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"Judge Hiller assigns Lindsay the repugnant task of defending nun-killer Michael Kingston. Lindsay discovers the police search that found the body was unconstitutional, and against all her morals, moves that Kingston be released. Helen delivers an impassioned argument, stating that the Constitution was designed to protect the innocent, a category that doesn't include Kingston. In the end, Judge Hiller has no choice but to strike the body from evidence, and dismiss the charges." What's this? Episode 53 of ABC's "The Practice," as synopsized on epguides.com, is what it is, first broadcast on March 28, 1999, and recently repeated. "The Practice," about a law firm, is produced by David Kelley, formerly a writer out of the Steve Bochco stable. The show is regarded as a cultural provender of rare quality, basking in the soft glow of liberal approval.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Those of you old enough to remember the Vietnam War will recall the early years, when the majority of Americans couldn't find the place on a map and practically nobody could tell the difference between the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. Well, it's time to look up Colombia on the map of South America and learn what FARC is.

When the history of this one is written, what will amaze everyone once again is how hopelessly clueless we all are -- the Clinton administration, Congress, the media. The media keep reporting "a $9 billion spending bill to help Colombia combat drug traffickers" as though it were just that simple.

(Actually, only $1.6 billion of the spending bill is for the "counter drug aid package for Colombia." There is $2.6 billion to pay for our military costs in Kosovo, $2 billion for disaster relief and then, somehow, amazingly, the thing came out of the House Appropriations Committee with the total price tag doubled by pure pork barrel.)

Does America have a military-industrial-media complex?

Whether you consider the question in terms of psychology or economics, some grim answers are available from the National Association of Broadcasters, a powerful industry group that just held its radio convention in San Francisco.

When a recent Federal Trade Commission report faulted media companies for marketing violence to children, various politicians expressed outrage. But we've heard little about the NAB -- a trade association with a fitting acronym. The NAB has a notable record of nabbing the public airwaves for private gain.

Nearly 40 years ago, a farewell speech by President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry." He said: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." That potential has been realized, with major help from media.

The media summer of 2000 is now history. As leaves begin to fall, let's consider a few key dynamics of the political season that has just passed.

Despite complaints about smarmy orchestration and chronic pandering, the Republican and Democratic conventions resulted in gobs of deferential coverage. Some journalists rolled their eyes or even shed a bit of light on the big money bags behind the Oz-like curtains, but each party got what its backers paid for -- a week of mostly upbeat publicity.

Meanwhile, Americans saw very little news about the iron-fist tactics that police used in the host cities to suppress thousands of social-justice demonstrators. Evidently, several days of militarizing a downtown area is the latest new thing for laying down the political law.

In Philadelphia, while the Grand Old Party partied, police raided a protest headquarters. The gendarmes proceeded to confiscate and destroy large numbers of handmade puppets being readied for deployment in the streets. The crackdown was understandable, since art can be subversive. Better to be on the safe side!

Despite all the emphasis on new media, photography has never lost the power to move us. Some recent photo essays in major American magazines, focusing on the poor and dispossessed, are efforts to break through abstraction and indifference. They tell us a lot about the potential impacts -- and common limitations -- of photojournalism.

The March 27 edition of Time devoted six pages to the haunting black-and-white work of renowned photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Bleak images evoke humanity struggling for survival and hope: Rwandans at refugee camps, women holding pictures of men abducted from a Kurdish village in Iraq, toddlers -- abandoned by destitute parents -- crawling at a care center in urban Brazil.

Meanwhile, two other magazines showed that color photos can also be stark. If we don't turn the pages too quickly, the pictures are heart-wrenching. The New York Times Magazine published a March 19 cover story, "In the Shadow of Wealth," featuring photographs of "the invisible poor" from the East Coast to California. And the March issue of Life offered 10 vivid photos of Americans living in poverty, from Manhattan to rural areas of the Northeast, South and West.

AUSTIN -- Watching our homeboy George Dubya as he wends his way -- somewhat unsteadily -- toward the presidency is a nerve-racking procedure. Face it, our reputation is on the line along with the governor's. All of us know that 20 million Texans can't be brought to agree on anything, including whether the guys who died at the Alamo were heroes or fools. Nevertheless, we are all being painted with the Bush brush, so whenever he makes a cake of himself, all of us get the blame ("Those Texans, so ignorant.'')

Relatively speaking, Bush is one of our better representatives on the national scene. In Washington, which seems to have been deeply scarred by LBJ's occasional lack of couth, we are still regarded as a tribe of Visigoths. ("And then, he lifted his shirt and showed us the scar!'') Every time Gov. Preston Smith, who had a terminal West Texas accent, went on television, I used to wince: "Our biggest problem after this hurricane is all the day-brees we got lyin' around.'' So, Dubya Bush doesn't seem like anyone we'd have to blush for.

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. -- The moon, a bit more than half full, glowed in a sky of stars and darkness. Only a faint breeze was blowing across the San Francisco Bay. A few yards from the dark water's edge, vans from local TV stations lined the road ending at prison gates. The state was ready to kill.

The premeditated murder went smoothly. Six minutes after midnight, a lethal injection began. Eleven minutes into the morning, observers reported, Darrell Rich's face changed color. The official time of death was 12:13 a.m., March 15, 2000.

The Associated Press quickly sent out a 270-word report that began: "A serial killer who threw an 11-year-old girl more than 100 feet to her death was executed by injection early Wednesday..." The dispatch did not mention that several hundred people had gathered at the gate to protest the death penalty.

By now, when the government takes a human life, it's usually not much of a national story -- maybe a few inches in the newspaper or a fleeting mention on a newscast. With 3,625 people on death row in the United States, and more arriving all the time, a macabre rhythm has taken hold.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Man bites dog! Or, how special interests accidentally steered us toward good public policy. In a pleasant change from the norm, we have a reversal of the usual dreary political story in which big donors and special interests shaft the public: House Republicans Drop Call for Rollback of Gasoline Tax.

Isn't that nice?

Leaving aside, as our elected leaders so often do, the wisdom of repealing the 4.3-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax, lo, regard with wonder the politics of the thing.

You may recall that this buffle-headed suggestion was made last week by Gov. George W. Bush, backed by some Senate Republicans. Dubya, as we know, has little interest in policy, but excellent political skills. And what could sound better, as prices at the pump soar across the nation, than an offer to cut 4.3 cents a gallon off the total? Great politics: Vote for that guy, or you'll have to be Bill Gates to fill up the pickup, not to mention those monster SUVs.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Walter Hall, that wonderful citizen, died Sunday at 92. Hall was, of all things, a liberal banker active in the public life of Texas for many decades. He has so many credentials on his resume that it could give you an inferiority complex just to read it.

To be called a "do-gooder" anymore is a sneering insult, but Walter Hall did good. In addition to all his work as lifelong liberal Democrat (and proud of it), he helped everybody from the Boy Scouts to the cause of clean water to tackling organized crime back when it ran rampant in Galveston County to schools to libraries to the Texas Bill of Rights Foundation to his alma mater, Rice University. One of his last, loveliest gifts was Helen's Garden in League City, Texas -- a park full of old oaks and flowers in memory of his late wife, Helen Lewis Hall, who so loved flowers.

He was one of the organizers of the Texas Independent Bankers Association and once owned banks in Dickinson, Alvin, League City, Webster and Bay City. At his death, he was chairman of the board and owner of Citizens State in Dickinson and the League City Bank & Trust.

AUSTIN, Texas -- We've already seen how disgusting the results can be when politicians drag religion into politics, so perhaps we should be depressed at the news that education is going to be the major issue in this year's presidential campaign. Lord save the children.

However (she observed with lunatic cheerfulness), perhaps some good can come of it. Right away, I can think of a dandy demonstration project that could settle at least one significant policy difference.

One of George W. Bush's big applause lines is: And if a school is failing, we should cut its money. He wants to take all Title I money away from low-performing schools -- and give it in the form of vouchers to the families of disadvantaged students. The parents could then use the vouchers (worth about $1,500 per student) to pay for after-school tutoring or to help pay for private-school tuition.

If a school is failing, take away some of its money ...