Right on the Money

I wasn't going to comment on this topic; but in my general tendency to salute excellence in whatever form it presents itself, I'll put forward someone else's inspired words.

The topic in question is Sen. Barack Obama's reflections on Lincoln, wherein the media darling makes an ill-judged comparison to the 16th President:

In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat -- in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.

Not just of my own struggles.... Leave aside for the moment Obama's reluctance to "swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator." The Senator is comparing himself to Lincoln. To Lincoln.

This is bad enough, but it generated a lot of froth that was probably only marginally deserved, and I decided to leave it alone. Enter the "someone else": Peggy Noonan. Now it should be said here that, yes, I've had a bit of a crush on Ms. Noonan since I was 12 or so, an impressionable young Republican lad looking for inspiration from the Reagan White House. And boy, did she deliver. Anyway, in a recent op-ed piece, this most fair of the talking heads distilled my feelings into a few concise paragraphs:

Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.

Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency.

You see the similarities.

You go get 'em, Peggy...and don't let the Angry Left ever take that sparkle out of your eyes.

News Roundup 06/28/05

• Ring Cycle: We're not sure what's causing it or how much we'll see, but let's toss a few thousand tiny spacecraft (and a few "gravitationally significant" ones) into orbit, and boy, we'll lick that global warming thing.
• I sure wish I'd thought of this. That Justice Souter seems like a real life-of-the-party type, so I'm sure he'll get the joke.
  
• At least the hemadrones are leaving me alone these days: "A California man facing life in prison for crashing his car into a UPS truck will not dispute that his actions resulted in the death of the driver when his trial opens Monday in Nevada County Superior Court. Instead, Scott Krause's defense will argue that the defendant believed he was trying to escape man-eating subterranean beings when he ran into Drew Reynolds' truck on Jan. 6, 2004." God bless America.

UPDATED: My April 2005 post on the Grokster case before the Supreme Court.

Wow. It takes real courage to equivocate like that.

The Supreme Court took a real stand today on whether displays of the Ten Commandments on government property are constitutional, or whether they violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. The justices, in yet another 5-4 ruling, said that the answer is "maybe."

David Souter's majority opinion has all the fire and verve of a product warranty:

"A determination of the Counties’ purpose is a sound basis for ruling on the Establishment Clause complaints...[Displaying] text is thus different from symbolic representation, like tablets with 10 roman numerals, which could be seen as alluding to a general notion of law, not a sectarian conception of faith. Where the text is set out, the insistence of the religious message is hard to avoid in the absence of a context plausibly suggesting a message going beyond an excuse to promote the religious point of view...the Court does not decide that the Counties’ past actions forever taint any effort on their part to deal with the subject matter. The Court holds only that purpose is to be taken seriously under the Establishment Clause and is to be understood in light of context. District courts are fully capable of adjusting preliminary relief to take account of genuine changes in constitutionally significant conditions. Nor does the Court hold that a sacred text can never be integrated constitutionally into a governmental display on law or history."

What a victory for positive law. So it seems that it's OK to show the Decalogue "symbolically," representing it as a few solid ideas some guy decided to carve onto stone tablets. Whatever your belief system, you have to agree that the people who used these as a basis for their systems of jurisprudence certainly didn't think they were merely the result of one dude's acid trip on a mountain. It is their divine character which imbued them with power and relevance, and which has given them a longevity such that we're still discussing them today. Stripping away the context strips away an enormous chunk of meaning as well.

Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying we need to start reciting them at the start of every kindergarten class. But I'd have been happier if the justices would have just made a simple decision one way or another, rather than making, effectively, none at all. No, that's not fair: what they did decide was, "You guys in the lower courts decide." Courageous.

Well, at least we have Scalia to get us fired up. In his dissent, we read such gems as "What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle." Amen, my brother...ahem, "indeed, my colleague."

It's gotta be Bush's fault, right?

Just yesterday, I noted that the GOP has put forward some new Social Security reform plans, some entirely without private-account provisions, and yet the Democrats showed no signs of budging from their inaction-and-invective approach. I'll repeat this quote just to make things clearer:

Top Democrats yesterday reiterated their demand that Mr. Bush not only take private accounts off the table before they will consider negotiating, but also that he disavow supporting them in a final House-Senate compromise. "Until the president and the Republican leadership agree that their misguided attempt to privatize Social Security is over, and they will no longer pursue their previously announced bait-and-switch strategy, Democrats will continue to refuse to enter negotiations over Social Security," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. (Source: Wall Street Journal, 6/22/05. Emphasis mine.)

So today I notice a strange headline from Reuters: "Bush points finger at Democrats on Social Security." Apparently, the uptick in rhetorical intensity is entirely Bush's fault:

"I was pleased to see some Republican members of the House and the Senate have started laying out ideas. I've been laying out ideas. I think it's time for the leadership in the Democrat party to start laying out ideas," Bush said at a high school in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland.

"See, the American people expect those of us who come to Washington, D.C., to negotiate in good faith on behalf of the people. If there's a problem, people ought to say, 'here's what I'm for,' not what they're against."

Bush's accusations that Democrats were refusing to negotiate in good faith marked a sharpening of his rhetoric and a shift from an approach of trying to reach out to members of the opposing party to forge a bipartisan compromise.

OK, so immediately after the White House annouces that, despite its own preferences, it will support Sen. Bennett's efforts at reforming Social Security without private accounts, Democratic leadership makes it clear--very clear--that it is not ready to negotiate. Bush is the only one giving ground, and Reuters believes that this is a shift away from compromise??

And let's sample some other Democratic reactions to the new GOP proposals (some of which, it should be noted, do include stripped-down private account provisions):

• From Sen. Chuck Schumer: "They can twist themselves into any pretzel shape they want...as long as privatization is on the table, there will be no compromise on Social Security." He certainly sounds ready to sit down at a table.
  
• Rep. Charlie Rangel is clearly ready to discuss meeting the Republicans halfway: "Their plan would raid the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund their private accounts. That's privatization! Private accounts are not Social Security."
  
• Sen. Max Baucus apparently believes that he's going to be tricked into voting for something: "Until the president publicly takes private accounts off the table, bait and switch is still a real possibility."

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I have to ask: which party is doing the negotiating here? And can you explain to me how a party which refuses to budge or offer substantive alternatives isn't considered obstructionist?

One day, it may be your home

Susette Kelo's home or unchecked eminent domain: which is the greater threat?

I was going to write today about the flag-burning amendment that recently passed in the house. A fair number on the left are up in arms about the possibility of a constitutional ban on flag-burning, seeing such a thing as a trampling of First-Amendment rights of expression.

This is not an unsound argument; but while critics of this measure are gnashing their teeth and rending their garments at the mere possibility of an amendment, the Supreme Court has gone ahead and given its blessing to a far more expansive reading of the government's right to seize your property.

The relevant case is Kelo et al v. City of New London, 04-108. Several homeowners in a working-class neighborhood in New London, CT, were notified that the city was seizing their homes for public use. This, of course, is not new in itself: the doctrine of "eminent domain" has been on the books for quite some time, allowing governments to take private property (provided appropriate compensation was given) in order to build schools, roads, etc. Indeed (and this, of course, is the reason the case found its way to the Supreme Court), it is enshrined in the "takings clause" of the Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

The problem is that, over the years, municipal governments have begun interpreting "public use" in much broader ways. It has been used, for example, to combat urban decay by allowing cities to seize "blighted" properties and redevelop them. All of this sounds like a good idea until you realize that, in the Kelo case, the city government 1) seized an unblighted residential neighborhood, 2) reselling the land to developers who 3) plan to build a hotel, health club, and office complex. In short, New London took homes away from their legal owners in order to give the land to private developers who might offer a larger tax base. Hell, according to the majority opinion, the city doesn't even have to prove anything--just have a plan in place:

"The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including — but by no means limited to — new jobs and increased tax revenue..."

I have not yet been able to locate a copy of the opinion, but I'm eager to, because the clip's I've read from Justice O'Connor's dissent rings very true with me:

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has been a key swing vote on many cases before the court, issued a stinging dissent. She argued that cities should not have unlimited authority to uproot families, even if they are provided compensation, simply to accommodate wealthy developers.

The lower courts had been divided on the issue, with many allowing a taking only if it eliminates blight.

"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," O'Connor wrote. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."

I am often on the side of business, I am often on the side of government. But most fundamentally, I am on the side of private property and equitable markets. This action--and, sadly, many others like it around the country--is so far from "public use" as to be laughable, yet the Supreme Court is willing to interpret the concept so broadly as to render it almost meaningless. If this constitutes "public use," tell me, pray, what doesn't?

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UPDATE: The decision and opinions may be found here (hat tip to The Commons Blog). And while it's not up to the rhetorical standards of, say, a Scalia dissent, O'Connor's has its moments:

In moving away from our decisions sanctioning the condemnation of harmful property use, the Court today significantly expands the meaning of public use. It holds that the sovereign may take private property currently put to ordinary private use, and give it over for new, ordinary private use, so long as the new use is predicted to generate some secondary benefit for the public–such as increased tax revenue, more jobs, maybe even aesthetic pleasure. But nearly any lawful use of real private property can be said to generate some incidental benefit to the public. Thus, if predicted (or even guaranteed) positive side-effects are enough to render transfer from one private party to another constitutional, then the words “for public use” do not realistically exclude any takings, and thus do not exert any constraint on the eminent domain power...If legislative prognostications about the secondary public benefits of a new use can legitimate a taking, there is nothing in the Court’s rule or in Justice Kennedy’s gloss on that rule to prohibit property transfers generated with less care, that are less comprehensive, that happen to result from less elaborate process, whose only projected advantage is the incidence of higher taxes, or that hope to transform an already prosperous city into an even more prosperous one.

Senator Durbin's "Apology"

So Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has finally gotten around to "apologizing" for his comparison of Gitmo interrogators as worthy of Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot (murderers of somewhere in the range of 10 million, 11 million, and 3 million, respectively). Durbin said

Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line...to them I extend my heartfelt apologies.

Furthermore, a spokesman noted that the apology was in response to "this loud, continuous drumbeat of misinformation that was being broadcast and printed."

Pardon me, but is this actually an apology? To me, it very much sounds like someone who's sorry you took offense.

INSULTER: Your mother's a whore

INSULTEE: What!? Take that back!

INSULTER: I'm sorry you took offense.

This way, you can sound like you're sorry without repudiating your original, insulting statement. This is very much in line with Durbin's Friday statement in which he revealed that he'd "learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood." Duh. But still, neither here nor in yesterday's statement, does he actually take back what he said.

Perhaps I'm asking too much of a politician, or perhaps I should simply be more forgiving. But I can't shake the sense that, were this sort of thing to happen to a Republican, there'd be a lot more fur flying.

Am I the only one who takes heart in this news?

I will be the first to admit that the Iraqi insurgency is a mess and a tragedy--a mess because of its apparent intractability, and a tragedy because I believe that some prewar planning on occupation policies might have prevented many deaths. But I nevertheless believe that we are on the right side, and that to leave the job half done would be a great insult to the Iraqi people.

That said, I take heart in something I recently read in the New York Times (registration required) that suggests that the insurgents are battling among themselves in what has been dubbed "red on red" attacks:

Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.

A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

The nationalist insurgent groups, "are giving a lot of signals implying that there should be a settlement with the Americans," while the Jihadists have a purely ideological agenda, he added.

This strikes me as a very positive sign. While the violence has undeniably spiked, a sense may be beginning to emerge that it may not be the best approach toward gaining political clout.

The Sunni population is coming around to the idea of political participation--not quickly, to be sure, but change is in the wind. A recent poll shows that "fully two-thirds of Iraqis believe their country is headed in the right direction...While a poll in January showed only 11 percent of Sunni Muslims in Iraq shared that view, that percentage has since grown to 40...." More significantly, a Sunni political bloc is being formed with the explicit aim of preserving and representing Sunni rights and political aims.

Will this justify the body count? If it leads to a stable, pluralistic democracy, I think so; but history will be the ultimate judge. For now, I see some reason to hope, and strong reasons not to abandon the charge we have taken upon our shoulders.

Tell me again, which is the extremist party?

The debate over Social Security reform has just reached an interesting point: President Bush seems ready to give up the idea of personal accounts, at least for now. At a White House luncheon on Tuesday, Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT) announced his plan for Social Security reform (based on progressive indexing), noting that "[Bush] indicated that I should go forward and do that...and I'm grateful to have him do that even though his own preference would be to have personal accounts included."

Democrats reacted predictably, perhaps smelling blood in the water: instead of welcoming this move and affirming their desire to work for meaningful reform, they began to bash the as-yet unintroduced legislation and increase the rhetorical pressure on the administration. For example,

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for Americans United to Protect Social Security, a coalition of labor and civil rights groups, said the Republican tactic will backfire and shows their desperation.

"The pro-privatizers are flailing about like dying fish on a dock," he said. "They don't have a clue how to flip themselves back into the water."

Very constructive. But of course this is from an advocacy group. Surely the Democratic leadership has responded in a more sensible way?

In effect, [Sen. Bennett] says he is calling the bluff of Democrats who have told him privately they would support a bill without private accounts. "We will find out," he said, "...whether they really will."

Top Democrats yesterday reiterated their demand that Mr. Bush not only take private accounts off the table before they will consider negotiating, but also that he disavow supporting them in a final House-Senate compromise. "Until the president and the Republican leadership agree that their misguided attempt to privatize Social Security is over, and they will no longer pursue their previously announced bait-and-switch strategy, Democrats will continue to refuse to enter negotiations over Social Security," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. (Source: Wall Street Journal, 6/22/05. Emphasis mine.)

Nice. So what the Democrats appear to want is not only for the GOP to turn its back on the idea of private accounts, but make some kind of King-Henry-at-Canossa self-flagellation--only after the Republicans have been properly chastised for their heresy will the Dems deign to deal.

Remarkable. So the Democratic party shows little collective interest in encouraging Dick Durbin to apologize for calling US soldiers Nazis, but it gets itself in a Gordian twist about the GOP's reluctance to apologize for an alternative policy choice.

The Downing Street Memo: Up in Smoke

I'm beginning to think that the media is running around in circles.

Back in early May, the Times of London broke the story of the Downing Street Memo (hereinafter "DSM")--a document apparently written by a high-ranking official in the British Foreign Ministry recounting a meeting held with the Bush administration in Washington in mid-2002. The message the media took away from this "secret" memo was that Bush had decided to attack and invade Iraq long before the resumption of UN weapons inspections, and indeed that the case to justify such an attack was weak.

Much was made of the following items in particular (emphasis mine):

C [a British official whose identity is currently unknown] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action...The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.

Let's put this in context: what we have here, assuming this memo is even genuine, is a composition by a Mr. Matthew Rycroft based on notes he took during a meeting with "C," who recounted his trip to Washington. Elements on the left have argued that the DSM is, in reality, the "minutes" from a high-level administration meeting, but the document doesn't read that way; and anyway, you'd think that a meeting's minutes would be composed by someone who was actually at the meeting. But I'm not going to try to convince you--go read the document and see what you think.

The White House has been pressed for comment on the DSM, but the mainstream media has made a great deal out of the fact that Bush and Blair are not making vocal denials. The media would do well to remember what should be about lesson 2 or 3 of basic reporting: the absence of a denial does not mean an allegation is true. Let's say someone walked up to you on the street and asked, "Are you a child molester?" and you responded, with appropriate shock, "What are you talking about? Get away from me!" Suppose the questioner was a reporter--how could he then go ahead and publish a story with the title "[Your Name]: A Child Molester"?

But the story of the DSM doesn't stop there...indeed, it's taken a weird turn. It turns out that the reporter who broke the story "protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals." In short, he destroyed the evidence, along with any reasonable chance of authenticating the documents. All that we have now is reporter Michael Smith's word and the affirmation of an anonymous source who says that the "content" appeared authentic.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it's the CBS Bush/National Guard story redux. In the "Rathergate" case (take a walk down Memory Lane here), established Bush basher Bill Burkett claimed to have received the original memos from a "Lucy Ramirez," who asked that she be kept out of things. Burkett took the documents to a local Kinko's, copied them, and then (in that very parking lot) burned the originals. Or so he says. Then he showed the copies to CBS producers:

"He said, ‘Well, what do you think about this?’" Mr. Smith recalled. "It contained a lot of the elements that had happened with Bush. We read it and our jaws dropped: ‘Wow, that’s exactly what we heard happened.’ So we were stunned when he pulled this document out."

So reads a recollection originally published in the New York Observer, though the linked page was as close as I could come to the original.

CBS called the White House, which did not immediately deny the documents' authenticity, and the network, now convinced, ran with the story. We all know where that ended up.

So here's another case: someone finds some documents that, in the media's mind, say "all the right things" and therefore seem genuine. An anonymous source says the content seems right. The White House has not denied them outright. The DSM and related memos are not even photocopies of the originals, but the reporter says he retyped them faithfully. The allegations must be true!

Either I'm going crazy, or the mainstream media is. And I don't think it's me.

I'm sure glad I decided to waste my time...

FLASH! Dick York's "Bewitched" Contribution Underappreciated

With so many news sources available on the internet--particularly the very, very many sites through which you can get direct Reuters or AP feeds--I tend to no longer rely on Yahoo! (my gateway of choice) to collate the top stories for me. And good thing, too--today I decided to click on their "AP Top Stories" listing and found these headlines among them:

• Aruba Police Probe Teen's Disappearance (item 5) Isn't their something about "news" that's supposed to imply "new"? This story has a "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead" ring about it.
  
• Nancy Reagan Falls in London Hotel Room (item 6) She didn't hurt herself, and good for her, but do we really need this kind of update?
  
• Murphy the Dog Awaiting His Day in Court (item 8) I confess I didn't read this at all. Perhaps it's a moving tale of human-canine tragedy. But I doubt it.
  
• Poll: Most Say Stars Make Poor Role Models (item 11) To steal a phrase from James Taranto, what would we do without polls?
  
• 'Bewitched' Statue Goes Up in Salem (item 14) Elizabeth Montgomery was extremely hot in her day, and even long afterward, but I'm not going to visit any statue that does not commemorate the achievement of Dick York.
  
• And the item that's most likely to impact my daily life: Necktie Makers Fear Japan's New Dress Code (item 19)
  

So there we have it: just about one-third of the Associated Press's "Top Stories" are ridiculous, unnecessary, or outright puff pieces. Congratulations, AP! You've handily beaten the "hard news" ratio of network "news magazines" and morning shows, and probably beaten the evening news ratio as well...thank God for print.

My THC Flashback

What's the fuss?

Not long ago, the US Supreme Court rendered a decision invalidating California's "Compassionate Use Act," a law that allowed individuals to grow and consume marijuana for medical reasons. I've been surprised by the responses from both sides of the aisle, particularly the sense that, since the decision "erodes" states' rights, conservatives should oppose the decision and use it as another strike against an activist judiciary.

I think this is nonsense. The defendants' point is not absurd: since the drug is grown for personal (i.e., noncommercial) and local use, the federal government has no right to regulate it under the Interstate Commerce Act. However, I do not think it unreasonable for drug-control policy to be set at a national level (due in no small part to the issue of policing borders and the likelihood of interstate transactions); and California's law, which allows individuals a good deal of leeway in growing their own supplies, could put a significant kink in federal control efforts.

Again, I do not think the issue is so much whether marijuana can be medicinally helpful--I take that as a given. But I find it disingenuous, to say the least, for medical-marijuana advocates to lobby for the legalization of the weed, rather than the development of THC (marijuana's active chemical component) as a prescription drug. At least the current legal situation will bring this disconnect to a head: either proponents will resort to civil disobedience, or they will adopt a more constructive approach.

And it's not just my opinion: the American Medical Association (AMA) has its share of doubts as well:

[The AMA calls for a debate on] the wisdom of burning and inhaling the combustion products of a dried plant product as a valid therapeutic agent...the view that smoked marijuana is not a unique therapeutic substance but rather represents an alternate, but more toxic, delivery vehicle for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC; Dronabinol®)...A smoke-free inhaled or sublingual delivery system for whole marijuana extract or isolated cannabinoids would be preferred, and some progress has been made in this effort by the pharmaceutical industry...The AMA calls for...the NIH [to] use its resources and influence to support the development of a smoke-free inhaled delivery system for marijuana or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to reduce the health hazards associated with the combustion and inhalation of marijuana.

So there.

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Yet another update: I think this article helps demonstrate both the need for some overarching (pardon the pun) regulation as well as the underlying ridiculousness of the problem--apparently, in San Francisco, there are two medical marijuana "clubs" for each McDonald's.

Howard Dean, Porn Stars, and Monolithic-ity

[Sorry about "nouning" that adjective in the title, and "verbing" the noun in the first clause of this note, but somehow it seemed appropriate.]

I'd thought to make a long post somewhere about Howard Dean, firebrand chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his recent comments about Republicans, noting that they're "monolithic" and "pretty much a white, Christian party," and that many of its members have "never made an honest living." While it might be amusing to counter with the fact that these statements are being made by a person who grew up in privilege in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and who avoided the draft because of a skiing injury, the truth is that criticizing Dean could become a full-time job. I'll just leave him to destroy his own credibility--I can't really improve on his efforts.

But I was interested to note that the GOP may not be as monolithic as Dean thinks. Not without some minor controversy, porn star Mary Carey (a former candidate for governor of California) attended the $2,500 per-plate "The 2005 President's Dinner and Salute to Freedom". While this has raised the hackles of many of the "family values" members of the party, and aroused the curiosity of the press, it also debunks Dean's argument. She may be white and Christian, but she doesn't fit the GOP stereotype he's peddling; and while I have no experience in the matter, I can't imagine that having impersonal sex with random men in front of a camera does not constitute a hard day's work.

UPDATE: I've taken a gander at some of the things the left-wing blogs are writing about this event, and I must say I'm not entirely surprised. There's a good amount of whining about the GOP's "hypocrisy" in advocating family values and yet taking money from a porn star. Perhaps that's something the Democrats do: screen potential donors on the basis of their suitability. I'm more than willing to believe that Ms. Carey is a fan of smaller government and an active foreign policy, but apparently the Left feels that, if your profession does not meet their rigorous standards for respectability, you should not be able to participate in the political process.

God forbid the Mainstream Media ask pointed questions

This is a media crackdown, in case you've forgotten

I don’t normally pay a great deal of attention to the op-ed pages of the New York Times; but I was sitting here at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning and thought I’d take a gander. I wish I hadn’t, because Frank Rich's Don’t Follow the Money has, to borrow a phrase from Grampa Simpson, angried up my blood.

The problem is that it is the epitome of the kind of self-important nonsense the mainstream media is coughing up these days. Like the ravings of a dying and feeble mafia don, these words are delivered loud and stern to give the impression that everything is still under control (and to avoid a palace coup). It begins interestingly, noting that the media have tended to attribute the famous “All the President’s Men” movie line “follow the money” to the actual Deep Throat (W. Mark Felt), rather than the author of the movie script, to whom it actually belongs:

As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride."

This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King?

Interesting questions indeed, though far more interesting is the question, “How did the mainstream media, with the vast resources at its disposal, make such a basic, factual error in its reportage?” But instead of exploring this question, Rich seems to use the page as a place to vent his unresolved anger over Richard Nixon, a President who left office more than three decades ago, and spit venom at the machinations of the current President.

The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

And what exactly are the kind of attacks and intimidation we’re talking about here? Perhaps the government has used troops or police to shut down unflattering media outlets, or caused snooping reporters to “disappear”? Or maybe it’s that a censorship board has been instituted? What about something on a softer sinister level, such as late-night calls to reporters’ homes, threatening their lives or those of their family members? Nope. With, presumably, lots of experience with the Bush administration’s tactics, Rich comes up with several anemic examples:

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

Uh, are you blaming the Bush administration because reporters failed to ask pointed questions of Scott McClellan?

Rich then launches into a blistering attack on the Nixon White House, linking it ever so tenuously to today’s administration by stating they both like “lapdog” media outlets. Nixon’s special counsel Chuck Colson is singled out for abuse, as are the “blogging lynch mobs” who apparently can trace their ancestry to him. Strange, but I don’t remember ever getting a phone call from him, much less genetic material.

While this is neither here nor there, as more or less any competent writer will tell you, it provides a bit of a respite from the bouts of idiocy. But it doesn’t last. Rich soon notes that

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt … None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear.

Again, Rich’s problem seems to be with the unprofessional behavior of the mainstream media. But he doesn’t see it that way:

The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant Koran story…These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.

The mainstream media failed to give sufficient coverage to a news story that put the administration in a bad light! Must be George Bush’s fault. I mean, what’s the deal here? Does Rich believe that, should a reporter ask the “wrong” questions, he’ll be barred from the White House briefing room? Even if this is true (and Terry Moran still appears to have a job), my followup question would be, “So what?” God forbid you lose your “access.” If you are an investigative reporter, then, dammit, investigate. If you’re afraid asking the wrong questions will put your job in jeopardy, you’re in the wrong business. The conclusion to Rich’s piece is remarkably dense, even by the standards of his piece:

But in the days that followed [the Felt revelation], Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.

You are the media, largely unfettered by government control. You can say what you want (take for example your own piece, Mr. Rich—was it vetted by the administration prior to publication, I wonder?). If you don’t have the courage to report the way you really, deep-in-your-heart want to, don’t blame that on the Bush administration. Ask the questions, publish the answers—and let America decide.

Blair and Third-World Debt Relief

With the G-7 summit ramping up, there's been a lot of talk about third-world debt relief, with the general proposal being that the IMF (to whom much of the debt in question is owed) sell its gold deposits to finance the plan.

This sounds like a terrific idea, until you actually find out what it's doing. I read a particularly harsh piece about this in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and until I actually did some research (most of it right at the IMF site!) I couldn't believe it was true.

See www.imf.org if you want to check this for yourself. I dare you! They don't even try to pretty it up.

Here's the plan. The IMF holds 103.4 million ounces of gold. I say "holds" because this has been deposited with the IMF by member countries, to whom it ultimately belongs. But since much of this gold was deposited a long time ago, it sits on the IMF's books at something like $52 per ounce. The IMF will raise capital for debt relief for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) through a strange sellling process that will in reality leave the IMF with no more money. Here I quote from the IMF description of the process:

"Between December 1999 and April 2000, separate but closely linked transactions involving a total of 12.9 million ounces of gold were carried out between the IMF and two members (Brazil and Mexico) that had financial obligations falling due to the IMF. In the first step, the IMF sold gold to the member at the prevailing market price and the profits were placed in a special account invested for the benefit of the HIPC Initiative. In the second step, the IMF immediately accepted back, at the same market price, the same amount of gold from the member in settlement of that member’s financial obligations."

Here's the process in brief. The IMF expects a payment of, say $10 million from a HIPC, but it's not coming. So the IMF sells that country $10 million in gold at today's prices. It then immediately buys back $10 million in gold (at today's prices, therefore the same tonnage of gold) from the HIPC and says, "Thanks for your $10 million payment."

Did you see where the IMF made a profit in this transaction? Nowhere! This is what's called in US investing terminology a "wash sale," something that could theoretically generate a taxable loss or a taxable gain, but where the investor's holdings never actually change. The US tax code rightly disallows using wash sales to manipulate your tax bill, just as the IMF is using the technique of "off-market" gold sales to manipulate its balance sheet.

So Blair's plan involves 1) jiggering the IMF's books in order to 2) make payments for countries that have squandered their loan proceeds, so that 3) the IMF can say that these lenders have not defaulted and therefore 4) have a "track record of reform and sound policies" entitling the HIPCs to 5) more IMF loans.

In fairness, half of the HIPC initiative is to be financed directly by IMF member countries. But since the IMF will have no surplus money to finance its half, it will have to go into more debt to pull its weight.

Debt relief sounds like a worthy cause (whether it's the best use of available resources is a question that will have to wait for another day). But effecting it through such a shady and ill-conceived plan has got to be a mistake.

John Kerry, Intellectual

God, I love this picture.

OK, you know the "truth" about who's smarter, George W. Bush or John Kerry. As we've all been told, time and time again, Bush is the gregarious, seat-of-the-pants thinker who was a poor student, partying his way through college. Kerry, by contrast, is the deep-thinking intellectual whose natural gifts helped him excel at school.

Well, it turns out pretty much everyone was wrong about that. Indeed, the record shows that, at Yale anyway, they were both terrible students. So you think Bush is an idiot because he mangles every third sentence? Well, you Kerry boosters have it worse--you got taken in by someone just as dumb, but who's a smooth talker. Here's the relevant bit:

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

There is this interesting side-note to the story:

The grade transcript, which Kerry has always declined to release, was included in his Navy record. During the campaign the Globe sought Kerry's naval records, but he refused to waive privacy restrictions for the full file. Late last month, Kerry gave the Navy permission to send the documents to the Globe.

Kerry appeared to be responding to critics who suspected that there might be damaging information in the file about his activities in Vietnam. The military and medical records, however, appear identical to what Kerry has already released. This marks the first time Kerry's grades have been publicly reported.

It appears Kerry did have something to hide after all--the fact that one of the left's most scurrilous charges against Bush is a knife that cuts both ways.

Clearing up this particular smoke-filled room

That damned, activist Supreme Court! Stepping in where it doesn't belong! Oh, wait...it appears that the Court has actually upheld the superiority of a fairly clear federal statute over an oddly written state law. Well, that's different then.

The state law in question is California's medical marijuana statute, under which patients, seemingly based on as little as an oral recommendation from a doctor, can buy, smoke, and even grow the drug for their personal use.

Does that make sense? My wife is a doctor, and assures me that there are medicinal benefits from marijuana's active ingredient, THC. Why, if this is the case, don't concerned groups 1) lobby the federal government for changes to the Controlled Substances Act to move marijuana out of Schedule I, representing the most tightly controlled drugs, and 2) request the FDA to establish standards for the prescription and use of THC which 3) may then be produced safely under FDA supervision? But no, what we have is this sense that, if you need it, you should smoke it. I notice that we don't encourage people with chronic conditions to go out and plant poppies to make homemade opium.

No, what we have is clearly another agenda masquerading as a "medical benefit" argument. If you think it has medicinal value, urge its use as a medicine.

And since it wouldn't be a good post if I didn't stick it to the mainstream media, allow me to present this headline from the AP: "Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People." Technically true, but doesn't that have a little bit of a biased ring to it?

It's true! I don't know for sure, though...

There must be something in the water, because these stories just keep on popping out. Not long after Amnesty International called Guantanamo Bay "the gulag of our times," the head of the group's US branch (William Schulz, below) now says, "We don't know for sure." Here's the relevant quote from the article in full:

'Schulz said, "We don't know for sure what all is happening at Guantanamo and our whole point is that the United States ought to allow independent human rights organizations to investigate."

He also said he had "absolutely no idea" whether the International Red Cross had been given access to all prisoners and said the group feared others were being held at secret facilities or locations.'

So, let me get this straight: you allege that "independent human rights organizations" should be able to have access, but you can't tell us whether one of the world's largest such organizations has an opinion? Has it occurred to you to pick up the phone and call??

Listen, I'm no fan of the Guantanamo situation, but what gets me going about this is the idea that a group like Amnesty International can make broad statements without having access to, apparently, a single fact; and furthermore, they get enough credit from the media that their allegations are presented without disclaimer. I mean, check this out:

[Executive Director William Schulz] recently dubbed Rumsfeld an "apparent high-level architect of torture" in asserting he approved interrogation methods that violated international law.

"It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea," Schulz told "Fox News Sunday." [emphasis added]

I don't know what all this tells us. But I will say this: before the "mainstream media" can begin to rebuild its reputation in my eyes, it has to become a lot less credulous. They're willing to doubt whatever statements come out of the White House; think how well they'd do if they evinced a healthy skepticism about all their sources!

Speaking of hagiography...

This is really the guy. Really.

There has been a great deal of exuberance in the mainstream media over the past couple of days, thanks to the confirmation that W. Mark Felt, the "former No. 2 man at the FBI" (as a phrase liberally sprinkled throughout the coverage affirms) was the confidential Watergate source known as "Deep Throat."

I understand how this is a story, and how the historical interest justifies fairly high-profile coverage. But I just kept getting the sense, watching the very many encomia (sorry, a personal favorite), that the media was taking the time to pat itself on the back. You could just see the various anchors saying to themselves, "Man, we did good that time, didn't we!" See this story, for instance (and note the odd accompanying picture).

I have no lingering resentment about Watergate; and not having been aware of it at the time, I was not infected with the institutional mistrust it seems to have engendered. But neither do I feel the need to exult at this revelation, as if we are reliving Keith Tkachuk's goal for Boston University in the 1991 National Championships, the one that sent the game into overtime. It fills in a gap, sure, but no more. The story is over, and has been over for decades. Indeed, it appears that if anyone chose to look, there might be an interesting story around this guy's motives: he was passed over for the position of FBI Director after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, and only after this did he start peddling confidential information to reporters.

I suppose I should let the media have its moment. This may be for the best--if they begin to realize that this iconic story took place long before some of the well-coiffed newsreaders of today were even conceived, they may come to the conclusion that they actually have something to aspire to: the long road back to trustworthiness.