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• Political Contributors Do an End-Run in New Jersey Gubernatorial Race 

New Jersey's campaign finance system may have restricted the flow of big money into statewide elections and cut down on the abuses known as pay to play, but determined donors and fund-raisers always seem to find a loophole.

Indeed, newly available records show that big donors to the Democratic and Republican Parties -- along with law firms, engineers and others who do business with the state -- are sidestepping the state's contribution limits and pay-to-play rules by giving to the parties' governors' associations, which turn around and spend heavily in New Jersey.

Harry Pozycki, chairman of the Citizens' Campaign, a nonpartisan group that is an advocate of the pay-to-play rules, said on Monday that the two associations were providing "a huge back door for the evasion of contribution limits." He added, "Following the money becomes that much more difficult." . . .

The Republican Governors Association, which has spent nearly $3 million already in support of Christopher J. Christie, the former federal prosecutor who is challenging Mr. Corzine, has raised $90,000 from the National Rifle Association since December. . . .

Big tobacco also seems to be backing Mr. Christie, who as a securities lawyer once represented the industry in an antismoking lawsuit: Tobacco interests have given the Republican group nearly $300,000.

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• The Legacy of Mr. Horace Kornegay 

Several newspapers reported in late January on the death of Horace R. Kornegay, Jr., who served as the Executive Director of the Tobacco Institute from 1969 to 1986. Mr. Kornegay's passing was little noticed, but he was one of the more notable opponents of public health measures in American history.

Mr. Kornegay took over at the Institute just five years after the U.S. Public Health Service and Surgeon General's first report in 1964 positively linked smoking to a list of chronic and deadly diseases. In his speeches, Kornegay typically portrayed public health advocates -- a category that included the Surgeon General -- as a bunch of shrill, over-emotional zealots who "plied their trade with terrifying tactics" and were involved in misguided efforts to destroy the industry. . . .

On December 11, 1979, Mr. Kornegay gave a notorious speech before the Tobacco and Allied Industries Division of the American Jewish Community in which he likened attacks on the tobacco industry to the repression of Jews . . .

When society became alarmed over skyrocketing rate of lung cancer in the 1970s, Kornegay deflected attention from cigarettes by attributing the increase to improved medical diagnostic techniques.

When Eastern Airlines attempted to create separate smoking and non-smoking sections on their commercial flights in 1977, Mr. Kornegay wrote a near-hysterical letter to industry supporters to get them to oppose it . . .

Mr. Kornegay was central to the tobacco industry's decades-long battle to thwart tobacco control in the U.S., but more importantly to history, he personified the industry's combative stance in the wake of overwhelming published research implicating smoking as a cause of disease and death. It was a stance that will not be forgotten.

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• McCain Adviser's Work As Lobbyist Criticized 

Longtime uber-lobbyist Charles R. Black Jr. is John McCain's man in Washington, a political maestro who is hoping to guide his friend, the senator from Arizona, to the presidency this November.

But for half a decade in the 1980s, Black was also Jonas Savimbi's man in the capital city. His lobbying firm received millions from the brutal Angolan guerrilla leader and took advantage of Black's contacts in Congress and the White House.

Justice Department records that Black's firm submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act detail frequent meetings with lawmakers and their staffs and lavish spending by Black and his partners as they attempted to ensure support for Savimbi, whose UNITA movement was fighting the Marxist Angolan government.

Then in his 30s, Black already had established himself as a pioneer of the revolving door between campaign consulting and lobbying, having been a senior adviser on President Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign before returning to K Street. . . .

Black formed the political consulting firm Black, Manafort and Stone in 1980 with two other Republican political advisers, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. In 1981, the trio started a separate lobbying company by the same name. In subsequent years, the lobbying firm added Democrat Peter Kelly, and the consulting firm tapped legendary GOP adviser Lee Atwater.

The lobbying shop represented Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute and the government of the Philippines.

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• Fighting for Safety 

Since its inception, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has grappled with how to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from accidental fires. . . .

For years, there has been an obvious way to address accidental fires: requiring tobacco companies to make cigarettes, which are the leading cause of fatal fires, self-extinguishing. But tobacco was exempted from CPSC jurisdiction when the agency was created in 1972, and a 1994 attempt to give the agency authority over cigarettes failed.

Catching Fire

The alternative was to focus on the furniture that was catching fire. And the tobacco industry, which wanted to avoid further regulation of cigarettes, did its best to steer the CPSC in that direction.

The industry's agent was a former insider named Peter Sparber. Sparber, now in his early 60s, started out as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and became a vice president of the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying arm, in the 1980s. There, he built a national network of tobacco-friendly fire marshals to call on in the fight against fire-safe cigarettes. To win their loyalty, the industry gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to fire departments across the country, according to internal documents released under the 1998 multi-state tobacco settlement.

By the late 1980s, Sparber had set up his own firm and was a volunteer lobbyist for the National Association of State Fire Marshals. In 1994, the group petitioned the CPSC to require furniture manufacturers make upholstered furniture so it would resist ignition by a smoldering cigarette and small open flames.

Unknown to the CPSC at the time, Sparber was still on the tobacco industry payroll . . .

In 2000, New York passed the first fire-safe cigarette law, which took effect in 2004. Twenty-one states have followed suit, including Maryland, effective in July.

Sparber, however, had an incentive to stick around. Starting in 1999, lobbying registration records show, he went to work for the top producers of brominated fire-retardant chemicals, which include Chemtura of Middlebury, Conn., and Albemarle of Richmond. The industry stands to benefit if the CPSC adopts the fire marshals' original proposal.

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• Research on Teenage Smoking 

In this 1974 letter, pollster Burns ("Bud") Roper of the Roper Organization describes to William Kloepfer (President of the Tobacco Institute) a stealthy way his firm could survey children to help the Institute find out "the extent to which kids smoke."

Roper suggests the Institute

"offer to enter into a cooperative study with the Cancer Society, Heart Association of whoever" as cover to conduct a personal interview study among 12-17 year olds. Roper then suggests a method of conducting interviews with children that would evade parents' eavesdropping and (he hopes) avoid parental objections to the line of questioning. . . .

We would design and administer about a fifteen minute questionnaire which would be "kid-oriented". It might deal with such things as clothing styles, pop singers, recreational activities, etc.

About the thirteenth minute of the fifteen minute interview would be devoted to a list of activities about which two questions might be asked.

Thus, to the kids and any eavesdropping parents, these two questions would be incidental to the study. From your point of view, of course, they would be the entire study..."

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• COMBINED REPLY BRIEF OF ALL APPELLANTS OTHER THAN LIGGETT AND BROOKE 

A hallmark of plaintiffs' brief is its repeated attempt to evade substantive issues by mechanically raising baseless procedural arguments -- "waiver," "harmless error," "invited error," "law of the case." As a further diversion, plaintiffs' brief begins with a 70-page "statement of facts" that misrepresents the record, improperly seeks to prejudice defendants in the eyes of the Court, and presents supposed "facts" that plaintiffs never tied to the claims of any identifiable class member. (Pl. Br. at 11-81.)1 In any event, the errors raised here are essentially legal, not factual, in nature.

Defendants therefore will address the legal issues that actually determine this appeal.

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