Derailing a multibillion-dollar federal plan to restore the Florida Everglades is just the kind of cause that suits Citizens for a Sound Economy, a conservative think tank. But soon after the group took on the Everglades project in 1998, the Washington-based nonprofit got an incentive that went beyond the purely philosophical. It received $700,000 in contributions from Florida's three biggest sugar enterprises, which stand to lose thousands of acres of cane-growing land to reclamation if the Army Corps of Engineers plan goes into effect.

The president of Hillsdale College, described once by William Buckley, Jr. as "the most prominent conservative college in the country," was ousted from his job following a messy sex-and-suicide scandal. The college responded with what the Weekly Standard calls "clumsy attempts to cover all this up. ... It may have been the most inept attempt at damage control ever produced by an academic institution."

Bob Dole pulled no punches in his op-ed piece in the Boston Globe. Slobodan Milosevic, he wrote, should be indicted as a war criminal for his brutality in the Balkans. The tag line at the end of the piece identified Dole as a former Senate majority leader and past presidential candidate. What it didn't say, however, is that Dole works for the powerful Washington lobbying and law firm Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson, and Hand. The company represents -- in addition to numerous corporate clients -- the government of Slovenia, a former Yugoslavian republic and NATO ally.