Washington Lawyer

FRATERNITY brothers at Cornell call it "the driver." A Washington lawyer calls it "the zapper"; a New Yorker calls it "the clicker." Others say "the remote" or "the thing-ie." They all mean the little black box that, having transformed television, now threatens male-female relations.With broadcast television, people used remote controls mostly to zap commercials. With the spread of cable, and its 36 or 70 or 150 channels, the luxury has become a necessity. Now the remote is to TV what page-flipping is to magazines.

WASHINGTON -- Marc C. Ginsberg, a Washington lawyer who served as a campaign spokesman for President Clinton, has been nominated as ambassador to Morocco in what is believed to be the first appointment of a Jewish envoy to an Arab state.Mr. Ginsberg, 43, who lives in Bethesda, was born in New York but spent 1960 to 1968 in Israel, where his mother and two brothers still live. They hold dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship; he elected to hold only his U.S. citizenship.He was involved in the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt while working at the State Department and the White House under President Jimmy Carter.

One of Maryland's racing industry leaders is taking sides in the Virginia gubernatorial race by throwing his support behind Mary Sue Terry, the Democratic candidate for governor.In fact, Joe De Francis, owner of Laurel and Pimlico race courses, last evening sponsored a $500-a-head fund-raiser at the Centre Club in downtown Baltimore that was attended by a host of local notables, including Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and his political adviser, Larry S. Gibson.About 45 people attended the event, intended to bolster Terry's chances in the Virginia gubernatorial election Nov. 2 against Republican George F. Allen.

The latest change in Orioles ownership should have no effect on the team's commitment to play at Oriole Park at Camden Yards deep into the next century, Maryland Stadium Authority chairman Herbert J. Belgrad said.The 30-year ballpark lease agreement binds the new Orioles owners just as it has present owner Eli S. Jacobs and as it did Mr. Jacobs' predecessor, the late Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, Mr. Belgrad said."The lease was drawn with care. We feel it has all safeguards necessary to protect our interest over a 30-year period with a current or successor owner," Mr. Belgrad said.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court has dealt a financial blow to the pay-TV industry, ruling that states and cities do not violate the First Amendment when they tax cable television but exempt print media.Voting 7-2, the justices yesterday upheld an Arkansas tax that, by one estimate, means more than $4 million a year for state coffers from cable TV services.The court said the tax, which applies to a variety of services, from utilities to concert tickets, is constitutional because it is not based on the content of cable programming and does not burden only a small group of taxpayers.

WASHINGTON - When Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character sneered, "Go ahead - make my day," the line became such a cultural phenomenon that President Ronald Reagan repeated it in daring Congress to pass a tax increase he could veto. But John Stanton and millions of other deaf Americans did not recognize the reference. The line comes from a 1983 movie that - like virtually all other American movies released since the end of the silent film era - had no subtitles or captions for the hearing-impaired.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court has dealt a financial blow to the pay-TV industry, ruling that states and cities do not violate the First Amendment when they tax cable television but exempt print media.Voting 7-2, the justices yesterday upheld an Arkansas tax that, by one estimate, means more than $4 million a year for state coffers from cable TV services.The court said the tax, which applies to a variety of services, from utilities to concert tickets, is constitutional because it is not based on the content of cable programming and does not burden only a small group of taxpayers.

The state's highest court has overturned the conviction of a computer specialist because Maryland's law against "hacking" does not apply to workers who have been freely given computer privileges by their employers, even if they abuse those privileges.Yesterday's reversal was a victory for Terry Dewain Briggs, 26, a computer programmer who was convicted by an Anne Arundel County Circuit Court jury in 1996 of gaining unauthorized access to a computer, which is called hacking.Hacking is a misdemeanor punishable by up to five years in prison in Maryland.

Green Mount Cemetery's chairman said yesterday that those who want to exhume the remains of John Wilkes Booth, !c President Lincoln's assassin, must prove their case for exhumation under oath in Baltimore Circuit Court.Two Booth relatives and two historians Monday asked the court to allow disinterment of the body that was buried in Green Mount in 1869 for scientific testing.The historians believe that Booth escaped from a Union Army trap after he shot the president and that the government, after announcing his death, substituted another body to cover up the escape.

A 1998 suit accusing the state's largest health insurer of violating federal law by not making clear its policies on denying HMO claims has been dismissed by a federal judge in Baltimore. In a written decision dated Friday but released yesterday, Judge Benson Everett Legg ruled that the unnamed plaintiffs did not have standing to sue CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. "Plaintiffs do not allege that their insurance contracts were breached," he ruled. "Plaintiffs instead contend that their insurance contracts would have been breached, had performance been required."