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Thinking of sending an end-of-year contribution to a public interest outfit, perhaps one of the big green groups? Why not pass up the outfits with big staffs and excessive overhead in favor of less well known, but nonetheless lean and hardy battlers for the public good. I offer you five. These are tax exempts, but check with them to make sure.

The conquest of the American West started with the extermination of the buffalo. That slaughter continues, as the Department of Interior and Montana Department of Livestock pursue its policy of capturing and killing all buffalo that leave the boundary of Yellowstone National Park, supposedly to keep the animals from spreading brucellosis to cattle. During winter the buffalo often migrate down out of the deep snows of Yellowstone onto national forest lands in search of forage. When they do, they enter a free-fire zone. The science is fuzzy, but that hasn't slowed the slaughter. The Buffalo Field Campaign has.

As usual, the competition for P.U.-litzers has been fierce.

For the ninth year in a row, I have worked with Jeff Cohen of the media watch group FAIR to sift through the many entries for the annual award that pays tribute to this nation's stinkiest media performances.

And now, the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2000:

* SWALLOW THE MONEY PRIZE -- Barbara Walters and ABC

The panel on "The View" program broke into a chorus of the "M'm M'm good" jingle when Walters asked, "Didn't we grow up eating Campbell's soup?" It was all according to plan. In November, blurring the line between programming and advertising, parts of eight episodes of ABC's daytime chat show became paid infomercials for Campbell's. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Walters and her panel agreed to "try to weave a soup message into their regular on-air banter." An ABC News executive defended the hucksterism of Walters, a news personality, by saying that "The View" is an entertainment show and that "people wear many hats."

* COOL YOUR JETS AWARD -- New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post

AUSTIN, Texas -- Procrastinators of the world, unite! Be it resolved that we will be found from now until quite late on Christmas Eve solving all our Christmas shopping problems at the best one-stop shop in town, the bookstore -- preferably a local bookstore.

I firmly believe it is well worth going out of one's way to shop at an independent bookstore. The importance of independent bookstores to a healthy culture is not to be overestimated, but if an independent is not available, all the chains now have fancy coffee.

Then, of course, for the eternal procrastinator comes the problem of having bought a book for a loved one in Alaska two days before Christmas. You can always take them and dump them at one of those places that specializes in shipping things -- this costs only a small fortune -- but I believe the better part of valor is to carefully train your loved ones never to expect anything before Valentine's Day. This adds a piquant element of surprise to their dull February days.

Can you imagine if it was the other way round, and it was Bush who'd won the popular vote but lost the electoral college after a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by Democratic appointees had voted 5-4 to stop counting votes likely to assure a Republican victory in, let us say, Illinois? We think we can safely guarantee that the Republicans would not be taking the soft path of "coming together" and reconciliation. They would be screaming about stolen elections, constitutional illegitimacy, and pledging to resist the "coup" by any means necessary. By now we would have had the Republicans in both House and Senate vowing to boycott the Inauguration. Unlike the Democrats, Republicans take losing and winning seriously.

You can tell the Republicans know this is going to look bad in the history books. Why else have they floated the notion that it might be wise, in the interests of civic tranquillity, to put all of Florida's ballots under lock and key for all eternity? It seems that Christie Todd Whitman, the governor of New Jersey, first put the idea up on MSNBC, claiming that a recount of the sort promised by the Miami Herald would somehow delegitimize the Bush presidency.

AUSTIN -- All right, we've got W. off to Washington at long last, and here we are, stuck with Gov. Rick Perry.

I realize President-elect Bush is pushing the unlikely notion that what the nation needs is for Congress to become more like the Texas Legislature -- a thought so alarming I can only fall back gasping -- but in truth our very own dreaded Legislature is almost upon us. Jan. 9 and they'll all be here, leaving many a village without its idiot.

As a matter of politeness and patriotism, all Texans are obliged fall in line and wish our new governor the best of luck, which I cordially do, and besides, I have been pointing out for years that he has good hair. Really, really good hair.

But don't expect me to forget that he went to A&M to become a veterinarian and had to change his major when his grades weren't good enough. Besides, he's part of the Cheerleader Conspiracy running rampant in Republican circles. Otherwise, he's an amiable fellow.

But as we all know, who is governor is not a matter of great moment in our state -- the important question is who will be the next lieutenant governor. And we have a number of interesting candidates.

Is the next presidency going to be legitimate?

This question now hovers over George W. Bush. Made possible by a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, his triumph is lawful -- but many Americans see it as illegitimate. Bush can look forward to wielding enormous legal power. But his moral authority is another matter.

While eagerly claiming the title of president-elect, Bush faces a huge "legitimacy gap." Its magnitude and duration remain to be seen. For much of America, his Inauguration Day seems likely to ring hollow.

Right now, this crisis of legitimacy is somewhat befuddling for large numbers of reporters and commentators. Some political journalists are indicating a sense of disorientation. And it's by no means certain how quickly or fully they'll revert to the usual media reverence for an incoming president.

TALLAHASSEE, FLA. -- Memo To Democrats Only:

Nikolaevich Tolstoy once wrote a short story titled "God Sees the Truth, But Waits."

I suggest we nurse this grudge very carefully.

It is clear to me, as an admittedly partisan Democrat, that Al Gore carried the state of Florida on Election Day by somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 votes.

Understand that I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that the guy who actually gets the most votes does not necessarily win the election. Fine, dem's da rules. But in all honesty, I not only think the Republicans stole this, I think they know they stole it.

On the whole, I think it's better this way. For one thing, I think there are so many immature jerks in their party that they clearly had a hard time admitting it was just one helluva close election and the smart thing to do was count the votes carefully. Determined to be more self-righteous, more outraged than thou, no matter what.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Hard to know what to do about the Middle East, although indicting Ariel Sharon for treason might be useful. And listening to presidential debates just makes one want to sigh. Al Gore: There are 1.4 million children in Texas without health insurance. George W. Bush: "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hard-hearted person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."

Sigh.

So let's consider some interesting stuff about the stock market. Stock options in high-tech companies, you may have heard tell, have created tons of new millionaires and are a splendid means of motivating employees. They also have this nice side benefit: They can cut a company's federal income tax to zero.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that Cisco Systems, Siebel Systems Inc. and America Online paid no federal income taxes in their latest fiscal year, the entire tax bill having been wiped out by tax benefits from issuing options to employees. The pattern is consistent across the high-tech spectrum, with Microsoft Inc., among others, getting a huge tax reduction. Cisco wiped out what would have been a $1.68 billion federal tax bill.

Newton Minow, a former board member of the Federal Communication Commission, wrote a book a few years ago attacking TV and famously saying it had produced "a vast wasteland," inhabited by comatose Americans watching soaps and quiz shows and disregarding pressing problems of governance and the polity. How wrong Minow was! Courtesy of television, these days we have a vibrant democracy of well-informed citizens that would be the envy of Pericles.

I was wandering through a shopping mall in Eureka, Calif., the other day and came upon a gaggle of citizens looking raptly at a bank of TV sets in Radio Shack. Suddenly, they raised howls of excitement. The verdict on the Seminole absentee ballots had just come through. The Eurekans continued to watch, commenting knowledgeably to each other as law professors from Georgetown and Yale did battle over the meaning of the Florida Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the thoughts of Madison and Hamilton.

One of the great paradoxes of modern journalism is that unusual and extraordinary events seem to be the most newsworthy -- but in the long run, key realities of our lives are shaped by what's usual and ordinary.

The news coverage filling our screens is routinely the product of haste, with little exploration beyond the surface. Generally, the sizzle of the moment prevails -- which is understandable, since novelties tend to be more captivating than chronic situations. But over time, barraged with accounts of the atypical, our society can easily lose sight of what matters most.

"When a dog bites a man, that's not news, because it happens so often," journalist John Bogart commented many decades ago. "But if a man bites a dog, that is news." This assumption is apt to sound like common sense. It's certainly common -- but is it really sensible? After all, we have much more reason to be concerned about dogs biting people than the other way around.

If something happens all the time, it's unlikely to be "news" -- but it ultimately may be far more significant than the latest sensation.