Friday, June 8, 2001 1:59 P.M. EDT

Another Labour Landslide
British voters hand the Conservative Party a sharp defeat, giving Tony Blair's Labourites 413 seats in the 659-seat House of Commons. The Daily Telegraph's political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow, says Tory leader William Hague, was "ahead of his time." Hague announced this morning that he would step down as leader of the Conservative Party.

Elian's Family Can Sue
A federal judge has ruled that the family of Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old refugee captured at gunpoint by Janet Reno's agents and subsequently deported to communist Cuba, can sue the federal government, Reno, former immigration chief Doris Meissner and former deputy attorney general Eric Holder. Judge Shelby Highsmith found that "the Gonzalezes have alleged sufficient facts" to support a claim that the Clinton administration used excessive force in seizing the boy.

The Mystery of the Missing Intern
Twenty-four-year-old Chandra Levy hasn't been seen since April 30, just before she was supposed to return to California after completing an internship at the federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington. News accounts of the search for Levy have been raising questions about her relationship with Rep. Gary Condit, a Democrat, who represents her hometown of Modesto, Calif.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Condit "told D.C. police that Chandra Levy has spent the night at his Adams Morgan apartment, according to law enforcement sources, who also said the missing intern told a close relative that she was romantically involved with the congressman." Condit quickly denied the story; the Associated Press reports he "has hired a lawyer and demanded that media outlets retract news stories about the nature of his relationship with a young woman who has been missing for five weeks."

Today's New York Post cites Levy's cell-phone records, which, the paper says, "reveal that she called the 53-year-old Condit--whose office she had visited--several times on both April 29 and April 30." The congressman's mother complains that reporters are "vultures" who are "trying to destroy" her son. Stay tuned.

The 'Right' to Housing
Miloon Kothari, the "U.N. rapporteur on housing issues," is criticizing the United States for opposing a declaration that defined housing a legal entitlement, the Washington Times reports. The Times quotes Michael Southwick, a State Department human rights official: "We don't like the sloganeering aspect of this rights debate, which everyone knows is very big in the U.N. system right now. There's the right to housing, the right to food, there's a right to everything, sometimes, that you can think of. . . . It tends to become an entitlement and a legally enforceable kind of thing." Instead, Mr. Southwick said, "an economy, good government, the rule of law, democracy--those are the kinds of things that create housing."

Blackjack Blackout?
One consequence of the shift in Senate control may be an end to President Bush's plans to expand the use of nuclear power, columnist Robert Novak writes. Reason: Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the new majority whip, is determined to shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. "The green threatening nuclear development is not the color of trees but of money on Nevada's gambling tables," Novak writes. "The state's dominant industry does not want even a safe nuclear waste repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas for fear of frightening away high-rollers. Without Yucca Mountain to store waste, new nuclear power cannot be developed."

Gee, wouldn't a lack of electricity be even worse for a city that depends on slot machines and glittering lights?

Largent Quitting
Rep. Steve Largent, an Oklahoma Republican, will resign from the House on Nov. 29 to devote full time to a run for governor. Largent's seat is reliably Republican, the Associated Press reports; a possible successor is Cathy Keating, the wife of the current Oklahoma governor, Frank Keating. Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, is running for re-election next year.

More L.A. Losers
"Hollywood lost another election," writes Daily Variety's Army Archerd. "It was no secret that showbiz showed up for Al Gore and gave the Demos its ble$$ing$ and support. The disappointment in Gore's loss was (is) evident. Hollywood was also evident on the fundraising circuit heavily supporting Antonio Villaraigosa in the L.A. mayoral race."

Los Angeles Voters Go to Polls
Three days after the mayoral election, voters in Los Angeles are going to the polls again--to vote for president of Iran. The L.A. Times reports that "polling places had been arranged at a variety of venues, mostly hotels, in Los Angeles and Orange counties, but as election day approached, the hotels began balking at allowing the voting after receiving complaints from opponents of the Islamic republic. Opponents threatened to boycott the businesses or reminded hotel managements that they technically were becoming involved with a country that has no diplomatic relations with the United States." Los Angeles has a large Iranian expatriate community, so much so that it is sometimes known as "Teherangeles."

Calming the Tax Tantrum
The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson has some straight talk on the tax issue, the day after President Bush signed his tax cut into law. "We're talking about a 6 percent to 10 percent tax cut, which is not the end of government," he writes. "Taxing the few for the pleasure of the many is a no-brainer. Politicians are less inclined to judge how much spending serves the national interest, as opposed to their own political interests. Whether this is ultimately healthy for the country is a question Washington won't ask, let alone answer."

Punitive Taxes
We heard from several readers yesterday who thought we lowballed our estimate of how much tobacco jackpot winner Richard Boeken would have to pay if he collected his $3 billion punitive-damage award from Philip Morris. The main issue is whether Boeken would have to pay taxes on his lawyer's fee (which we guessed was one-third, or $1 billion if the settlement were paid in full). The most authoritative-sounding comment came from Rosslyn Smith, a Chicago certified public accountant, who writes:

Your tax numbers may be low. The IRS has been taking the position in litigation that the gross settlement is included in the plaintiff's income and the attorney's fees and costs are miscellaneous itemized deductions on Schedule A. Miscellaneous itemized deductions are an add-back for alternative minimum tax purposes for both federal and California purposes. Therefore the actual tax may be even higher than your numbers. I can't provide you with an actual number because my planning software doesn't let me go past $99 million.

Reader Nathan Clark also came up with some interesting calculations. Based on Boeken's claim that he smoked two packs a day for 40 years, Clark figured Boeken had smoked 584,000 cigarettes:

(20 cigarettes/pack) x (2 packs/day) x (365 days/year) x (40 years) = 584,000

Leap years would add another 400 cigarettes, and $3 billion divided by 584,400 cigarettes comes to $5,133.47 per cigarette Boeken smoked. Look for a big increase in teen smoking as word gets around the schoolyards that it's a ticket to untold wealth.

Liar's Club
An alert colleague noted that Hillary Clinton's story of running behind an exterminator's truck and inhaling insecticide is suspiciously similar to this passage from "Liar's Club," Mary Karr's 1995 memoir of Texas girlhood:

At dusk in the late summer of 1962, the mosquitoes rose up from the bayous and drainage ditches. Kids fell ill with the sleeping sickness, as we called encephalitis. Marvalene Seesacque came out of a six-month coma that left her what we called half-a-bubble off plumb. Other kids weren't even lucky enough to wake up, and for the front page of the paper, Mother had taken a slew of funeral pictures with tiny coffins. A mosquito truck was dispatched from Leechfield Public Works to smoke down the bad swarms. It puttered down the streets every evening trailing a long cloud of DDT from a hose as big around as a dinner plate. Our last game of the day that summer often involved mounting our bikes and having a slow race behind the mosquito truck. A slow race is the definitive Leechfield competition. You win in it by coming in last.

Reader Bryan Hight reports there's a similar vignette in a newly published novel by the late Willie Morris, set in Mississippi; it's mentioned in this National Public Radio program (link requires RealPlayer).

Zero-Tolerance Watch
In Arlington, Texas, a policeman participating in a "school shooting training exercise" was shot to death Thursday by a live round fired by another officer in an apparent accident, the Associated Press reports. A police spokeswoman tells the AP that a group of about 20 to 30 officers were at Ousley Junior High School (motto: "Eyes on excellence") training on how to respond in the extremely unlikely event that a gunman were inside a school.

In Spokane, Wash., five of the top graduating seniors at Lewis and Clark High School were "charged with trespassing onto [a train] trestle and disorderly conduct for the slingshot launching of 10 Dick's cheeseburgers at fellow students below," the Spokesman-Review reports. "They could have posted a $500 bond and gone home. Instead they decided to spend a night in the slammer as an act of defiance over the silliness of their alleged crimes."

One of the arrested students, valedictorian Silas Hilliard, scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT. The paper calls him "the Mayor McCheese mastermind of this brainy bunch." To his credit, principal Mike Howson says the school won't take any disciplinary action. "How could we? It wouldn't make sense. They're just super kids."

Speaking of Burgers and Prisons . . .
Inmates in Pasco County, Fla., are complaining about their striped uniforms. "It makes us look like convicts," Shawn McCarthy, serving 100 days for violation of house arrest, whines to the St. Petersburg Times. The Times reports that "Until Monday, trusties"--inmates who'd avoided trouble behind bars--"wore orange cotton pants and an orange cotton-polyester blend T-shirt."

"One man said the [striped] uniform made him look like the Hamburglar, the sandwich-stealing character from the McDonald's commercials," the Times reports. Maybe they should dress the prisoners in purple. That'd make them grimace.

Goofy Underwear
In other Florida news, "union leaders for the workers who play Mickey Mouse and Cinderella at Walt Disney World have won an important concession: clean undergarments," the Associated Press reports. "Many of the characters have to wear Disney-issued jock straps, tights or bike shorts underneath their costumes because regular underwear bunches up and is noticeable. Each night, they turn in the undergarments with the rest of their costume before going home. They then pick up a different set the next day." Some Disney workers said they'd received dirty underwear and had gotten pubic lice or scabies.

Now, thanks to concessions won by Teamsters Local 385, they'll be assigned individual undergarments, which they'll be able to take home and launder themselves. Smartertimes.com notes (third item) that the New York Times ran the item as (pardon the pun) a "brief": "This is a front-page story if Smartertimes.com ever saw one . . .: Mickey Mouse turns out to be a lice-infested member of the Teamsters Union wearing an athletic supporter."

Monkey Business
Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, is a very clever fellow, but he's always struck us as somewhat unworldly. You know what we mean--the sort of guy who has a lot of book learning but is short on street smarts. Well, it appears he has fallen for an obvious hoax. Yesterday Slate published an article about a "monkeyfishing" trip the author, Jay Forman, supposedly took in 1996. Forman claims he went to "a horrible monkey-infested island called Lois Key" in Florida, where "a pharmaceutical company had released a bunch of rhesus monkeys there and left them to breed, thereby supplying research labs around the country with a fresh supply of experimental test subjects." The monkeys "were miserable there, howling and screeching and polluting the pristine waters with their feces."

This description of the island, unlikely as it is, actually is true, as this 1998 CNN story confirms. But Forman's account of his "monkeyfishing" expedition is preposterous:

Fruits were the bait of choice. . . . Once the bait was on the hook, I watched as the monkeyfisherman cast it onto the island, then waited. Not for long. The monkeys swarmed round the treat, and when the fisherman felt a strong tug he jerked the pole. I knew he had hooked one by the shriek it made--a primal yowl that set my hair on end. The monkey came flying from the trees, a juicy apple stapled to its palm.

He didn't actually land the monkey on the boat, since having a pissed-off, screeching monkey on the end of a hook running around a small skiff trying to bite you is the stuff of nightmares. He practiced a form of "catch and release." Monkeys can't really swim, but the water round the island was shallow. The line was cut and the monkey floundered back to await medical testing.

It turns out there actually is such a thing as "monkey fishing," and it did originate in the Sunshine State. This Southern glossary defines the term: "The illegal practice by Florida cracker commercial fishermen of either (1) using a battery and hand cranked generator to shock the fish to the surface or (2) dynamiting the water, like a depth charge, to send floating fish to the surface for scooping up." No primates, aside from the fishermen, are involved, though Jay Forman does seem to have made a monkey out of Mike Kinsley.

(Thanks to John Appleby, Angela Winner, Priya Malhotra, Michael Morley and Michael Garrett. 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:

• Dennis Prager: Jenna's old enough to drink.
• Paul Gigot: Jesse Helms goes off the deep end on trade.
• Peggy Noonan: Blair's victory means more euro-homogenization.

And on the Tatste Page:

• Review & Outlook: Librarians sue over porn (or lack thereof).
• Tony & Tacky: Barney Fife preaches the Gospel.
• Kim Strassel: Suddenly, Princeton is Comedy Central.
• Merle Rubin: An article with lots of bad words.
• Gary Eisler: A Buddhist Woodstock in Portland, Ore.