(FORTUNE Magazine) – JUST ASKING

In which the headline above, one that has graced 23 of these columns over the years, again betokens the imminent broaching of ornately long-winded and syntactically suspect questions, none of them likely to be answered here or anyplace else so long as they persist in verging on the rhetorical:

If Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's idea was to introduce free-spending New York City to "reality therapy'' in the form of wide-ranging program cutbacks that affect even most of the city's hitherto sacrosanct civil rights enforcement activities, why did Rudy make a point of retaining funds in the budget for the program that outlaws employment discrimination on the basis of prior prison record, or was the mayor perchance unconsciously signaling the ultimate reality, which is that Gotham will always be Gotham?

How come none of the 800-odd students and media bigwigs lucky enough to catch La Streisand's February 3 star turn at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government got around to asking during the question period whether, in listing all the wonderful doings of liberals down through the centuries ("they even gave us the five-day workweek!'') and explaining why she was accordingly proud to identify herself as one of them, Barbra had exhaustively documented her categorical statement that liberals "fought against . Stalin,'' and did the database supporting this statement incorporate any material on the Popular Front period (1935-39)?

Now that the New York Times is calling for the President to take a hard look at the financial shenanigans of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and reminding Clinton in a passage of vintage editorial-page klutziness that "slippery language is no way to treat a serious ethics question,'' and also given assorted previously expressed concerns about the ethical performances of departed Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and still-on-the-job-but-obviously-in-trouble Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros (said to have misled the FBI in pre-nomination interviews about payments to his former mistress), would the gray eminence of 43rd Street be willing to reconsider its enthusiasm for cabinet quotas as expressed in the December 25, 1992, editorial saluting the "rare, welcome diversity'' embodied in Bill's appointments of so many minority-group members, including the three named in this increasingly overlong paragraph?

Still stalking the Times but moving now to the realm of manners and mores, is it considered socially acceptable nowadays for a fellow to not feign interest in women's basketball and to wonder out loud whether the Diversity Task Force at the world's arguably greatest paper has totally taken over the front page when you can find headlines there about the University of Connecticut hoopstresses, and our follow-up question is whether it is easier to sustain the posture described above if one is identified as also not terribly interested in men's basketball?

How can it be that Holy Bull, widely identified as the best thoroughbred in America, went off at 1 to 5 the other day, meaning that bettors collectively thought he had an 83% chance of winning, while Republican candidates who are obviously the class of the 1996 presidential sweepstakes are collectively rated far lower in the Iowa Electronic Markets, where the prices being paid for political futures contracts have been implicitly telling the world that the chance of some GOPster capturing the White House next time out is only 54% (vs. 33% for Bill Clinton and 12% for some other Democrat), and is it possible that punters here and elsewhere have turned overcautious about playing favorites since Holy Bull pulled up lame at the four-furlong mark and didn't finish the race?

Can anybody name a plank in the 1992 Democratic platform currently looking less likely to be implemented or even mentioned out loud than statehood for the District of Columbia, or figure out a way for Washington, D.C., to fall on its face any worse than it did on the day in February after Moody's lowered its rating on the city's debt from Baa to Ba, which is where junk bonds hang out, and have its ex-jailbird mayor thereupon hold a press conference to argue that he was developing a plan for restoring the city to fiscal health and to formally register dismay over the new rating, in the course of which it emerged that Marion Barry hadn't carefully read the news about the rating and didn't even know his town's paper was now deemed junk?

ASK MR. STATISTICS

Dear Betterbettor: Forlornly identifying myself as one whose shirt flutters on the flagpole at my local racetrack, I recently proclaimed at a New Year's Eve party that I was henceforth eschewing all gambling, but twenty minutes after the clock struck midnight I heard another chap state that he expected to be around and available for many such galas and then incredulously heard myself offering to bet that I personally would be around for even more. This spirited exchange resulted in exhaustive efforts to structure a fair wager between the two of us. We are both white males, but he is 55 and I am 50, so presumably I am the morning line actuarial favorite-but by how much? Please respond rapidly, as I fear this character could predecease me before we even get the bet finalized, and then where would I be?

SHIRTLESS IN SARATOGA

Dear Twenty-Minute Man: The question you raise is deeper than it looks, and Mr. Statistics knows of no easy way to figure out the odds you need. Given the average life expectancies of white American males at 50 (26.7 years) and 55 (22.5 years), you are clearly a solid favorite, but those expectancies do not convert into probabilities.

In seeking the odds, our solution was to abstain from direct calculations and instead create a simulation program in which the computer puts the two of you on a track wherein each runs a rising risk of expiration during the next 30 years, in each of which mortality is of course somewhat more probable for the older guy. Each year's kill rate reflects Census Bureau probabilities of white male death in that year. We have now run this program 500,000 times, observing each time which of you chaps checked out earlier and found that your 55-year-old party pal did so 61.2% of the time, which means you need to give him odds of about 3 to 2. How you collect from a corpse is your problem.

DODGE CITY AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT

One has heard overmuch lately about the brutality of British troops in colonial times, and how before the Revolution they were forever busting down the doors of nice people who were just eating lunch or something, and that is why we have Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures.'' This story line keeps getting played by folks trying to persuade you that the House Republicans' Taking Back Our Streets Act is effectively the end of freedom in America.

The act, like a counterpart making its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee, would severely limit application of the so-called exclusionary rule--the rule that says evidence must be excluded in court when the gendarmes have acquired it improperly, e.g., in a search done without reasonable suspicion of guilt. The exclusionary rule is broadly unpopular because it means that obviously guilty bad guys go free to rob and rape again, so the rule's defenders tend to position themselves as freedom lovers standing up to a howling mob. A hysteroidal type on the Ted Koppel show posited that the damage being done to the rule by the Taking Back Our Streets Act means we will soon enough be worrying about Brown Shirts banging on the door, which is presumably a lot worse than the British. Even normally sensible civil libertarians like op-edster Nat Hentoff are saying that Fourth Amendment protections would be gone with the wind if the Gingrichites have their way. "Without the exclusionary rule,'' Nat wrote recently, "the Fourth Amendment is a mere relic to be briefly mentioned in history books.''

Nat is exaggerating on several different fronts here. First, the House Republicans are not proposing to repeal the exclusionary rule, only to carve out one exception to it. In their version, the rule would not work to suppress evidence if the arresting officers had made an understandable mistake--if, for example, they had not been told that the search warrant they used had expired.

In any case, it is crazy to talk as though the exclusionary rule is integral to the Fourth Amendment. Our country got by fine without the rule for roughly a century and a quarter, and today it should be viewed not as synonymous with the amendment but as merely one possible strategy for implementing its ideals. The basic thought behind the exclusionary rule, first enunciated in Weeks v. United States (1914), was that the best way to force cops to get proper warrants and otherwise act with restraint was to deprive them of the benefits of unrestrained searches. In a world where Americans have more cause to be concerned about governmental incursions on personal liberty than about crime and terrorism, it looks like a reasonable strategy. In a world where folks sense they are living in an updated Dodge City, the strategy just looks irrational.

The more so as there is little evidence that the existing strategy effectively transforms police behavior. Paul J. Larkin Jr., a Washington lawyer who has represented the Justice Department in several cases involving the exclusionary rule, recently observed that cops who act without warrants do not generally suffer career setbacks-it's the prosecutors who suffer, months later. Larkin testified on the rule before the House Judiciary Committee and left one thinking that Congress would not do badly to go even further than Taking Back Our Streets. There is a case for repealing, and not just modifying, the exclusionary rule. Suspects' rights would not be abrogated by repeal, since the rule does not exist to protect their rights; as Larkin kept reminding the solons, it exists solely because of its presumed deterrent effect on police. If these effects are judged minimal, and the cost of lost evidence judged serious, then the case for just throwing out the rule gets to look quite powerful. And talk about British brutality quite fatuous.