Tilting at windmills: Rummy's Retreat * Rural Tribeca * Respirators for Rangers 43's Four Failures * The Power of the Media Lobby.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Column

THE POPULATION OF LOS ANGELES County is 10 million, more than that of 42 states. Its county supervisors are "among the most powerful public officials in America," according to Governing magazine. Yet almost no one in the rest of the country knows who they are. Indeed, that ignorance is shared by a good many residents of the county. This reflects the almost total neglect of county government by the press, even though counties are often responsible for police and fire protection, and water and sewage systems in unincorporated areas, and also frequently for roads, bridges, airports, and schools. But Governing cannot be charged with that neglect. The fellows who put it out, Peter Harkness, Elder Witt, and Alan Ehrenhalt, are notable for attending to what's going on at the state, county, and municipal levels of government that are the subject of vast inattention by media biggies in Washington and New York. Governing recently presented a report card on county governments. The best are Fairfax County, Va., and Maricopa County, Ariz.; the worst is San Bernardino, Calif.

THE MOST PATHETIC UTTERANCE on the recently released Nixon tapes came from Arthur Burns, himself a Jew, then the Federal Reserve Board chairman, who told Nixon, "In all the years I've known you, I've never heard of what even resembled what could be interpreted as a touch of anti-Semitism." Of course, the rest of the tapes overflow with Nixon's vicious anti-Semitism, a sentiment that seemed to be fully shared by quite a few of the notables to whom he confided, including the Reverend Billy Graham, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself, and the former Texas governor and secretary of the Treasury John Connally, who after Nixon told him "look at the Justice Department, it's full of Jews," replied, "Any place of power."

REMEMBER THAT PROMISE BY the administration that all flights into Washington, D.C., would have a federal marshal aboard? It pretty much is, as bureaucrats love to put it, "no longer operative." Al Aitken, the head of the Allied Pilots Association's Washington unit, tells The Washington Post that at least a dozen pilots flying into Washington report a decline in the number of marshals aboard. What's happened is that the Transportation Department has been increasing the number of flights into the city without regard to having enough marshals to staff them. The Post confirms, by the way, an item reported in this space last fall about how few air marshals were available on September 11. We said 32; the Post, "fewer than 50."

GRETCHEN MORGENSON OF The New York Times is one of the few people in the media who, before Enron's collapse, blew the whistle on brokerage firm analysts who made "wildly bullish pronouncements about companies that could benefit themselves or their firms." Now she says that they still don't seem to have learned that this is a no-no. She cites the case of Holly Becker, a Lehman Brothers analyst who recently puffed Alloy Inc. Becker praises Alloy's "proven profitable business model." Morgenson points out, however, that "Alloy has incurred nothing but losses since its inception."

Morgenson notes that Becker's "buy" rating came just after her employer, Lehman Brothers, had managed an offering of 6 million Alloy shares, and as Lehman continued to make a market in Alloy securities. A disclaimer accompanying Becker's report adds that "an analyst who contributed to the report (or a member of his or her household) owns shares [in Alloy]."

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the compensation of many of these analysts is tied to the amount of business their firm gets from the companies they rate.

THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S proposal to prohibit snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park is in danger of being overturned by the Bush administration. Bush's Interior Department has proposed three alternative policies, two of which will permit the snowmobiles to continue using the park. Most of the public has supported keeping the snowmobiles out of the park because of the noise they make and the pollution they emit. "Pollution at the West Entrance of Yellowstone has become so intense," writes Katharine Q. Seelye of The New...