrender. Maybe they’ll send us back to The Motherland. We hear the new government there allows dissent.

Give those orphans a cigar

Last year, before Rush Limbaugh and his ditto-heads stormed Capitol Hill, blowing smoke about family values, tobacco companies were in retreat. The Food and Drug Administration was pushing to label nicotine an addictive drug. Congress was grilling tobacco executives about their schemes to hook new teenage customers as the old ones die. This year, Republicans snuffed the hearings. Now, the FDA has reopened its crusade, calling nicotine addiction a pediatric disease. This could get interesting. Will Joe Camel’s political pals defend his subsidized war on kids?

Lawyers create fees, not capital

Perry Mason, your profession needs a facelift. It pecked like vultures on the carcass of Gulf USA Corp., which left behind a poisoned environment in Idaho’s Silver Valley and unkept promises to its pensioners. Now a settlement’s in the works. The vultures want $4.5 million in legal fees, but brag they “created” the partial payment proposed for pensioners. Not quite. That wealth was created by those who dug the mines and ran the machines. The fight to keep it from the workers is enough to give free enterprise a bad name. Eeep! Put down that microphone, Mr. Speaker, we’ll go quietly.

MEMO: The Hot Seat is a feature of the Sunday Opinion page.