Friday's indictment in Washington of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is bad news for the American people because it will tend to make a secretive federal government even more so.

The top aide of Vice President Cheney had talked to reporters about a controversial article by Joe Wilson, a former ambassador, and mentioned that it was his wife, a CIA employee, who had suggested Wilson for the mission about which Wilson then wrote. Libby was not charged with disclosing her identity. He was charged with making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with reporters. But the distinction is likely to be lost. The lesson for high government officials: Never talk to a reporter about anything that might be classified, lest you become trapped in an investigation about who said what to whom at what time and then get indicted for saying something wrong.

In a Sunday column on Oct. 2, I wrote about the Oregon Supreme Court's Ciancanelli decision, in which the court struck down a state law against "live sex shows." I referred to Associate Justice Michael Gillette's opinion and paraphrased it this way: Free expression is protected especially if it offends or annoys the public.

The actual opinion also was quoted in the column. What Gillette had written was: "Thus, it appears to us to be beyond reasonable dispute that the protection extends to the kinds of expression that a majority of citizens in many communities would dislike — profanity, blasphemy, pornography — and even to physical acts, such as nude dancing or other explicit sexual conduct, that have an expressive component."

My paraphrasing overstated the court's point. The majority found that expression is protected even if it annoys the public, not especially if it does so.

In either case, the opinion steers the court further down the road on which it has traveled for many years. And sooner or later it will have to backtrack. That will happen when a case comes along in which the court will have to protect the general public — not paying audiences — from displays of free expression that are so bad that the public can't tolerate them.

A case like that happened in Albany a few years back. A property owner, presumably to express his displeasure with the authorities, had written a four-letter word in two-foot letters on his building. He was induced to change the message after neighbors complained. Had the case reached the court, it's hard to believe Justice Gillette or his colleagues would have forced the neighbors and children passing by to keep looking at that vulgarity, prominently displayed.

A couple of readers complained this week about some of the stories we had on page one in recent weeks. They were particularly upset about two Associated Press reports, one dealing with the "West Wing" television program and Hillary Clinton, the other with the announcement of a new actor to play James Bond in the movies.

Granted, those were not the kind of stories we usually put on the front, where local news normally predominates. We thought readers might appreciate a little change of pace, not to mention a fine photo of Geena Davis, along with some lighter news or commentary from the entertainment world.

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