(FORTUNE Magazine) – We open with an inside story. Occasionally, your servant comes to a fortnight when it is time for Keeping Up to go to press, and there is no Only in America item in the cupboard. What can the poor guy do? How can he track down the requisite news story -- the one in which somebody is demanding previously unheard of rights while asserting the latest looney legal theory? For many years, his approach was to sit down at the computer, log on to Nexis, and start searching for stories containing combinations of promising words, e.g., stories in which ''rights'' appeared within 30 words of ''lawsuit.'' He has tried several such search strategies over the years, with mixed results. More recently, he has learned that the most efficient approach is simply to ask for stories with four contiguous letters: ACLU. % Three somewhat separate thoughts have fed into the unfriendly headline above. One is that the American Civil Liberties Union and its statewide affiliates seem never to tire of augmenting the world supply of bloody nonsense. Should municipalities be allowed to pass anti-panhandling laws? Local ACLU affiliates keep saying no (most recently in Washington, D.C.). Are the California Boy Scouts entitled to have a rule barring homosexual scoutmasters? The ACLU also says no (because it views the Scouts as a business, meaning that they are covered by state antibias laws). Should the federal government have the right to ask prospective employees about their arrest records? The ACLU fought that one too (so now the Office of Personnel Management may ask only about convictions). Should high schools have the right to test athletes for illegal drug use? But then you already know where the ACLU came out. Thought No. 2 is that the organization seems unable to resolve the tension between its two classes of members. One is a highly politicized class that persistently views the ACLU as an instrument for advancing left-liberal causes (along the way fortifying the nonsense quotient). The other class consists of old-fashioned Bill of Rights stalwarts. The latest contest between the two camps was a vote in the organization's National Board over the ACLU's posture with respect to all those campus speech and conduct codes giving extraordinary powers to the academic thought police. The board ultimately voted its disapproval of such codes, which would seem a victory for the stalwarts (and a great idea); but the national debate leading up to the vote could have left nobody in doubt about the organization's deep divisions. Thought No. 3 is that even if the Bill of Rights team decisively prevailed over the committed left wing -- a somewhat incredible scenario -- it would still be hard to state crisply what the ACLU distinctively stands for. What, in fact, would a nonpolitical ACLU have to contribute to the country's endless arguments about the correct application of the ten amendments? In 70 years of existence, the organization has never developed a particular perspective of its own on the reach and limitations of the Bill of Rights. Anyway, what does it mean to be a ''civil libertarian'' in a country overwhelmingly committed to civil liberties? We suspect the ACLU of having long since run out of serious ideas. Which is doubtless why we end up reading so much about the right to panhandle.