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PostWatch: An irregular correction to the Washington Post
Brought to you by Christopher Rake
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Tuesday, August 06, 2002
10:28 PM
Eleven Day Empire isn't too broken up about illegal immigrants losing jobs as a side-effect of the Social Security Administration's program to verify the accuracy of its social security-number system. At least they say it's a side-effect in the following Post story:
Thousands of immigrants have been forced to leave their jobs in the last few months, the result of a little-publicized operation by the U.S. government to clean up Social Security records, immigration experts say. Since early this year, the Social Security Administration has sent letters to more than 800,000 businesses -- about one in eight U.S. employers -- asking them to clear up cases in which their workers' names or Social Security numbers do not match the agency's files. The letters cover about 7 million employees....
"The impact is enormous," said Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza, which represents Hispanics. "We're hearing about it from all over the country."
La Raza, by the way, is Spanish for "The Race." Wonder if whitey could get away with that one.
Social Security officials note that there may be innocent reasons for some of the discrepancies, such as the misspelling of a worker's name, which can easily be corrected.
But the crackdown has highlighted an open secret: A huge number of illegal immigrants work "on the books," providing stolen or made-up Social Security numbers to employers and having U.S. taxes deducted from their paychecks...
Anyway, here's 11-day commenting on an illegal you have to feel sorry for, who's been trying to support a family and says look, we're not all criminals. 11-day:
I'm sorry that life sucked for this man in Venezuela. I'm sorry that there's economic and political turmoil there. But, hey, he is a criminal. He stayed in the country illegally, and he fabricated a Social Security number. Both of those things are crimes. When you commit crimes, you're a criminal. But controlling our own borders is just so, so Evil of us, I guess. What right do we have to say who can come into our country? How dare we expect immigrants to follow our laws?
By the way, did you know that the Mexican government has set up mobile consulates that are driving around the U.S. to issue Mexican ID cards to illegal aliens, because these cards are increasingly being accepted as ID by U.S. police, banks, and other institutions? Really.
An Entry Card for Immigrants
Illegal Residents Gain Access To Services With Mexican ID
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 26, 2002; Page B01
[skipping dreamy lede, here's the actual buried lede]
So far this year, the Mexican government has distributed about a half-million of the cards, known as matriculas consulares. In recent months, the cards have been recognized as official identification by nearly 200 U.S. police departments in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston, according to the Mexican Embassy. Dozens of banks and city governments accept them. Now the cards are starting to appear in the Washington area...
The consular IDs do not allow immigrants to live or work legally in the United States. But for the estimated 4.5 million undocumented Mexican immigrants, the cards are useful in other ways. Bank of America and Citibank recently decided to accept the cards to open accounts....
Use of the cards soon began to spread, especially after Sept. 11. The Mexican government, through its 45 U.S. consulates, increasingly has urged local officials and banks to accept the cards. "We want our compatriots to have an ID document . . . to distinguish those people who contribute to and live in this society from those who have other interests" such as terrorism, said Carlos Felix, who is in charge of immigrant issues at the Mexican Embassy.
In recent months, consulates have been overwhelmed by immigrants seeking the cards. About 488,000 were issued in the first half of this year -- a 76 percent increase from the same period in 2001, Felix said. Mexico has also stepped up a program of "mobile consulates" in which its diplomats travel to far-flung areas to provide the cards..
That's on top of Mexico's 45 non-wheeled consulates.
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2:12 PM
MisTruth in Non-Labeling.... The Post forgot to label this Sunday story "editorial" or the more crafty "analysis:"
Amid fears of the political fallout from its ties to scandal-tarred businesses, the Republican Party has latched onto a seemingly unlikely answer to the political questions surrounding the corporate pasts of the president and vice president: former treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin.
Unlikely to....oh, I get it, reporter Jonathan Weisman
Whether the business exploits of a Democratic financier who has been out of power since 1999 will resonate with voters is far from certain, but the GOP is willing to give it a try.
Well, he was a former Clinton Treasury Secretary serving as a Citigroup director, and called a Bush treasury official to prevent independent credit-rating agencies from nudging Citigroup client Enron into bankruptcy (Rubin's effort was turned down). That's a pretty straight line as these things go. But alas, it is a complex web to reporter Weisman.
Rubin would appear to be an odd choice of targets -- out of power and uninvolved in Democratic attacks on the Bush administration's links to tainted corporations. One GOP aide involved in the anti-Rubin campaign conceded that most Americans probably do not know who the current treasury secretary is, much less the one before last. And Rubin's current position with Citigroup would not fit on a bumper sticker: member of the office of the chairman and chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors.
New reporting guidlines: Pay no heed to executives with long titles who can't be identified by the American public. Done!
Now that we've established how odd it is to drag poor Rubin into it, we can quote the other side:
But other Republicans say Rubin has been held up by Democrats as an icon of an era of prosperity and a symbol of wisdom that Democrats use as a foil to the troubled tenure of O'Neill. When Rubin penned a July 22 Washington Post opinion piece calling for a reexamination of the tax cut, he became fair game, they say. "If Bob Rubin had disappeared into the night and was not making analyses on economics, on the tax cuts, he'd have every right to life as a public citizen," Foley said. "But the fact is, he is on the public airwaves."
Meanwhile, though I don't have a link handy at the moment, Don Imus raked Sen. Joe Lieberman over the coals for not pledging to make Rubin appear at an upcoming corporate evildoer hearing.
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1:46 PM
Random thought of the day... There's an academic well-known in wonk circles named Glenn Loury, who is an interesting fellow partly because he has migrated from an earlier neo-conservative view of race issues to a more liberal outlook that, among other things, has ended his ostracism from the black lefty social establishment. It's safe to say I agree with him less than I used to, and some believe the pain he experienced when being shunned is one reason he marched back leftwards. But who knows.
I mention him today because he appeared on C-Span's Booknotes recently, and offered a terrific insight into the taxicab problem that showed a more subtle examination than we usually get with such issues. The transcript of the interview is here, and here's the relevant excerpt:
I say look if you're waiting for a cab and you know the cabs are unlikely to stop for people like you, then you anticipate a long wait. Now, if you're a guy who's out to rob, a long wait may not be such a big deal. You only need one cab to stop and get in your day's work.
If you're a guy who's just trying to get home from the movies, that a cab is not going to stop for you is a problem and so you don't even look to take taxis in the first place. You take the bus or you bring your own car or whatever.
Now, if most taxi drivers think that Blacks are more likely to rob them and so they won't stop for them, then most Blacks who are just trying to get home will probably not rely on taxi transportation or at least disproportionately they would be inclined to not do so; whereas most Blacks who are bent on robbery won't be so much affected by the cab driver slowdown.
The consequence is that the cab drivers not picking up Blacks creates a set of incentives which, when African-Americans react to those incentives, leads to the very circumstance that the cab drivers had feared and which justified their not picking up the Blacks.
The book that Loury is promoting is The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, mainly I think for an academic audience.
Booknotes of course is one of the jewels of cable television. There's an online webcast of the interview if you have the bandwidth. Cheer up, Right-Wing Conspiracy; Anne Coulter will be throwing bombs there this Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern.
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8:58 AM
Visa applications would be monitored by the new Department of Homeland Security under pending legislation, according to this story, putting DHS in a theoretically strong supervisory role over the State Dept., whose consular officials would still issue them.
The proposed new Department of Homeland Security would take a strong new role in the issuance of U.S. visas worldwide amid increasing criticism that the State Department has handed them out too easily, especially in countries that are home to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. As debate over the Homeland Security legislation heads to the Senate next month, a little-noticed part of both the House and Senate bills would give the new counterterror department some responsibility in deciding U.S. policy on who enters the country....
Critics in Congress and the law enforcement community [and the conservative press--pw] contend that the State Department has been too accommodating to visa applicants, making "customer service" a higher priority than national security....
The House version is stronger than the Senate's:
The House homeland security bill, approved on July 26, goes farther. Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) successfully added provisions to the House bill that allow members of the Homeland Security Department to be placed in consular offices. They would have the authority to review visa applications and order some rejected, and would give "expert advice and training" to consular officers on security threats.
Legislatively, the thing to keep in mind here is that the visa proposals in both the House and Senate are not some outlier bills floating around--they are already in both the House and Senate DHS bills. The visa section could still be taken out, but I'm surprised it's gotten this far along. Cheers to NRO's Joel Mowbray.
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Monday, August 05, 2002
11:12 PM
Instapundit has great sources in the Post: He predicted a Tom Ricks story would be printed "today" (Tuesday) on a Pentagon briefing identifying Saudi Arabia as an enemy, and here it is--Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies:
A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States.
"The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader," stated the explosive briefing. It was presented on July 10 to the Defense Policy Board, a group of prominent intellectuals and former senior officials that advises the Pentagon on defense policy.
"Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies," said the briefing prepared by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corporation analyst. A talking point attached to the last of 24 briefing slides went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East.
Happy-face spin is still on this scenario, according to Ricks:
"Neither the presentations nor the Defense Policy Board members' comments reflect the official views of the Department of Defense," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said in a written statement issued last night. "Saudi Arabia is a long-standing friend and ally of the United States. The Saudis cooperate fully in the global war on terrorism and have the Department's and the Administration's deep appreciation."
But the wheels are turning inside the Administration. I think this will be a bad day to be Colin Powell:
One administration official said opinion about Saudi Arabia is changing rapidly within the U.S. government. "People used to rationalize Saudi behavior," he said. "You don't hear that anymore. There's no doubt that people are recognizing reality and recognizing that Saudi Arabia is a problem."
Then again, Henry Kissinger--!!--is reported as speaking up at the briefing to say the Saudis are pro-American (!!!) and that they can be "managed."
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11:04 PM
Iran boiling over, not simmering down as the Post would have it. Instapundit points to this Glenn Frazier account of anti-regime violence that President Bush, according to the Post, had damped down by talking about his support for a free Iran. Frazier recently, today:
Fighting in Iran
Getting news out of Iran is increasingly difficult. Not surprisingly, I have not heard from any of my more trusted correspondants in hours. The SMCCDI news page continues to provide brief updates, though.
I haven't been able to confirm any of their most recent reports, but they have generally proven to be a reliable source. That being said, they are reporting an increase in violence, with Iranian and...ahem..."foreign" security forces using deadly force in some instances to respond to demonstrators. Citing sources they themselves describe as "very reliable", they claim confirmation that many of the security forces in Tehran and Ef are communication with each other in Arabic.
It is still unclear what magnitude event we're looking at, whether the fighting is sporadic or widespread. Where's CNN? Where's BBC? Without video, it's hard to get a sense of things.
Some clashes are being described as traditional urban guerilla events, with staged ambushes leading security forces into blind alleys for dispatching. In other cases, the description is more of frantic security forces grabbing anyone they find still out in the streets and hauling them off.
The regime has withstood large public demonstrations of unrest in the past, so it is premature to think that this is the beginning of a revolution. At the same time, Iran has gone through around five regime changing revolutions in the last hundred or so years, and they generally do start just like this. It'd be a shame if the mainstream media missed a chance at putting the next one on live TV. If I were program director at a major news outlet, I'd put this on the screen pronto just on the off-chance at broadcasting live history.
But that's just me, I suppose.
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10:54 PM
BBC Watch...who knew? U.K. solicitor Trevor Asserson and Israeli lawyer Elisheva Mironi acting as research assistant have compiled a heavily footnoted report documenting anti-Israeli bias at the BBC. BBC broadcasts are reflexively anti-Israeli if you listen to them over time. One taste of the report, The BBC and The Middle East - A Critical Study:
The BBC refuses to label the Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups as ‘terrorists’, instead using the terms ‘militants’, ‘hard liners’ or ‘radical’. The BBC usually refers to Bombings of Israeli civilians as ‘attacks’ or ‘suicide bombings’. When suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word ‘terror’ was used by the BBC only when describing Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Palestinian targets.
Iain Duncan Smith recently stated that: “…such misappropriation is absurd when even Palestinian moderates in Jerusalem describe the suicide bombers as terrorists.”
We consider it implausible that the deliberate bombing of a bus full of civilians or of a pedestrian street full of teenagers does not fall within any meaningful definition of “terrorism”.
Via Little Green Footballs
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10:42 PM
This is what William Raspberry thinks we should do with the terrorist Palestinians--negotiate:
The Post reported after the Gaza City bombing that since the intifada began, 570 Israelis had been killed and 1,670 Palestinians...Can either side believe such violence has served the interest of peace? Indeed, the reports are that the Gaza City rocket attack scuttled a proposed accord among militant Palestinian groups to end the suicide bombings. They ought to move forward with the accord anyway -- if Israelis can't strafe their way into security, the Palestinians can't suicide-bomb their way into statehood.
While Little Green Footballs quotes an NRO piece to remind us of the terrorist's view of negotiations, as well as their estimate of the intelligence of your average Western columnist:
Speaking in English with European media outlets, Hamas spokesman Abd al-Aziz Rantisi further explained that Hamas is only trying to "defend our children ... stop demolitions of our houses ... " and the ever-popular "end the occupation." What self-abasing, leftist European wouldn't at least "understand" such motivations?
The problem is that Rantisi said something altogether different in his Arabic television soundbite: "I am saying to the Zionists that this [the Hebrew U. attack] is just the first reaction and if they do not want to get hurt a lot more, they should go back to the countries they came from." Or, in another clip, he said that the attacks will continue "until the Jews leave Palestine." I guess some things just don't translate well into English.
And if all Israel won't voluntarily take the next plane out, the terrorists Mr. Raspberry wants them to negotiate with continue to show they are equally content to practice depraved slaughter, as Debka tallies:
After Midnight, Palestinians Shot Dead Avi Wilensky, 29, His Pregnant Wife Avital, 27, in a Car North of Ramallah, Leaving Their Two Babies of 8 Months and 2 Years injured
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5:46 PM
Press Release Division....Mighty Kausfiles takes on a Post story alleging that hunger is a "sleeper issue," saying the paper got taken by an advocacy poll.
The Post:
Fighting Hunger Emerges As Nonpartisan Issue
By Helen Rumbelow
Is hunger in the United States a potent political issue?
A poll of 1,000 likely voters found that 93 percent said "fighting the hunger problem" was important when deciding who to choose in House or Senate elections; half of them called it "very important."
Kaus:
Hmmm. If you were told there was "the hunger problem," wouldn't you think fighting it was important too? It's not as if voters spontaneously came up with "the hunger problem" when asked what was important. The Alliance to End Hunger, which commissioned the poll, wasn't about to take chances like that! Rather, "fighting the hunger problem" was included on a list of "a dozen leading issues" the poll respondents were fed, according to the group's Adobe Acrobat explanation. Who's going to say it's not important? ... In another shocking finding from the poll:
Almost three-quarters of likely voters (72.9 %) say the 6 million children around the world who die annually from hunger-related illness is a convincing argument to do more.
The rest say, "Screw 'em!" ... Isn't the news here that an astonishing 27.1 percent say they don't think "the 6 million children around the world who die from hunger-related illness is a convincing argument to do more?" ... How could the pollsters have failed to stack the question more effectively?
Kaus and Eric Umansky (Today's Papers at Slate) add the Post was gulled (or didn't care) about the background of a key figure in the story. Today's Papers:
By the way, the article quotes two people, both pollsters saying that hunger is now a big voter issue. The Post notes that one of the guys helped devise the poll. Left unsaid: According to the poll's press release, so did the other guy.
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4:07 PM
The Post is confused about Iran according to NRO's Michael Ledeen, who critiqued this Post story by Karl Vick, which says chances for a revolution overthrowing Iran have dimmed because President Bush publicly backed reformers, undercutting them.
Vick:
ISTANBUL, Aug. 2 -- A sudden surge in momentum for reform inside Iran was reversed last month by President Bush's public expression of support for the cause, according to Iranian analysts and foreign diplomats there.
Bush's July 12 statement, in which he urged Iran toward "a future defined by greater freedom, greater tolerance," was framed as a direct appeal to the people of Iran to press for the political and social changes that elected reformers within the government, especially President Mohammad Khatami, have been trying to achieve. But observers in Iran said Bush's message enabled religious conservatives who hold powerful, appointive positions in the government to link their reformist foes with the United States, still regarded as "the Great Satan" by many Iranians. The emboldened hard-line clerics immediately launched a wave of repression, closing newspapers and jailing intellectuals.
Ledeen:
Let's begin with the first and last paragraphs.
The first: "A sudden surge in momentum for reform inside Iran was reversed last month by President Bush's public expression of support for the cause, according to Iranian analysts and foreign diplomats there." The last: " 'I think, broadly speaking, reform is a bit of a juggernaut,' one diplomat said. 'There's not much an international power can do but affect the edges of it.' "
So you see that logical consistency is not one of Karl Vick's strong points. But then, neither is factual accuracy. If one were to deconstruct the first, one would point out that the momentum to end the religious extremist tyranny in Iran had started many months ago; there was no sudden surge in July. And the anti-regime movement was greatly encouraged by the president's words of support, as Karl Vick could and should have documented simply by reading the statements of gratitude from a large number of pro-freedom organizations within the country, from students to ayatollahs.
Vick and his sources argue that Bush's support for a free Iran somehow played into the hands of the tyrants (as always, described as "conservatives"), because it enabled them to demand national unity against the threat of American meddling. But this conveniently overlooks the events that provoked the president's July 12 statement: a massive, nation-wide demonstration against the regime, followed by vicious repression, mass arrests, increased censorship, and the like. Thus the cycle that Vick pretends to describe had already occurred before the president spoke. It's preposterous to blame it on him...
Ledeen has some other telling points, particularly that "reformers" don't have any street cred anymore because they haven't reformed anything.
Then he posted the following later today:
One could hardly imagine a more dramatic refutation of the Washington Post's misguided effort to convince its readers that the air had gone out of the balloon of the Iranian revolt against the tyrants in Tehran. Early this evening, Iran time, huge demonstrations broke out in every major city in the country, provoking violent clashes with the Revolutionary Guards and other security forces.
The demonstrations were in commemoration of the establishment of the constitutional monarchy early in the 20th century, and were organized by the many groups demanding freedom for the Iranian people.
Just as President Bush has.
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2:50 PM
Speaking of fringes, Eugene Volokh has some poll numbers that he takes with a grain of salt--but just a grain:
ANOTHER SECOND AMENDMENT POLL: Two weeks ago, I mentioned the Zogby poll, commissioned by the Second Amendment Foundation; that poll found that "A wide majority of American voters (75%) agree with the Justice Department's position that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. Just over a fifth (22%) disagree with the Justice Department, while 4% are unsure." I pointed out, though, that the pollsters asked respondents "Do you agree or disagree with the current Justice Department's position that the Second Amendment guarantees you the individual right to keep and bear arms?" Citing a relatively authoritative source -- the Justice Department -- as supporting the individual right view, I suggested, might have skewed the results, though I conjectured that even despite this flaw, "the Zogby survey at least makes clear that the supposedly 'radical' Justice Department view is at least well within the mainstream of public opinion."
Well, I still think the question was somewhat skewed, but another recent poll that I just ran across suggests that the skew might not have had much effect; according to a May 14, 2002 ABC News poll (italics added),
After hearing the Second Amendment verbatim, 73 percent in an ABCNEWS.com poll said it guarantees the right to individual gun ownership. Twenty percent said, instead, that it only guarantees the right of states to maintain militias -- the government's longstanding position until the Justice Department reversed it in a U.S. Supreme Court brief last week.
Now this result may not be terribly robust -- many people's views might be quite different at other times, when the memory of the Justice Department's stance has been replaced with, say, the memory of a contrary court decision, or a mass shooting, or some such. I've seen polls that yield much closer results than 73-20. And of course one can argue that the public's views, whatever they may be, just shouldn't matter, in one direction or the other.
But I think this poll provides further evidence that the Justice Department's position is far from the "radical" step that many have described it as being.
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2:23 PM
The Post's Second-Amendment editorial I blogged this a.m. is scorched by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:
THE WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL BOARD EMBARRASSES ITSELF AGAIN with this extraordinarily lame editorial on the Second Amendment. The editorial attacks Attorney General John Ashcroft for adopting an individual-right view of the Second Amendment, using a particular case (in which a Maryland man, licensed to carry in Maryland, was arrested for carrying a gun in D.C.) as its springboard.
Here's the dumbest passage, from among many candidates:
Our point is simply that the government cannot both embrace an individual rights view of the Second Amendment and prosecute people for wielding guns.
Well, the Post here seems to lose sight of the distinction between carrying a gun and "wielding" it, something that seems rather crucial. More importantly -- as the editors of the Post would know if they bothered to read anything on the Second Amendment beyond (suspiciously similar) press releases from the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center, both of whom incestuously feature a lot of Post editorials on their webpages -- prosecution for illegally carrying guns doesn't violate the right to keep and bear arms anyway. Scholarship on the Second Amendment is almost completely in agreement on this point.
And why shouldn't it be? The First Amendment, favored by those on the fringes of the free-speech lobby, has not barred a variety of restrictions on free speech including incitement to murder and the well-known example of not being permitted to blithely scream "fire" in a crowded theater.
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7:47 AM
The Post Reverts To Form on the Second Amendment in today's editorial, though the Justice Dept.'s inconsistent position on the issue means it partly has it coming. The editorial, Guns and Ideology, says Attorney General John Ashcroft wrongly supports the individual right to bear arms but is dancing around a D.C. law banning ownership, an issue that came up since a criminal defendant is arguing Second Amendment protections concerning his 9mm picked up, along with drugs, during his arrest. Ashcrfot is indeed trying to finesse the law, which makes little sense, but the Post is too comfortable with its usual Second Amendment rif:
Mr. Ashcroft has insisted that he will defend this country's gun laws, even as he has contended that the Second Amendment to the Constitution creates an individual right to own a gun -- subject only to reasonable regulation to keep guns from criminals. But cases such as Mr. Pearson's demonstrate that the circle cannot be squared. Some gun laws -- Washington's notably among them -- sweep more broadly than any individual right can reasonably be read to permit.
Which is why it has to be overturned, though apparently Ashcroft doesn't think the time or the case is ripe.
The D.C. Court of Appeals, it has argued in several cases, has held that there is no individual right to own a gun. And while the attorney general may disagree with this holding, it is binding law in Washington; hence, gun prosecutions here may proceed. But it is hard to see why the government should be locking people up for conduct it has plainly said -- before the U.S. Supreme Court, no less -- is constitutionally protected.
You know, doesn't the fact that the suspect appeared to be on drugs when he was arrested after people heard gunshots--doesn't that have the teensiest thing to do with him compromising his right to bear arms? I can't have a handgun while drinking in a restaurant in Virginia...
The Justice Department's answer is that the D.C. statute is constitutional as applied to Mr. Pearson because he was "visibly under the influence of drugs" and because it is "well settled that the individual right to bear arms is . . . not violated by statutes that . . . prohibit the possession of firearms by those who are intoxicated." In fact, nothing about the limits of the purported individual right to bear arms is well established.
Nothing? Geez, I'm truly not an expert in this area like Glenn Reynolds or Eugene Volokh, but I'm sure that every state that recognizes the right to bear arms makes it clear you can't wave your Glock around if you're drinking or, you know, on drugs.
Our point is not that Mr. Pearson's behavior -- assuming it can be proven -- should go unprosecuted. We believe in strong gun laws. Our point is simply that the government cannot both embrace an individual rights view of the Second Amendment and prosecute people for wielding guns. The attorney general is complicating efforts to prosecute people such as Mr. Pearson by adopting arguments better left to the fringes of the defense bar. Unless Mr. Ashcroft backs off, his efforts to align himself with the gun lobby will only play into the hands of more criminal suspects.
O Post, there you are with the gun lobby and the fringes again. I am the fringes. Tens of millions of Americans are the fringes. It's a pretty big fringe.
See the Post's other editorial today, Convicted for Speech, for the Post's take on the free speech lobby.
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Sunday, August 04, 2002
8:08 PM
Another Middle East-Oklahoma City bombing link is covered in another LA Weekly piece pointed to by Instapundit. LA Weekly writes about another FBI agent who's been trying to call attention to suspicious links he uncovered that his superiors seem oddly uninterested in. This comes under Instapundit's persuasive We Better Win The War Overseas file. From LA Weekly's Jim Crogan:
The Weekly has learned that Chicago-based special agent Robert Wright has accused the agency of shutting down his 1998 criminal probe into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City. The apparent goal of the training camps, according to confidential documents obtained by the Weekly, was to recruit and train Palestinian-American youths, who would then slip into Israel. Recruits at these camps reportedly received weapons training and instruction in bomb-making techniques in the early 1990s. The bomb-making curriculum included the sort of explosives later used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And government documents state that two trainees came from the Oklahoma City area.
One alleged trainer at the terror camps is now fending off a government lawsuit to seize his bank accounts, car and property for alleged money laundering on behalf of the militant group Hamas. So far, no one has been prosecuted for these alleged terrorism-related activities....
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6:32 PM
Slack Security Standards Part II... I should also add I blogged about this partly because GlennMan noted the issue as mentioned by Leaning Left in the context of whether the FBI's investigation of Congress is a concern. Glenn and particularly Leaning Left think it is (he called it "disturbing") but as far as I can tell neither has acknowledged that the investigation was requested by Congress--specifically Bob Graham, D-Florida, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Porter J. Goss, R-Florida, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee--and not "two senators" or whatever it was that I said before.
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5:51 PM
Slack Security Standards complement sloppy reporting earlier this week on complaints by staffers and members of Congress about their being investigated by the FBI. The co-chairmen of a Senate intelligence committee asked for the investigation after Dick Cheney called them to complain about leaks: CNN and then other outfits including the Post reported that just before Sept. 11, the NSA intercepted communications in which operatives said: "The match begins tomorrow" and "Tomorrow is Zero Hour." As I've blogged before, it's reckless to report such exact language, compromising intelligence assets and leads. But I'm blogging today because the Post has made it sound as if all this is old news--The Washington Times said it before. But it didn't.
I tried using the Washington Times pay archive and it called up the wrong archived story, so I'll save my pennies for now. But this Scripps Howard excerpt from a Martin Schramm piece at the The Tri-City Heraldtracks with my recollection:
The Oct. 3, 2001, front-page article, by Rowan Scarborough and Jerry Seper, reported that the NSA had begun "sifting through reams of raw intelligence to find links to bin Laden," and added: "According to a senior administration official, that search turned up information about conversations between bin Laden lieutenants the day before terrorists hijacked the four airliners. One conversation had an associate speaking of an impending 'big attack.'
Schramm also writes as if it's the same thing, but it isn't. Granted that this may be wishful thinking on my part, but it would be no big surprise to anyone including those in Al Qaeda that reports of a "big attack" were circulating--and intercepted--the day before. The phrase being quoted here seems intentionally vague, precisely to protect sources. You can argue that even that information should not have been leaked, but it's hardly as damaging as the exact phrases actually spoken: "The match begins tomorrow" and "Tomorrow is Zero Hour."
Now look how the Post's Dana Priest reports this sequence in FBI Probe Irks Lawmakers:
The Washington Times first reported the intercepts and the delay in translating them 11 days after the September attacks. Several news organizations published or broadcast similar stories in early June. But it was not until a June 19 CNN report that cited "two congressional sources," and June 20 reports in other major newspapers, including The Washington Post, that Cheney called Goss and Graham.
This is either carless or just plain dishonest. The Times reported the intercepts--just not the language that matters, the Post neglects to mention. It backs off ever so slightly but still confuses the issue the next day inSecurity Agency Led FBI To Capitol Hill by Dana Priest and Helen Dewar:
The leaked information, parts of which had been reported in The Washington Times in late September 2001 and then again by other news outlets in mid-June, contained snippets of conversation intercepted by the NSA on Sept. 10 in which people, speaking in Arabic, said "the match is about to begin" and "Tomorrow is zero hour."
Look. The Times published a vague report in the fall. CNN exposed the exact langage June 19, which is when you started playing catch-up:
NSA Intercepts On Eve of 9/11 Sent a Warning
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
The National Security Agency intercepted two messages on the eve of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon warning that something was going to happen the next day, but the messages were not translated until Sept. 12, senior U.S. intelligence officials said yesterday.
The Arabic-language messages said, "The match is about to begin" and "Tomorrow is zero hour." They were discussed Tuesday before the House-Senate intelligence committee during closed-door questioning of Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the NSA, the agency responsible for intercepting and analyzing electronic messages...
CNN first reported on the committee's discussion of the messages yesterday....
If I can do this on the internet, why can't you do this with your own stories on Lexis-Nexis?
UPDATE: This Aug. 2 CNN story says they weren't the original source of that exact language, either [though the earlier CNN story linked above does take "credit" for it]:
Investigators are trying to determine who leaked information to CNN about communications in Arabic that made vague references to an impending attack on the United States. The communications were intercepted by the National Security Agency on September 10.
An intelligence source later told The Associated Press they contained the phrases, "Tomorrow is zero hour" and "The match is about to begin."
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4:34 PM
While I was out MediaMinded has been taking on the Howler's attack on William McGowan's Coloring The News, including questions about coverage at the Washington Post. One incident he's discussing is the Post's tame treatment of a racial hatred involving a black charter-school chief who attacked a white Washington Times reporter. MediaMinded is not much impressed by the Howler's attempt to knock down the book. MediaMinded quotes McGowan on on aspect of the incident:
Ignoring the violence against Susan Ferrechio and the questions raised about public accountability, [Post columnist Courtland] Milloy wrote: "The eagerness with which whites have seized on this case is astounding. Their outrage at the perceived slight against a white woman at the hands of a black is matched only by the sheer absence of any concern when whites do worse to blacks ... It's as if whites were engaged in a desperate bid to absolve themselves of racism by going to any length to prove that blacks are racist, too." He turned Ferrechio into a symbol of white arrogance, describing her as a white "Missy" tossing her hair into Mary Anigbo's face. Milloy closed his tirade by writing that if in fact Anigbo did tell Ferrechio to get her " 'white ass out of here,' then I think I know how she feels."
Some black people just feel entitled to vent hatred against whites. And they, Milloy among them, can reasonably expect that most of the time they won't get called on it. Not to put words in MediaMinded's mouth--that's me talking. He continues:
Yes, some black editorial writers at the Post weakly declared that Anigbo should be punished for her outrageous actions. All well and good. But the fact that Milloy was allowed to write a racist screed that the paper defended as an expression of "diversity" is outrageous. It's not the net balance of editorial opinion; it's the blatant double standard regarding Milloy's over-the-top piece that is at the heart of McGowan's argument. Compare Milloy's kid-glove treatment to what happened to Paul Teetor, a former reporter in the diversity-obsessed Gannett company who lost his job for basically reporting the truth about a meeting in the black community of Burlington, Vt., that barred whites.
MediaMinded notes that Coloring the News got a [largely] favorable review in the Washington Post.
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11:39 AM
Rewarding for whom.... A startling opening sentence in ombudsman's Michael Getler's column today:
This has been a rewarding couple of weeks for Post readers, and Saddam Hussein.
Just kidding.
But Getler, whose column was ably blogged yesterday by OmbudsGod, doesn't see any problem with the military secrets being exposed in recent stories by the Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, USA Today and other ignorant and careless publications. Today Getler writes in Better Leak Than Never:
This has been a rewarding couple of weeks for Post readers.
The investigative and business staffs have produced two probing, hard-hitting series. Last week, a five-parter by staff writers Peter Behr and April Witt laid out, in remarkable and powerful detail, the inside story of the collapse of Enron. The week before, a two-parter by reporter Alec Klein on accounting practices at AOL Time Warner set in motion civil and criminal investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, respectively. Metro reporters Yolanda Woodlee, Craig Timberg and others did a solid job in covering, and helping to uncover, the scandal surrounding the electoral nominating petitions gathered in support of Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams.
But what, ultimately, may be the most important stories of recent days were by The Post's Pentagon correspondent, Tom Ricks, and by his counterparts at the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and maybe others. These were accounts of possible military scenarios being debated inside an otherwise tight-lipped administration and Pentagon concerning what is widely expected to be an eventual attack on Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein.
The lives of American soldiers and the odds for a future without hellish smallpox conflagrations or nuclear nightmares are at stake, but Getler just kinda senses it's okay to leak orders of battle:
Having watched this kind of thing unfold before, my strong sense is that such leaks don't compromise security. The U.S. military, if it does act, will do so in a way that hasn't been on anyone's front page.
In which case Getler should set up one of those 1-800-fortune teller infomercials or go to Pimlico.
The sloppiest thinking is at the end:
What these stories do show is the great benefit of reading newspapers if you care about whether and how this country is going to war. Aside from making its intentions clear to remove Saddam Hussein, the administration has not opened itself up yet to questions about the specific reasons, rationale, risks and evidence for such action. It has been the press -- and especially big newspapers with large circulations and reach -- that has been leading the effort to uncover the road to war....
Unless you happen to be in the relatively small, all-volunteer armed forces, or in the reserves, going to war for the past quarter-century has been pretty painless. You can watch it on TV, you don't pay higher taxes, and there are few casualties. Most of those are foreigners or others killed in badly misnamed "friendly fire" accidents. There are better ways to debate the pros and cons of going to war with Iraq. But thus far it is the leaks that have opened things up.
Whether and how are two entirely different categories. The questions about why we should go to war are fair game for all kinds of reporting and essential if a representative democracy makes any sense. But how we're going to fight--tactics, basing plans, proposed front lines and other deployment plans--this is what could have gotten you arrested during World War 2 and should get you thrown in the clinker now if it's done intentionally. I disagree with Getler all the time and that's fine, but today's column is disgusting.
As OmbudsGod notes:
Last I checked, we are at war. We’ve been at war since 9/11, although it is a different kind of war. It is a war against soldiers who do not wear uniforms or reveal who they are. It is a war against soldiers who primarily target civilians. It is a war waged by foreign governments who support terrorist groups. We’ve already overthrown one such government and we are planning to do it to another – a government that is known to have used both biological and chemical weapons and which is developing nuclear weapons. If The Post needs to be reminded of the reason we are at war, I suggest they go to New York City and look at the spot where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
In a very real sense, The Post and the leakers are worse than some screwed-up American kid who found himself fighting alongside the Taliban, because they have the potential to do real damage to America’s security interests and to cause more American deaths. The Post is allowing itself to be used, and in doing so is serving neither the readers not the public interest.
And he quotes no-friend-of-the-Administration Daniel Schorr:
[W]ill all the Pentagon and administration sources telling us how Saddam Hussein will be brought down please shut up.
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9:37 AM
The College Sports Council, plaintiff in the suit challenging current Title IX implementation, has finally been recognized by the Washington Post, ending a boycott comparable to the U.S. government's refusal to establish diplomatic relations with China. And just like that relationship, the Post did it in the most careful, tentative way, publishing a letter to the editor last Thursday from the council's chairman, Eric Pearson:
Once again, Sally Jenkins took a mean-spirited swing at any who would dare suggest that Title IX might have some flaws. In her June 24 Sports column, they were disgruntled wrestlers; on July 15, they were a bunch of sad sacks.
For wrestlers, runners, divers and many other athletes who have lost hundreds of teams in recent years as a result of the Title IX quota called "proportionality," a more accurate adjective would be "heartbroken." Those young men have devoted themselves to athletics, often as a way to gain access to higher education, only to have their teams and aspirations yanked out from under them.
Ms. Jenkins also had her facts wrong. She cited a General Accounting Office study as saying that 72 percent of colleges have complied with Title IX without cutting a men's sport. That statistic referred to only 53 schools that the Department of Education had strong-armed into compliance, not to every school in the country. What's more, each of those schools -- as is the unfortunate case at most colleges -- has put a strict cap on the number of male athletes who can participate on particular teams.
There's a bit more, including his observation that the quota forced local Howard University to cut men's baseball and wrestling programs.
Yeah, I got back from vacation and couldn't resist posting this right away. More anon.
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Tuesday, July 30, 2002
11:48 PM
POSTWATCH IS ON VACATION until Monday. I commend to you the links at left until then. I also recommend strongly the Partisan Review essay by Bruce Bawar brought to our attention by Anne Wilson. Do come back; traffic is building nicely.
Here's a link to the Partisan Review Bruce Bawar essay
Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe
I grew up in New York, the world’s most multicultural city, and for some time lived only a few blocks from the imposing Islamic Center on Third Avenue between 96th and 97th Streets. But it wasn’t until I moved to western Europe in 1998–living first in Amsterdam, then in Oslo–that fundamentalist Islam became a daily reality for me.
The reason this took so long seems pretty clear. Owing partly to different immigration patterns, but partly also to America’s genius for turning immigrants into proudly integrated citizens with realigned loyalties, Muslims in America tend to be more affluent, more assimilated, and more religiously moderate than their co-religionists in Europe. A perhaps not terribly atypical example is Walter Mourad, a secularized Lebanese-American businessman who was profiled a while back in the New York Times. Mourad has two children in a Montessori school, a wife "who says she would shoot him in the head if he suggested she cover her head with a scarf," and a love for America that drove him to respond at once when the CIA, FBI, and NSA put out the call for Arabic translators after September 11.
Every American Muslim is not Walter Mourad, to be sure, but his like is considerably easier to find in the United States than in Western Europe, where Islam, generally speaking, offers a somewhat different picture. For various reasons, Western European Muslims are more likely than their American counterparts to live in tightly knit religious communities, to adhere to a narrow fundamentalist faith, and to resist integration into mainstream society. The distance between mainstream society and the Muslim subculture can be especially striking in the Netherlands and in the countries of Scandinavia, whose relatively small, ethnically homogeneous native populations had, until recent decades, little or no experience with large-scale immigration from outside Europe.
The distance I speak of was certainly striking in Amsterdam, where I resided for a time in a neighborhood–the Oud West–where I grew accustomed to the sight of women in chadors pushing baby carriages past shops with signs in Arabic. A few doors from my flat, a huge Turkish flag flew over the entrance to the neighborhood center. (There was no Dutch flag.) One day I peered inside. A dozen or so men, middle-aged and older, scowled back at me. I did not go in.
Curious about my new neighbors, I did some reading. I learned that upwards of 7 percent of the Netherlands’ population–and nearly half of Amsterdam’s–was of non-Dutch origin. The Turkish and Moroccan communities dated back to the 1970s; immigration from Surinam and the Dutch Antilles had peaked in the 1980s. Most people of non-Dutch origin were fundamentalist Muslims, and most, even after years or decades in the Netherlands, remained largely unintegrated. The attitudes of Dutch officialdom, and of the Dutch generally, hadn’t helped: although in America the U.S.-born children of immigrants are American citizens, in the Netherlands the Dutch-born children of immigrants are called "second-generation immigrants." (The same is true in Germany, where even "third-generation immigrants"–and, yes, they do use that term–aren’t automatically entitled to citizenship.)
To an American, such a generation-by-generation perpetuation of outsider status can only make one think of the enduring social marginality of many American blacks. Yet at least we Americans have been taught by our bloody history that "separate but equal" is not a viable democratic option, but a cruel delusion. This lesson, I soon recognized, had not yet been learned in the Netherlands. Downtown Amsterdam and the Oud West felt almost like two different worlds. Moving among the native Dutch, whose public schools teach children to take for granted the full equality of men and women and to view sexual orientation as a matter of indifference, I felt safe and accepted. Yet many Muslim youngsters in the Netherlands attend private Islamic academies (many of which receive subsidies from the Dutch state as well as from the governments of one or more Islamic countries). These schools reinforce the Koran-based sexual morality learned at home–one that allows polygamy (for men), that prescribes severe penalties for female adulterers and rape victims (though not necessarily for rapists), and that (in the fundamentalist reading, anyway) demands that homosexuals be put to death. If fundamentalist Muslims in Europe do not carry out these punishments, it is not because they’ve advanced beyond such thinking, but because they don’t have the power. Like Christian Reconstructionists, a small U.S. sect that wishes to make harsh Old Testament punishments the law of the land, fundamentalist Muslims–whose numbers are, of course, many times larger–believe firmly in the implementation of scriptural penalties....
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6:14 PM
Competing Cultures... For the life of me I can't remember whose blog it was that directed me to Anne Wilson, but she posts today about the lack of assimilation of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands:
Last week, Partisan Review had an in-depth article by Bruce Bawar on the same subject: the "outbabying the enemy" strategy of European Muslim immigrants.
One of Bawar's more chilling points is that the lack of Muslim immigrant assimilation is fostered by the Dutch school system. While US conservative writer Marvin Olasky lauds Canada's subsidy program for private schools, one can see the end-game application in the Netherlands: [the following is from Bawar-pw]
Yet many Muslim youngsters in the Netherlands attend private Islamic academies (many of which receive subsidies from the Dutch state as well as from the governments of one or more Islamic countries). These schools reinforce the Koran-based sexual morality learned at home–one that allows polygamy (for men), that prescribes severe penalties for female adulterers and rape victims (though not necessarily for rapists), and that (in the fundamentalist reading, anyway) demands that homosexuals be put to death. If fundamentalist Muslims in Europe do not carry out these punishments, it is not because they’ve advanced beyond such thinking, but because they don’t have the power.
Yet, Wilson adds. And damaging cultural influences are possible that fall short of executing homosexuals. Providing a safe haven for anti-Semitism, for example.
So when I posted yesterday about the increase in home-schooled Muslims in the U.S., this is what I had in mind. It all depends on what is being taught, and how vigorous school districts will be in guaranteeing American Constitutional values are part of the program.
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12:45 PM
Another Andrew Sullivan Non-Sequitur: Sullivan, the brilliant national treasure who goes mentally numb when writing about the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal, comments on a story about a woman convicted of having sex with an underage boy:
THE REAL TADPOLE: In a case in Washington State, a woman gets prison time for a sexual relationship with a fourteen year-old boy. Both families are wrecked; and a young life is in jeopardy. I wonder whether Anthony Lane thinks this is the best a kid can get. Or if Mary Eberstadt even noticed.
Top of my head, I can't recall Anthony Lane's tracks; Mary Eberstadt wrote the important Weekly Standard piece, Elephant in the Sacristy, about the relationship between gays and sex abuse in the current Church scandal. Apparently Sullivan thinks any example anywhere of sex abuse that doesn't involve gay men automatically defeats Eberstadt & Co. I don't understand how such a bright guy can put his hands over his ears, close his eyes and sing "la la la la la la" in the face of this, in media res from Eberstadt:
What even this brief recitation makes clear is a cluster of facts too enormous to ignore, though many labor mightily to avert their eyes. Call it the elephant in the sacristy. One fact is that the offender was himself molested as a child or adolescent. Another is that some seminaries seem to have had more future molesters among their students than others. A third fact is that this crisis involving minors--this ongoing institutionalized horror--is almost entirely about man-boy sex. There is no outbreak of heterosexual child molestation in the American church. In the words of the late Rev. Michael Peterson, who co-founded the well-known clergy-treating St. Luke Institute, "We don't see heterosexual pedophiles at all." Put differently, it would be profoundly misleading to tell the tale of Rudolph Kos--what he was and what he did--without reference to the words "homosexual" and "gay."
But that's what Sullivan and virtually all mainstream media does. Even the story that accompanies a recent USA Today poll that confirmed 85% of the sex-abuse cases involve men and boys couldn't bring itself to make the connection [I'm looking for the link]. Me, I think gay religious who can make the commitment should be ordained. I don't merely think it's okay for them to be ordained, I think they positively must be ordained and welcomed and thanked for shouldering that cross. Simultaneously, different parts of the culture go wacko at different times in history. One example is a subcultural part of GayLand that winks at the sexual abuse of minors and found a home in some Catholic seminaries and other Catholic institutions. That can be fixed, and the Andrew Sullivans are those best located to fix it.
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11:48 AM
Richard Cohen apparently thinks you should sign treaties to avoid hurting other countries' feelings:
We need the world as much as the world needs us -- and needed us in the 1920s and 1930s, when the world was heading toward war.
Bush is finding that out the hard way. He is now trying to assemble a coalition to topple Saddam Hussein, by war if need be. It is not in itself a bad idea, but it needs to be sold to our allies in Europe and friendly states in the Middle East as not in our interests alone. Yet the same president who is trying to make that case started off by renouncing or rejecting international agreements, such as the Kyoto treaty on the environment, that he and other Republican ideologues simply did not like.
You sign treaties if you think they're good. You don't sign them if you think they're bad. But I guess that makes me an ideologue.
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11:31 AM
Cartoonist Tom Toles finally debuts in the Post today. He's the guy replacing Herblock. It's a generic liberal attack on Bush's economic record, and I don't have anything original to say about that. But the way Toles draws Bush is going to create problems down the line for Toles, and for me. He's drawn to look like a moron. Big cantaloupe head, hanging overlip, stupid rabbit ears, beady eyes. In other words, a pre- 9/11 lefty caricature.
Now, one of the great things about America and Western democracies generally is the freedom we have to make fun of our leaders. Keeps them on their toes. But you know, Toles, we're gonna get attacked again in a big way--slaughtered--and I wonder if you've thought this thing through.
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9:53 AM
Columnist Marc Fisher writes about a local AM radio station switching formats from Islamic programming to conservative talk radio and a return of the Greaseman in Trading One Type Of Excess For Another. The Greaseman, Doug Tracht, was a shock jock who was thrown off the air a few years ago for playing a Lauryn Hill rap song and then moronically saying, "No wonder people drag them behind trucks."
Under its Islamic regime, the station broadcast some pretty moronic programming of its own, though Fisher doesn't put it exactly that way.
For months after Sept. 11, despite howls of protest, Sima Birach defended the sizzling Muslim talk shows on his Montgomery County radio station. Birach sold airtime on his AM station to two companies that served up Islamic programming -- religious discussions, news and angry political talk shows that sometimes bashed Americans and Jews in language that left some listeners slack-jawed.
Some listeners were slack-jawed because the station broadcast pure hate and Jewish-conspiracy fantasies, not that you'd know that from reading the column. But more on that in a moment.
At the time, station owner Sima Birach, an Orthodox Christian, said it was a free-speech issue, but now he says he was embarassed by the anti-Semitic broadcasts. The Muslims being thrown off the air say he broke the contract. Key to the broadcasts was host Mahdi Bray (in Fisher's story, he spells his first name differently).
If this is about Mehdi Bray's style, why did Birach have him on the air for more than a year?" asks Mamdouh Rezeika, who runs the Islamic Broadcasting Network, the programmer Birach tossed off. "Though I have an accent, I am a citizen; I respect and love this country. This is a big loss for our community. We need the radio to let our neighbors know us as we really are, not as criminals and terrorists."
Bray's "style" was covered once before in the Post, I believe in the Style section, sometime within the last half year. Fisher doesn't go into it. Basically Bray provided a forum for other people to bash Jews and Amerika. Some accused him of inciting anti-Semitic violence, which he strongly denied.
Some links:
From the Jewish Defense League:
Radical Islamic radio WWTL 700 AM broadcasts out of Washington, DC and has a history of advocating on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah. The readings from the Koran include calls to kill Jews and Christians and calls to wage war against infidels (non Muslims). After September 11, the readings from the Koran focused on Allah's vengeance on the oppressors.
The radio announcers also reported as fact the worst anti-Jewish rumors and hoaxes that are identical to those in the Arab and Muslim world, and which are reported as fact over there. These include that the FBI should investigate Israel since that country had the motive to attack America. This type of comment smears every Jew in America, in Israel and across the globe as being complicit and is the worst type of hate mongering and Jew-baiting rivaling the incitements of Hitler.
The radio station stated that 4,000 Jews did not show up to work at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. Obviously, by this logic, the Jews had inside information. Also, this radio station has stated as fact that CNN aired footage from the 1991 Persian Gulf War on September 11, 2001 showing Palestinians cheering. CNN has reported that the September 11 footage is accurate footage. Even the Arab American Anti Defamation Committee's web site states that CNN aired accurate and factual footage - the Palestinians indeed applauded the September 11th attacks.
Mahdi Bray is the morning talk show host...
Another way to minimize the depravity of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is to change the subject. This is from something called the Multiracial Activist, covering a conference in its February/March issue:
The next speaker, Imam Mahdi Bray, Political Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, brought his point home dramatically when he said, "Terrorism is indeed a terrible thing. But as a Black man, I didn't wake up on Sept. 11 and discover terrorism. I discovered terrorism in 1955 when my grandmother threw herself over my body trying to protect me from the bullets and the glass flying and the fire the Klan set because my grandfather was registering people to vote in the South. I knew terrorism in 1957 when they took my great uncle in North Carolina and laid him out on the railroad tracks and bled him to death simply because he was trying to organize for the NAACP. Oh, terrorism is a terrible thing. That's why we must speak up."
Bray also joined many other, um, distinguished Americans in defending Jamil El-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, from murder charges. El-Amin has since been convicted. This is from Pacific News Service, which after complaining about Hillary Clinton's return of a campaign contributions from a group accused of terrorist ties, notes:
Bray worked in the 1960s in coalitions with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other activist groups. [more recently], Bray insisted that the Muslim mainstream unequivocally support Emam Jamil El-Amin -- formerly known as H. "Rap" Brown -- who is accused of murdering a sheriff's deputy last year. Bray's insistence brought several major Islamic organizations to pledge $10,000 apiece for a rally this fall when El-Amin's trial is set to begin.
Great guy.
The re-formatted radio station's call letters are WGOP.
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Monday, July 29, 2002
11:52 PM
Moderate Gay Perspective on President Bush from a reader of the Washington, D.C.-based gay pub The Washington Blade:
Viewing America, and Bush a bit more realistically
To the Editor:
I am sure that Chris Crain will be inundated with hectoring harangues for daring to attempt a differentiated assessment of George W. Bush (editorial, July 5).
I have never voted for a Republican in my life, but I have to say that I have increasingly come to value looking at the president in a realistic way, weighing what I like and what I don't, and asking myself why. Perhaps it's post 9/11. Watching part of my hometown implode thanks to extremist Muslim kamikazes has indeed altered how I feel about a lot of things.
For one, it has made it viscerally clear to me that, despite its flaws, America has made it possible for me to be possible: an out gay man. Not many places on this planet yet have opened up that space. I am not equating George with my homeland, but I have found myself in the last year more than usually willing to give my fellow countrymen and women a break when they differ from me.
On gay issues, George W. has done a few good and decent things and has refused to do some mean and indecent things. In this world, where the root instincts of the Taliban and of some of the Left (including the Gay Left) have begun to smell eerily similar to me, I will continue to evaluate George W. on his record rather than his party. And I congratulate Chris Crain for having the guts and fairness to try the same.
I don't have a link to the July 5 editorial, but I think you get the idea.
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11:39 PM
The Arafat Clock Is Ticking... How blatant does his corruption have to be for Arab states to suspend funding of the Palestinian Authority? Via FrontPageMag.com, this from the World Tribune:
Friday, July 26, 2002
RAMALLAH — Several Arab countries have cut off financing for the Palestinian Authority after press reports charged that chairman Yasser Arafat had embezzled funds meant to aid Palestinians.
Palestinian sources said the Arab League funding was meant to finance the Palestinian health system as well as to improve infrastructure. The Arab states froze more than $200 million in funding pledged to the PA after reports in the Gulf Arab media asserted that Arafat had embezzled $5 million in Arab allocations, the sources said. Among the countries that have suspended funding are Morocco, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the sources said. They said Egypt and Jordan have sent little financial help and instead have focused on the transfer of food and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
Palestinian officials have confirmed a sharp reduction in Arab and Western aid, Middle East Newsline reported. They said many countries have pledged tens of millions of dollars but have placed conditions on delivery of the aid....
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12:09 PM
A new downside to homeschooling.... The Washington Times runs More Muslims home in to educate children:
More Muslim Americans are choosing to home-school their children, making them one of the fastest growing minority groups within the national home-schooling movement. Muslim parents are educating their children on their own for reasons common to most home-schooling families: improving academics and controlling social interactions.
Years ago, I knew a family or two who home-schooled and I thought it very odd and socially isolating. Home-schooling has grown a lot since then and there are a battery of studies showing many home-schooled kids perform as well or better on standardized tests; social integration is often aided by group activities that force the kids to get out of the house. But most of those kids are Christian. So here we have an interesting predicament. You can't pass a law forbidding any religious group from home-schooling. You shouldn't. But in simple demographic terms, this is a Chrisitan nation. Yeah yeah, I know, it's a multidiverse pastiche, got it, but the point is that the U.S. has a common Christian background music that can either be accepted or rejected--but it's there. Kids coming out of Christian home-schooled homes share a cultural reference point with fellow Americans. That isn't the case with Muslim home-schoolers, and really, that's the point.
"Muslims prefer a religious-based curriculum as a Christian might," said Fatima Saleem, a South Carolina mother of two who helped create the Palmetto Muslim Homeschool Resource Network, a Web site (www.geocities.com/ pmhrn_2000/PMHRN.html) [that link doesn't work right now--pw] that helps Muslim families find information on the basics of home schooling. "Parents may encounter that their school overemphasizes Judeo-Christian holidays," she said. "They also may feel that their children will feel isolated and have a problem with their identity as a Muslim."...
Ah, what kind of identity. That's the question.
Interest has grown so much that local leaders in Loudoun County, Va., have set up a six-week summer camp where local Muslim home-schooled students learn about bridging American and Muslim identities and developing character and community responsibility.
That could be good. Hopefully there's some Americanization going on there. I do wonder, though.
Nationally, the Muslim home-schooling movement can be divided into three populations, said Scott Somerville, an attorney with the Virginia-based Homeschool Legal Defense Association. Mr. Somerville estimates that about a third of Muslim home-schooling parents are white American women married to Muslims or Arabs, a third are blacks who converted to Islam, and the rest are immigrant families from Muslim countries....
"I didn't feel my son was in an atmosphere lending to who he was," said Afeefa Syeed, a mother of three from Sterling, who helped organize the summer camp. "Our public school system was set up to homogenize."
That's one of the most important missions of public schools--homogenzing diverse people into one American nation. Multicult belief argues against that, and endlessly isolated identies are the result.
Islam requires its followers to pray five times a day, which means interrupting the school schedule. It also emphasizes modesty, by encouraging young girls to cover themselves in public. The religion also doesn't allow Muslims to participate in common activities such as raffles, forcing many parents to opt their children out of the activities.
Raffles? Perhaps it's too much like gambling.
"The public school system is not accommodating to Muslims," Mrs. Saleem explained. "When children reach puberty, there are a lot of tenets that they have to adhere to, and interaction between boys and girls [is] greatly frowned upon."
Does all Islam teach that interaction between boys and girls is "greatly frowned upon?" after a certain age? Or does it accommodate interactions outside the classroom, as do most of the single-sex experiments lately being encouraged by other more mainstream institutions?
The fear that Muslim home-schooling parents might be somewhat extremist is unfounded, proponents argue. The religious focus in Muslim home-schooling curriculum is no more strange than what parents from other faiths teach their children, said Cynthia Sulaiman, a mother from Massachusetts who home-schools her son. "We have a little bit different names and dress a little bit differently," Mrs. Sulaiman said. "We are no more extreme than a person who tattoos themselves all over the place. Somehow we're viewed as a little bit more odd."
Maybe there's a better model for normalization than people covered with tattoos, but moving right along.....I think local school districts should make sure that Muslim home-scholers teach religious tolerance, since some strains of Islam, particularly Wahhabism, do not. And as long as the U.S. is accommodating Muslim immigrants, we should pay more attention to Muslim immigrants accomodating the U.S.
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11:12 AM
The scripts must be flying... Rescued Pennsylvania miner Harry Mayhugh looks very much like actor Nicolas Cage, who should play him in the movie they'll make about the stunning rescue of nine miners last week. Such joy.
Note: the AP photo I'm linking you to ID's him as Blaine; the Post (which uses an AP photo) as Harry.
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9:52 AM
Fit for a novel, or at least a book, is the Post's continuing series on the Enron debacle. Today's part two, of five parts, is more reasonably sized for a newspaper; the opening salvo yesterday was monumental. It's a great example of the value you can get from a great paper, but I doubt very many people read all the way through these things. They're intended mainly for award juries and book publishers.
Glad to see this characterization of Sherron Watkins, by the way, from today's story:
On Aug. 15, the day after Skilling quit, a 41-year-old Enron vice president named Sherron Watkins wrote a now-famous anonymous letter to Lay suggesting that Skilling was running from an approaching storm.
"I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals," the letter said. "Skilling's abrupt departure will raise suspicions of accounting improprieties and valuation issues. Enron has been very aggressive in its accounting." She specifically cited the Raptor transactions.
Watkins was not Enron's Mother Teresa. Ambitious like her peers, she worried about her future at Enron after an unsuccessful stint at the company's failing broadband Internet venture. She had gotten a temporary assignment to evaluate Fastow's LJM transactions, including the Raptors, as Enron pondered what to do with them. And that had led her to Enron's hollow center.
Nothing wrong with being ambitious, but Watkins has been portrayed--sometimes by the Post--as a heroic whistleblower. She was looking to save her livelihood, not so much the world or Enron's shareholders.
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Sunday, July 28, 2002
11:26 PM
And now this... I was checking out The One True Bix, which showed up on my referral log, and that blog reminded me of an odd story I neglected to post:
F-16s Pursue Unknown Craft Over Region
For Renny Rogers, it was strange enough that military jets were flying low over his home in Waldorf in the middle of the night. It was what he thinks he saw when he headed outside to look early yesterday that floored him.
"It was this object, this light-blue object, traveling at a phenomenal rate of speed," Rogers said. "This Air Force jet was right behind it, chasing it, but the object was just leaving him in the dust. I told my neighbor, 'I think those jets are chasing a UFO.' "
Military officials confirm that two F-16 jets from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled early yesterday after radar detected an unknown aircraft in area airspace. But they scoff at the idea that the jets were chasing a strange and speedy, blue unidentified flying object. "We had a track of interest, so we sent up some aircraft," said Maj. Douglas Martin, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado, which has responsibility for defending U.S. airspace. "Everything was fine in the sky, so they returned home."
At the same time, military officials say they do not know just what the jets were chasing, because whatever it was disappeared. "There are any number of scenarios, but we don't know what it was," said Maj. Barry Venable, another spokesman for NORAD.
o-k-a-y........
Radar detected a low, slow-flying aircraft about 1 a.m. yesterday, according to a military official. Controllers were unable to establish radio communication with the unidentified aircraft, and NORAD was notified. When the F-16s carrying air-to-air missiles were launched from Andrews, the unidentified aircraft's track faded from the radar, the military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Pilots with the D.C. Air National Guard's 113th Air Wing, which flew the F-16s from Andrews, reported nothing out of the ordinary, NORAD officials said.
Yes sir, Mr. Reporter, we get launched to chase speedy blue objects that disappear from radar all the time. Day in, day out, arm the missiles, another disappearing streak over the national command center, blah blah blah.
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11:15 PM
Debka Updates... Life is busy in the Middle East, and you can't prove this isn't true, so with that high standard, here goes:
28 July: Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has decided after much agonizing and consultation to keep Egypt out of the upcoming American campaign against Iraq. This exclusive information reaches DEBKAfile from sources in Cairo and Madrid – Mubarak’s last port of call. He has also decided not to permit the US to use Egyptian military bases for the campaign The Egyptian ruler thus places himself on the same Middle East square occupied by Saudi crown prince Abdullah since last year
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria now lead the opponents of an American military move against Saddam Hussein; Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar head the proponents...
This realignment drops in the middle of a long festering dispute at the top level of the House of Saud. Fresh rumors picked up by DEBKAfile’s Gulf sources speak of a failed attempt on the life of the ailing king Fahd in Jeddah, on or around July 14, shortly before he departed for his summer vacation in Geneva. This incident added fuel to the running feud between the Sudeiri faction of the royal house, led by Fahd and his full brother, defense minister Prince Sultan (the leading contender for the succession against Abdullah and father of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar), and the group led by their half-brother, the regent Abdullah.
Riyadh now shows an angry face to the Gulf Emirates siding with US action against Baghdad. The Saudis have stopped attending Gulf Security Cooperation Council meetings, refusing to sit at the same table as rulers they look down on as American collaborators. Saudi-Qatari ties have been effectively severed, with Qatari notables no longer welcome in the oil kingdom, while Saudi relations with Kuwait have likewise soured.
On the flip side of the coin, Jordanian military and businessmen are suddenly welcome in Kuwait for the first time since the 1991 Gulf War when Jordan sided with Iraq. Jordan and Qatar have also struck up a warm friendship.
The report of an attempt to murder King Fahd is the talk of the moment in the Gulf. It is claimed that on July 14, the monarch’s bodyguard fought off a band of 5 to 7 intruders, who gained entry to the palace courtyard in Jeddah through one of the main gates after setting off a large explosive charge. Three of the would be assassins were killed; the rest fled when armed reinforcements poured in from neighboring princely palaces, together with a contingent of the special Saudi counter-terror force. The bodies were identified as Saudi members of al Qaeda who fought in Afghanistan, escaped through Iran and arrived home last January. The identity of one of the dead assailants seriously heated factional tempers in the royal family; he is said to have been a member of the Wahhabist Uteiba tribe, loyal adherents of crown prince Abdullah....
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10:27 PM
Sorry about that: the truncated post below is one of those weird permanent posting bugs that shall now remain forever in my blog. I was reading the New York Times story about the sorry record of low-fat diets, and came across this amazing graf:
What’s more, the number of misconceptions propagated about the most basic research can be staggering. Researchers will be suitably scientific describing the limitations of their own experiments, and then will cite something as gospel truth because they read it in a magazine. The classic example is the statement heard repeatedly that 95 percent of all dieters never lose weight, and 95 percent of those who do will not keep it off. This will be correctly attributed to the University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Albert Stunkard, but it will go unmentioned that this statement is based on 100 patients who passed through Stunkard’s obesity clinic during the Eisenhower administration.
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10:23 PM
Irresistible... That is, I couldn't resist posting this excerpt from
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8:46 PM
Touchy! On Saturday, two pastors who attended a seminary wrote to the Post complaining that a recent story tracking the experiences of gays and straights there exaggerated the extent of sexual shenanigans. For example:
I was a seminarian at Theological College (TC) at the same time as four of the men interviewed in the July 21 front-page story At Seminary, Unease Over Gay Priests." Andy Krzmarzick's categorization of TC as a sexually repressive place is partly correct. But I reject his claim that we "didn't talk about it." I had no trouble speaking about celibacy and sexuality with my advisers, spiritual director or friends. They often prompted me to examine the role of sexuality in the priesthood.
Hanna Rosin reported that many of the two dozen present and former TC students who were interviewed for the article described participating in, or witnessing, some sexual activity. How many? A majority? How were these students chosen for interviews? Sexual activity, as far as I knew, was a rare occurrence. Most seminarians were committed to celibacy; if they were unhappy with that commitment, they left the seminary....
Fair enough. This guy had a different experience and wonders if the story was hyped. But then we get this:
Had Rosin contacted some of my other contemporaries or me, apart from the few she cites in the article, she would have gotten a different story. The impetus for this article clearly is the recent pedophilia scandals. So there is a homophobic basis for this article.
Homosexuality and pedophilia are discrete, and for Rosin to describe a putatively widespread unease over some diaphanous gay subculture in connection to these scandals is bigotry, with Andy Krzmarzick abetting her efforts.
Sheesh! The story was anything but homophobic and bigoted; to the contrary, it utterly averted its eyes from the fact that 85% of the sex abuse predators in the scandal are men abusing boys and male teens--in fact, it didn't even mention that statistic. "The impetus for this article clearly is the recent pedophilia scandals." Ya think?
I blogged the Hanna Rosin story July 21
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8:00 PM
How often do you check, Mr. Reynolds? InstaMan Glenn Reynolds had trouble getting into the Salon blogs Sunday and posted the following:
THE SALON BLOGS don't seem to be working at the moment. Are they hosting on Blogspot?
But in fact the Salon blogs have been balky since the day they went public. I've checked several times since they went live, and have often had to throw up my hands in favor of sites that actually work. Yes, BlogSpot has some maddening problems and the associated Pyra microads have been an inglorious bust, but Salon's effort hasn't started well either.
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3:25 PM
Careless.. Op Ed writer Sally Squiers gets in a couple of sloppy jabs against the low-carb, high-protein Atkins diet in Into Our Stomachs And Out Of Our Minds, a piece that does its best to reject growing evidence that it works:
Oh, how our ancestors must be laughing. Here we are in the 21st century, surrounded by more cheap and plentiful food than has been available since the Garden of Eden, and Americans are still struggling to learn how to eat. The latest national nutritional drumbeat -- the essentially laughable idea that limitless Porterhouse steaks, giant dollops of butter and carefree portions of other saturated fats will make us slim and healthy -- shows just how far off course we have gone. We may be aging, but we're still playing with our food.
So she disputes it, though not by trying very hard to question any actual facts:
Which brings us to the buzz generated by the recent New York Times magazine piece on the virtues of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, such as the one promoted by physician Robert Atkins. Accompanied by a photo of a juicy steak topped with a large pat of butter, the article by freelancer Gary Taubes suggested that such high-fat foods might be the key to weight loss. Gleeful gluttons gloated. Taubes got a book contract. Talk-show hosts talked. Was that great news, or what?
Get real. The Atkins diet, like the Stillman program developed 40 years ago, gives fruit and vegetables short shrift and considers all carbohydrates undesirable. USDA studies show that such diets lead to constipation in the short run. While long-term studies on the Atkins diet have not been conducted, worldwide research shows that populations that eat a diet high in meat and saturated fat have a significantly increased risk of colorectal cancer.
In addition to that photo of a luscious steak, the Times story was accompanied by a study that documented weight loss and lower cholesterol with the diet. It's apparently true that few studies have examined the long-term effects of such a diet, but that's largely because the medical establishment was too busy shoving low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets down our throats as we've steadily gained weight over the past thirty years. And how's this for bad reporting (yes, reporting is part of opinon):
By the way, Atkins himself suffered cardiac arrest a few months back. Still, we cling to our delusions.
But Atkins' heart attack was not related to the heart-blockage that high-fat meat-loaded diets are allegedly producing. From CNN in April:
Nutrition expert and author Dr. Robert Atkins, creator of the high-protein/low-carbohydrate "Atkins Diet," was released Wednesday from hospital care and is resting well after his heart stopped, a condition called cardiac arrest....
The episode was caused by cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart's ability to pump blood is weakened because of enlargement, thickening or stiffening of the heart muscle. In Atkins' case, cardiomyopathy was caused by an infection that spread to his heart muscle.
"I have had cardiomyopathy, which is a non-coronary condition and is in no way related to diet," Atkins said in a statement....
"We have been treating this condition, cardiomyopathy, for almost two years," said Patrick Fratellone, Atkins' personal physician and cardiologist. "Clearly, his own nutritional protocols have left him, at the age of 71, with an extraordinarily healthy cardiovascular system." Atkins told CNN, "I want the public to know the truth, not every condition affecting the heart comes from a blockage." He said "a controlled carbohydrate lifestyle really prevents risk factors for heart disease."
Doctors have checked for blockages, Atkins said, "and I don't have any."
Dr. Clyde Yancy, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and a member of the American Heart Association's national board of directors, said: "Despite the obvious irony, I believe there is a total disconnect between the cardiac arrest and the health approach he (Atkins) popularizes."
UPDATE: Here's the New York Times story called What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? about the correlation between low-fat high-carb diets and obesity. The link takes you to some kind of Pro-Atkins product site, but it appears the entire NYT story is there.
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3:11 PM
No argument there: from today's The Tougher Side of Girlhood --
Gwyneth Fair Presents a New Stage for Celebrating Bonds:
"The girls' music movement pushes the boundaries of femininity and the rules of girlhood in positive, transformative ways," Simmons said. "If a little girl sees a girl with bright pink hair rocking out on the guitar, she's exposed to images of girlhood they may have not seen before."
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10:41 AM
What would the United States do if Iraq nuked Tel Aviv? This question seems not to have occurred to the "many senior U.S. military officers" who are quoted in another front-page story as saying the status quo of Iraq containment is preferable to an invasion. Some Top Military Brass Favor Status Quo in Iraq by Thomas Ricks:
Despite President Bush's repeated bellicose statements about Iraq, many senior U.S. military officers contend that President Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq to force a change of leadership in Baghdad. The conclusion, which is based in part on intelligence assessments of the state of Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and his missile delivery capabilities, is increasing tensions in the administration over Iraqi policy.
This is very strange. Iraq can wreak all kinds of novel hell, and Hussein has shown he's completely willing to do so. But the people quoted in this story seem to be operating on the principle that if it he hasn't done something yet, he never will. Hello, 9/11?
And the following is priceless:
More than one officer interviewed questioned the president's motivation for repeatedly calling for the ouster of Hussein. "I'm not aware of any linkage to al Qaeda or terrorism," one general involved in the Afghanistan war said, "so I have to wonder if this has something to do with his father being targeted by Saddam," a reference to the U.S. government's belief that Iraqi agents plotted to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush with a car bomb during a 1993 visit to Kuwait.
Must have gotten his bars from Clinton. Also, must not read the Washington Times, including this week's story on Iraq acquiring nuclear weapons technology
Instapundit saw this story too and says:
TOM RICKS IS BEING USED. That's my take on this story of his in The Washington Post today. The story explains how a "cautious approach -- held by some top generals and admirals in the military establishment, including members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- is shaping the administration's consideration of war plans for Iraq."
The only question is who's using him, and why. The way I see it, he's either being used in a leakwar by top military officials who are more interested in fighting the White House than Saddam, or he's being used as a channel for disinformation designed to put Saddam Hussein off his guard. But I don't see any scenario in which he's not being used by somebody.
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9:57 AM
Hormone Developments... Doctors Working To Clear the Fog Of Hormone Study in on A1 today, talking about reactions to the estrogen hormone-replacement study that was halted when researchers declared it was doing more harm than good. OmbudsGod has stated a couple of times that an analysis of the study shows no more than a random association between the treatment and ill health, citing this source, but the greater world has rolled blithely on without taking notice.
So...in today's A1 story, why isn't this graf the lede rather than being buried two-thirds of the way in?
Lost in the recent report was evidence that estrogen coupled with progestin reduced colorectal cancer and hip fractures and made no difference with respect to death rates.
The actual lede is one of those dark-and-stormy-night meanders. The story doesn't repudiate the study (and I'm not positive either way at this point), but it does qualify the earlier blanket condemnations of the therapy. Eventually.
Many doctors also blame the media for misinterpreting confusing statistics. The study found, for instance, that the combination therapy resulted in a 26 percent increase in breast cancer. That number reflects the risk difference between the women taking hormone therapy and those taking a placebo. Although that is "statistically significant" and cause for concern among public health officials, Grodin said the raw numbers -- eight additional cases out of 10,000 women -- are not nearly as terrifying.
So in this instance, the study shows a 26% increase but from a baseline that was infintesimal. Remember what I told you guys about not majoring in journalism?
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Saturday, July 27, 2002
1:35 PM
Short Memories About False Memories... I really need to run around outside, but I see there's some posting out there at Amy Wellborn's In Between Naps about a Washington Post story, Psychiatrist on Catholic Panel Criticized (warning: new Post pop-down ad format will anger you and, on the bright side, ensure you will never buy the advertrised product). Here's the story:
The only psychiatrist appointed this week to serve on the Roman Catholic Church's national sexual abuse review board is closely affiliated with a controversial group devoted to combating what it believes are false memories of childhood abuse that never occurred. Paul R. McHugh, former chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, serves on the scientific advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a Philadelphia-based group many therapists view as unsympathetic to victims of child sexual abuse. McHugh has testified on behalf of people accused of child abuse.
"People are upset by this because he's clearly someone who wants to downplay the horror of sexual abuse," said Paul Fink, professor of psychiatry at Temple University and past president of the American Psychiatric Association, who described false memory syndrome as "junk science."...
Stu Philip of Vienna, Va., who edited a newsletter in the 1990s for victims of child sexual abuse, said he was "astonished" the church would put on the panel "somebody who in any way is affiliated with an organization which says . . . that the vast majority of people who make claims [of abuse] are deluded or had memories implanted by therapists."
McHugh, 71, labeled such criticism "ridiculous," adding, "I don't have a bias for child abusers."
As far as he knew, McHugh said, cases involving abusive priests are not based on repressed memories. "The church is in trouble because of things that have been corroborated over and over again. The issues here have very little to do with false memories," McHugh said, adding that he remains very proud of his long-standing involvement with the foundation....
Wenatchee. Fells Acres. The McMartins. People seem to have forgotten that false memories were used in truly crazed witch hunts during the 1980's and early 90's. Dozens of people were wrongly convicted based on bizarre testimony accepted by dense prosecutors and credulous juries who convinced themselves that children cannot lie. Other families were ripped apart by feminist therapists who exploited troubled people, particularly women, to fabricate memories of abuse by fathers and other male relatives.
I don't know how young the reporters who wrote this story are, but some editors should have been on point to explain that it's well-settled: False memories were created by bumbling, zealous child advocates aided by prosecutors unspoiled by reason.
Ace Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz apparently has a book coming out this January called No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times though I can't find any more information on it. Rabinowitz had some of the first, groundbreaking reporting on false memories and wrongfully convicted adults for the Journal. This excerpt from an old Journal story recounts part of what was going on back then in the Fells Acres case:
It was inevitable that jurors in cases like that of the Amiraults would one day discover all they never knew about the testimony and other evidence the prosecutors had presented. They had once sat listening to dramatic recitals by five- and six-year-olds, all unaware of the pressure, pleading and perseverance it had taken to produce such charges from children who had had to learn from the investigators all about the sexual attacks and tortures that had supposedly been inflicted on them by the Amiraults.
This was no ordinary resort to tainted testimony. The children's interviews were systematic, their sole objective the creation of abuse accusations. The jurors could not have known that investigators looking into the charges against the Amiraults had interested themselves exclusively in efforts to prove the family's guilt -- that the question of whether anything had in fact happened to the children was not one they were prepared to consider.
Begged for stories about bad things that had happened, the children had provided the interviewers with spectacular reports -- all the now-famous tales about invading robots, mutilated squirrels, and how Miss Violet had tied a naked boy to a tree in front of the school while all the teachers and children watched. The jurors could not have considered the point Judge Borenstein, among others, later made -- that the prosecutors never questioned the credibility of child witnesses relating these fantasies.
In any case, blotted-out memories don't seem to be a big part of the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal.
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12:45 PM
Another Illusion Shattered... The Post has a children's news section, KidsPost, which is a great idea, boiling down the top stories of the day into a more easily comprehensible format. To tell you the truth, sometimes I check it out when they write about science developments I didn't understand the first time around. That may be a bad idea, judging from George Stanford and Gerald Marsh, who write in today's Free For All section. They're identified somewhat clumsily as "retired reactor physicists with the Argonne National Laboratory." But here's what they have to say about reporting on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage facility:
The July 18 KidsPost story "Where Should We Put Nuclear Waste?" gave kids some big-time misinformation. Please tell Fern Shen that used fuel from nuclear reactors is nowhere near as dangerous as she says.
The used fuel would be somewhat radioactive after 10,000 years, to be sure, but so feeble that it would pose no danger at all. Shen could have told the kids that, for example, after only about 1,000 years the waste's radioactivity would be less than the amount of natural radioactivity already in the land near the repository.
"It can eat through flesh and cause cancer and birth defects," she says. Scary. But we safely handle larger quantities of other hazardous materials (such as household lye, arsenic and mercury) that can eat through flesh and cause cancer and birth defects....
"The government has spent about $8 billion so far studying the site," she says. Misleading. That's not taxpayer money. It has been collected by the utilities from electricity consumers to pay for waste management.
Shen says that an accident on the way to Yucca Mountain "would be serious." Nonsense (although many people believe it). She should have pointed out that accidents involving a gasoline tanker can be far worse than what could happen with the incredibly sturdy fuel casks....
Finally, she writes, "Yucca Mountain would be full by 2034." That's true, under current plans. But with good preparations, advanced reactors will be making electricity before then by consuming the plutonium and most of the other long-lived components of the used fuel. Then there will be lots of room down there to store the real waste: the fission products, which will be harmless within 500 years.
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12:29 PM
OmbudsGod, who always scoops PostWatch on ombudsman Michael Getler's Sunday column, digests this week's column and comes to the following conclusion regading the paper's coverage policy:
IF THE POST didn't break the story then it must not be important... Here's Getler's column. I'll blog on it later, but first I have to create a Metro section to bury it in.
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10:33 AM
Local scoop acknowledged.. A few posts below you'll see my comments on a couple of scoops scored by the Washington Times, a regular event around here. The Post today writes 3 Say D.C. Officials Solicited Funds and nicely credits the Times. Of course, the Times story was on A1, and this Post dispatch is buried inside the Metro section, but these things are hard to take.
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Friday, July 26, 2002
11:46 PM
Three noteworthy items by blogger All About Josh
One: He alerts us that American University Dean of Students Gail Hanson issued a press release explaining AU's side of L'affaire Wetmore. Here's the link, but the AU server is goin' wiggy as I post and I haven't been able to call it up yet.
Two: Josh criticizes the Washington Post's coverage of the incident and asks a good question. Quoting from the Post story that I briefly blogged:
Even before the big dust-up at the Tipper Gore appearance, Ben Wetmore was a gadfly of some notoriety at American University. The poli-sci major from Texas had elbowed his way into the ranks of student government but ended up getting impeached after a dispute with fellow legislators. Then he started a Web journal devoted to criticizing and lampooning campus leaders -- particularly President Benjamin Ladner, whose stately home and car Wetmore took to photographing and posting on his site as evidence of what he saw as administrative extravagance. "He's kind of like a Matt Drudge, but more immature," a fellow student politician said of Wetmore....
The debate echoes the political correctness battles of the 1980s and 1990s, when campus administrators tried to ban hate speech and some conservatives complained of an academic climate that shouted down their voices.The Wetmore case, though, might be driven less by ideology than by something noted by another of his supporters:"He's annoying."
Josh knows Wetmore and comments:
It's fine for someone to be quoted as bashing Wetmore and all, but shouldn't a paper like the Post refuse to print anonymous ad hominem attacks?
And shows us a letter he's sent to the Post:
Since when did the Washington Post allow reporters to anonymously quote sources for the sole purpose of personal attack? ...
That would be since about 1972.
And three: He comments on imminent changes at the Columbia School of Journalism (the embedded link is to a story at Opinion Journal):
Here's a brilliant thought by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. He proposes that journalism students actually take courses in the areas that affect society -- history, economics, political science, instead of redundant courses in copy editing and writing. It's about time. So many journalism schools are cluttered with worthless classes relentlessly encouraging the memorization of the AP Style Manual and endless courses in "pretend journalism."
Right on. Journalism degrees are a waste of time with one exception: contacts. Knowing the right people or at least hooking up with departments with internships can definitely help you get in the door, but there are other ways to do that.
Anytime aspiring reporters ask me for advice (not too damn often), I tell them to forget about majoring in journalism or, even worse, "communications." Minor in it, if you must; take some nuts-and-bolts courses, why not; and by all means try to join the school paper and write on deadline as much as possible. But for goodness sake don't waste that unique four-year event on journalism! Study history, English, science, economics, something with some meat on it that will force you to think and leave you smarter than when you started. As both Bias author Bernard Goldberg and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (founder of the Bloomberg financial data empire) will tell you, reporters as a class are morons about economics and business and it sure is reflected in most reporting. You wanna be a science or health reporter? Major in science or biology. Amaze your sources, know what the hell you're talking about.
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1:48 PM
Our Friends At The State Dept. I'm not sure this rates as a classic scoop, because it's more of a political development but riveting nonetheless. Ben Baber writes Bush pick for visa chief under fire:
State Department official Maura Harty, chosen by President Bush to take over the department's troubled visa division, is under fire from critics who say she failed in a prior post to protect American children who have been kidnapped and taken to Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. A senior State Department official confirmed yesterday that Mr. Bush plans to send Ms. Harty's nomination to the Senate for confirmation.
Hmm, maybe this is a scoop if they're the first to publicly identify Harty as Mary Ryan's successor.
The decision sets up a potentially bruising confirmation battle, with human rights groups and parents of kidnapped children vowing to prevent Ms. Harty from taking the post. "Her record was one of indifference bordering on hostility toward the interests of parents of abducted children," said Patricia Roush, whose two teenage daughters were taken to Saudi Arabia by their father when they were infants. "Her priorities were not to bring back kidnapped U.S. children from foreign countries but to maintain the State Department policies of remaining 'neutral' and 'impartial,'" Mrs. Roush said. Mrs. Roush said she last spoke to one of her daughters several years ago by telephone. She said the girl cried, 'Mommy, mommy, come here and help me,' before the father grabbed the phone and hung up.
Some of the FBI farces outlined in earlier posts are outrageous, but the State Dept.'s apathy over the freedom of U.S. citizens abducted by Saudis strike me as criminally negligent.
Mrs. Roush said that when she told consular officials about the call they ridiculed her by saying that her daughter could not have been able to speak English. She said she has since heard that both daughters have been sold to men as brides, an everyday practice in the desert kingdom.
Several other barbarities are described, none of which have pierced the Serene Composure of the Department of State:
Maureen Dabbagh's daughter, Nadia, was abducted and taken to Syria and then Saudi Arabia in 1993 by her Syrian father. "I have never seen her again," Mrs. Dabbagh wrote in letter to members of Congress. "My child is not home because of Maura Harty. I was told that the objective of the Office of Children's Issues was to 'Lower Parent Expectations.'"
Our government at work.
Miriam Hernandez-Davis of Pembroke Pines, Fla., said her daughter Alexandria Davis, formerly Yasmeen Alexandria al-Shalhoub, was 11 when she was taken against her will by her Saudi father, Khalid al-Shalhoub, to Saudi Arabia in June 1997. "My daughter was able to secretly call me in December 1997," Mrs. Hernandez-Davis wrote in a letter. "Alexandria's phone calls consisted of her cries and retelling incidents of physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse," she wrote. "Her father consistently beat her every time she mentioned she wanted to come home, locked her in the house and left her alone for hours as punishments and [she] was repeatedly told she would go to hell and burn in hell." The daughter, who was singled out for abuse because she was a Christian who refused to convert to Islam, called the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia and was told not to come there because officials could not help her.
Mrs. Hernandez-Davis managed to have her daughter smuggled out of Saudi Arabia. "My daughter is back home in the United States because I paid $200,000 to help get her rescued and because my daughter was remarkably strong willed, but not because the State Department and Office of Children's Issues cared to help," she wrote.
Here is a question I'd like to ask. What the fuck is wrong with the State Department?
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1:27 PM
Not in the Post Watch... I occasionally say that the Washington Times regularly scoops the Washington Post, particularly on local news and military issues. Today's local example is D.C. bar owners complain of 'shakedown' by Demian McClean:
The D.C. inspector general is investigating complaints that two elected leaders of the Adams Morgan neighborhood solicited bar owners for hundreds of dollars in what one proprietor describes as a "shakedown." Three bar owners told The Washington Times this week that Eleanor Johnson and Jobi Jovanka, who are members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, asked them for money in visits to their establishments and in phone calls in November. Two of the bar owners refused, and the third said he "contributed" $200.
Today's military example is Iraq seeks steel for nukes by the relentless Bill Gertz:
Iraq's government is trying to buy special equipment used in producing fuel for nuclear weapons, The Washington Times has learned. Procurement agents from Iraq's covert nuclear-arms program were detected as they tried to purchase stainless-steel tubing, uniquely used in gas centrifuges and a key component in making the material for nuclear bombs, from an unknown supplier, said administration officials familiar with intelligence reports. U.S. intelligence agencies believe the tubing is an essential component of Iraq's plans to enrich radioactive uranium to the point where it could be used to fashion a nuclear bomb..
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1:14 PM
You have excellent taste... Thanks to Mightier Than The Sword, a new blog that includes PostWatch among its regular links. Today he comments on homosexual and family issues:
I see nothing wrong with granting homosexuals the right to marriage, and even though gay families probably are a little more confusing for young children to handle, adoption into a stable gay family is much better than the foster home merry-go-around that many kids go through. Gay families have been known to adopt many disadvantaged or somehow physically or mentally handicapped children that straight families do not. There is a good case to be made that allowing children to be adopted into homosexual families greatly imporve the welfare of the children, and remember, when talking about adoption, the welfare of the chidren should come first.
He also notes, as others have today, a Charles Krauthammer column on how liberals and conservatives view each other ("Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.") But here's my favorite part, which gets into how conservatives are typically described in big media:
Thus the online magazine Slate devoted an article to attempting to explain the "two faces" of Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal. The puzzle is how a conservative could have such a "winning cocktail-party personality and talk-show cordiality." Gigot, it turns out, is "Janus-faced": regular guy -- "plays basketball with working reporters" -- yet conservative! "By day he wrote acid editorials . . . by night he polished his civilized banter [on TV]."
A classic of the genre -- liberal amazement when it finds conservatism coexisting with human decency in whatever form -- is the New York Times news story speaking with unintended candor about bioethicist Leon Kass: "Critics of Dr. Kass' views call him a neoconservative thinker. . . . But critics and admirers alike describe him as thoughtful and dignified."
But? Neoconservative but thoughtful and dignified...
The venerable David Halberstam, writing in praise of the recently departed Ted Williams, offered yet another sighting: "He was politically conservative but in his core the most democratic of men." Amazing....
The most troubling paradox of all, of course, is George W. Bush. Compassionate, yet conservative? Reporters were fooled during the campaign. "Because Bush seemed personally pleasant," explained Slate, "[they] assumed his politics lay near the political center." What else could one assume? Pleasant and conservative? Ah, yes, Grampa told of seeing one such in the Everglades. But that was 1926.
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8:55 AM
The eternally imminently peaceful terrorists... Post reader Herbert Grossman writes a letter for me on this week's Israeli missile strike:
In the article "Palestinians Vow Revenge After Gaza Missile Strike" [news story, July 24], we hear the same tired refrain by Palestinian terrorist leaders, repeated and embellished by an uncritical press, about how they were on the verge of agreeing to halt attacks on Israeli noncombatants but now, after the Israeli strike, will continue their campaign of terror. We hear this barely a week after two horrendous attacks on Jewish civilians -- one in which a bus was bombed and many of its passengers machine-gunned to death while trying to flee the carnage and after weeks in which Israelis have captured would-be suicide bombers and gunmen, almost daily, on their way to carry out attacks on Jewish civilians....
The terrorists' claim that they had plans for peace that have now been derailed by the Israeli strike would be more credible if they had actually ceased their terrorist attacks instead of only being on the "verge" of agreeing to do so.
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8:49 AM
Don't paint a picture for me... Strangest Yahoo search string bringing a surfer to PostWatch: "Dominant English women royalty fantasies"
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12:05 AM
The unspeakable stupdity of the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies (like the maroon of a Secret Service agent who scrawled anti-Muslim slogans on a Muslim prayer calendar)(really, not kidding) has been the subject of a few recent postings at Instapundit.
Earlier this week Instapundit quoted a correspondent to the San Francisco Chronicle who despite rare abilities and desperate American needs was turned away from joining the force because of long-ago marijuna use:
I was recently hired for an FBI counter-terrorism position based on my ability to speak several foreign languages, my thorough knowledge of Middle Eastern culture and my extensive travel abroad. Each FBI employee who interviewed me told me, "We're desperately in need of language skills." I'm a blue-blooded American, 44 years old, who has taught college several years for the Department of Defense, and I was excited my skills would be helpful in the war against terror. Then came the FBI's lie detector test.
I admitted I'd smoked marijuana about 20 times when I was 18. I've never used drugs since. But within five minutes I was put out on the street.
I told the FBI agent who kicked me out that "I doubt very seriously that Bin Laden screened any of the hijackers for drug experimentation when they were kids." The FBI agent confided, "You wouldn't believe the number of super- qualified individuals we've turned away. Just last week we let go a highly qualified psychologist for the same reason. It's very frustrating."
Today's installment refers to another blogger that Glenn Reynolds points to but doesn't quote on more evidence suggesting a link between Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the Iraqis. I know you have to be careful about this stuff, so judge for yourself. It's been bouncing around a few blogs and the ultimate source apparently is the LA Weekly. So here's the LA Weekly story, which is also about aspiring attorney Zacarias Moussaoui's link to the bad guys, and here's a good rundown on the LA Weekly piece by Ken Layne:
The LA Weekly says Zacarias Moussaoui, Marwan al-Shehhi and Mohamed Atta tried to rent an Oklahoma motel room together in August 2001 ... just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. Jim Crogan's story says the feds weren't much interested in the eyewitness reports. Did the 1995 attack on the Murrah Building have anything to do with this?
Layne then quotes from the LA weekly:
One reason for the FBI's apparent lack of interest might be this motel's alleged connection to Timothy McVeigh and a group of Iraqis who worked in Oklahoma City. According to the motel owner and other witnesses and investigators interviewed by the Weekly, McVeigh and several of these Iraqis were motel guests in the months preceding the 1995 bombing. Witnesses also claimed they saw several of the Iraqis moving barrels of material around on the bed of a truck. The motel owner said the material smelled of diesel fuel and he had to clean up a spill. Diesel fuel was a key component of the truck bomb that blew up the Federal Building.
The motel owner said he and his staff reported this information to the FBI in 1995. "We did have an ATF agent come out and collect the originals of the room registrations for that period, but we never heard back from them. And I never could get the registrations returned." He added that his previous experience with the FBI made him reluctant to contact them about Moussaoui. "But I decided it was my duty to tell them what had happened. So I did."
Former Oklahoma City TV reporter Jayna Davis also interviewed motel staff and former guests. In the process, she collected signed affidavits about their contacts with McVeigh and the Iraqis. She tried twice to give the Bureau this information, but the FBI refused to accept her materials. (The Weekly first reported on her investigation in an article published in September 2001.)
Photodude.com also quotes from the story (he's actually the guy InstaMan was pointing to) and adds:
The mind boggles and begs for mercy. The motel owner saw how little the feds cared about his evidence in 1995, and almost blew them off in 2001 because of it. Only his sense of civic duty overcame it.
Who created this FBI? Louis Freeh created this FBI.
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Thursday, July 25, 2002
6:21 PM
Amazing. This from the New York Observer via Slate:
Listen up, fellows: Rich, bored teenage girls in New York City are on the prowl for twentysomething (and in some cases, thirtysomething) men. And this time, they’re not just arming themselves with fake ID’s. Young women barely past puberty—and before, ahem, the age of consent—are sashaying onto the Internet, researching adult life, and constructing elaborate alter egos designed to dupe men all too willing to believe their lies.
Consider Alexis. By 14, she was fed up with the dopey guys in her age group. This 5-foot-9 private-school student and class treasurer likes them older—much older. At first, Alexis employed a simple alias: She would tell the older men she met that she was a junior majoring in communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Everyone bought the lie. It went well until a 24-year-old man asked her out, and mentioned that he, too, went to U. Penn.
"I, like, totally bugged out," Alexis said.
Alexis scrambled home and went on the Web. She spent the next 24 hours researching the U. Penn. campus, her major, the names of professors and other campus activities. She called a friend’s older brother who went to Penn, too, and he gave her some more inside dope: the names of dorm R.A.’s and the local drug store. From this information, Alexis created a U. Penn. cheat sheet that she carried with her on her date the next night. Oozing with information, Alexis spewed out fact after U. Penn. fact. The hunk from Morgan Stanley never knew what hit him—and readily accepted her story as truth. Though she’s moved on to other men since then, Alexis has kept her U. Penn. persona intact. "If one guy believes your story," she explained, "then most guys probably will."...
As it turns out, teenage boys are getting into the action. One high-school source said that guys, too, are concocting fake personas to try and trick women in their 20’s. "Oh sure, I know guys who lie all the time," the source said. "They say that they’re 25 and work at Goldman. And you should see the pathetic women who try to devour them because of it."
Back at her family’s house, Alexis was getting ready for another night out on the city. She had decided on a denim miniskirt and a white wife-beater tank for the evening’s attire. She laid the clothes on a chair. Alexis was talking about books, and she went to her shelf and pulled down her favorite.
"I’ve read it so many times I can practically recite each line," Alexis declared.
What book was it? "Lolita," she said, not missing a beat.
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1:31 PM
CampusNonsense.org points out it blogged on a free-speech incident back in April, several months before the Washington Post got around to reporting on something in its own back yard. American University student Ben Wetmore's video cam was seized and Wetmore was handcuffed, detained and allegedly roughed up a bit during a speech by Tipper Gore. Wetmore sounds like a potentially very irritating guy, but the founding fathers evidently forgot to insert an Annoying Gadfly Exception to the Bill of Rights.
I'm not sure, but I gather the Post ran the story this week after some PR flogging from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Wetmore has his own website with many more details. This Fox News story says he's on probation and could be expelled for another "offense." Tipper Gore is in no-comment mode, though one of the University's explanations is that Wetmore was violating the intellectual property rights of Gore.
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1:17 PM
Expulsion Explainer... I've heard lots of radio and TV reports lately saying that Rep. James Traficant (D) is the first congressman to be expelled from the House since 1861. Until today, I've never heard what happened before then and I still don't know exactly why the electronic media was drawing a curtain across it (brevity combined with deadline-crazed reporters copying each other, probably). From the Washington Times:
In its 213-year history, the House had used the expulsion power only four times, although serious efforts to remove members were made in more than two dozen other cases. Twenty-two House members have been censured and eight reprimanded since 1789. The last House member expelled before Traficant was Rep. Michael J. Myers, Pennsylvania Democrat, who was removed after a 1980 conviction for taking bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as Arab sheiks in what became known as the "Abscam" probe....
Three of the other four House expulsions before last night occurred in 1861, when the House unseated members accused of supporting the Confederacy at the outset of the Civil War. The Senate has expelled 15 of its members since 1789. Of that number, 14 were charged with supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War. The fifteenth was Sen. William Blount of Tennessee, expelled in 1797 for treason....
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12:03 PM
Not In The Post Watch... The Independent Women's Forum says the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) really does aim to supercede U.S. law:
WASHINGTON, DC—(July 23, 2002) The Independent Women’s Forum has uncovered the ultimate intention of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW): to assert precedence over the sovereign laws of independent nations. The warning comes as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to take up the 20-year-old discredited treaty.
The threat to national sovereignty is made clear in The CEDAW Assessment Tool, a new project released in March 2002 by the American Bar Association (ABA) and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (AID). The 175-page document is to be used to score countries on their compliance with the treaty and offers a 1 to 5 scale with which to rate both de jure and de facto compliance in separate categories.
On page 80, assessors are instructed to ask: “Is CEDAW directly applied and given effect in courts as part of national law? What training programs exist to educate judges and other legal professionals about CEDAW’s precedence over national law?”
On the following page, assessors are advised to query what “national machinery” has been established and what portion of the national budget has been allocated for implementing CEDAW....
“Criticism of CEDAW for its intrusive nature has been dismissed by supporters as a ‘preposterous misconception.’ Rather than address the substantive concerns, CEDAW supporters stoop to mocking their challengers,” says [IWF National Advisory Board Member Charmaine] Yoest. “However, the substantive, documented issues related to national sovereignty must be confronted. It is no longer possible to ignore and dismiss a directive that specifically undermines American law, backed by the force of the American Bar Association, and AID, an agency of the American government. This treaty is a preposterous Trojan Horse and the Senate must reject it.”
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8:24 AM
Speaking of results...I couldn't bear to read the recent meandering Washington Post two-part series (One and Two) questioning America On Line's accounting practices, but apparently the SEC has a longer attention span--AOL Time Warner Discloses SEC Probe:
AOL Time Warner Inc. disclosed yesterday that the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a probe into its accounting practices after questions were raised about how the company generated revenue through a series of unconventional deals....
As part of yesterday's earnings announcement, chief executive Richard D. Parsons said AOL Time Warner contacted the SEC after the company received a series of questions from The Washington Post about its business practices both before and after America Online's January 2001 acquisition of Time Warner.
"After the [Post] articles came out [last week], the SEC informed us that they are conducting a fact-finding inquiry," Parsons said in a conference call with Wall Street analysts and the media.
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Wednesday, July 24, 2002
11:16 PM
Gender Watch...With a Twist... It's usually all about girls, girls, girls when the Post writes about gender and education, as illustrated in passing by the illustration to this Sunday Magazine story by Stefanie Weiss about the potential benefits and drawbacks of single-sex and co-ed schools. At least the last few times I checked it, and of course in the printed version of the magazine, we see a flock of schoolgirls with math on their minds, and the story's hook is a girl trying to decide which school to attend. Yeah, Weiss mentions boys, but the tilt is always there.
But the really interesting story was on Monday by Elizabeth Chang and per Post policy it's about girls--her girls. She sees some pros and cons, and repeats some of the usual agitprop about girls uniquely falling apart when they start growing up (join the club!). But I have to admit I didn't expect this case in favor of all-coed in Learning Where The Boys Aren't /
Are Single-Sex Schools Really Good for Girls?
As a former girl myself, and the parent of two daughters, ages 5 and almost 8, I worry that the idea that girls need to be protected from boys is a dangerous message to send (I leave the issue of girls' impact on boys to others). For one thing, I don't believe it's generally true. And even if it were, I'm not sure the answer is wholesale separation of the sexes. Finally, the argument in favor of all-girl schools ignores a big reality: Girls sometimes can be as bad for girls as boys supposedly are.
Ask almost any woman and I'd bet the anguish she remembers most acutely from her school days was caused by girls, and it was more upsetting and distracting than any interaction with any boy, whether he was academically pushy or socially attractive. And I'd bet there are as many, if not more, girls harassed by other girls than there are girls demoralized or hassled by boys. My daughters would be astonished at the idea that they are potential victims of boys. In their world, girls rule: "Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider. Girls go to college to get more knowledge." They are confident at school, play with boys often and have rarely, if ever, seen reason to be intimidated by one, inside of class or out...
...as Rachel Simmons, author of "Odd Girl Out," writes, girls can be extremely mean to other girls in middle school. And this leads me to a point that hasn't come out in any of the news coverage I've read recently about single-sex schools: Boys can be good for girls.
I talked to several women after attending Simmons's recent panel discussion, and each had at least one horror story from elementary or middle school.
One of the things that struck me about these conversations was that several women said they preferred the company of boys and that they find boys -- and men -- much easier to deal with and to be themselves with....
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7:11 PM
Right-Wing News is a very interesting blog I've intended to link to before. Today's blog responds to the startling suggestion by Zion Blog to massacre Palestinians, an idea blogger John Hawkins thankfully rejects. But he evaluates what this means:
The Palestinian people and government overwhelmingly support terrorists who kill every Israeli they can get their hands on from a baby in the crib to grandmothers on their sick beds. The only thing that stops groups like Hamas and Yasser Arafat's al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade from wiping the Israelis out is their inability to get the job done. If the Palestinian terrorists were given the ability to murder every Jew in Israel tonight, they'd do so tomorrow morning and would spend their afternoon in the middle of a Palestinian street party where they would be cheered as heroes.
On the other hand, the Israelis are militarily capable of wiping out the Palestinians. They could literally turn the entire "Disputed Territories" into nothing [but] blood, sand, and rubble in the space of a couple of weeks. Yet, they're not taking advantage of their military power in that way because of their own populace's superior morality. It's no different than the scene near the end of dozens of action movies where the hero has the villan at his mercy and the bad guy can't bear his defeat. So he tries to taunt the hero into killing him by talking about how he killed his (father, mother, wife, kids, whoever). Then the good guy decides he's not worth it and takes him into jail instead.
I'm sure that there are a lot of people who would be repulsed beyond words by the idea that the Israelis should simply massacre the Palestinians. Yet, are these people just as disgusted by the support of the Palestinian people for terrorist groups who advocate the massacre of Israelis but are simply unable to carry out their desires? I certainly would not support Israel if they practiced genocide but apparently people who are pro-Palestinian have no such qualms about supporting a populace which does believe in wanton slaughter and genocide but is unable to achieve it's murderous ambitions.
All this, of course, is in reaction to the worldwide criticism of Israel's marksmanship.
One wonderful feature of Right Wing News is a series of interviews he's compiling, via email and IM. So far his list includes Glenn Reynolds, Wendy McElroy and more recently Andrew Marlatt of Satire Wire.
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12:50 PM
I told you this war was serious... You know, if the New York Times' Eric Schmitt knew what we were up against in Iraq, he'd never have written his story on U.S. war plans. From the Washington Times:
Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, sharply criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East yesterday, urging the Bush administration to leave Yasser Arafat alone and warning that a military strike on Iraq would be an "attack against God Himself."
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12:31 PM
Scary Opposing Viewpoint... Some conventionally PC reporters are upset that the National Press Club gave an award to William McGowan's Coloring The News; How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism. I've not read the book, but I've read some of the excerpts and followed the pro- and con- in venues like C-Span. Sounds like a terrific book. Opinions will differ, including from Washington Post editor Richard Prince who is quoted in this USA Today story, Press Club Defends Against Criticism:
Despite a request from black and Hispanic journalists to rescind it, the National Press Club on Monday gave an award to the author of a controversial book that argues that the crusade for diversity in the media has corrupted American journalism. In Coloring the News (Encounter, $25.95), William McGowan says that well-intentioned attempts by the media to accommodate minorities and their views are infected by political correctness.
Richard Prince, a Washington Post editor and member of the National Association of Black Journalists, said the book is full of ''half-truths, spin and inaccuracies and is not worthy of an award from a journalistic organization.''...
McGowan said Monday that his book ''tackles a very emotionally difficult issue with fairness, historical perspective and compassion.'' He says diversity in the media is a ''historically overdue, fundamentally well-intentioned effort that has run off the rails in its implementation.''
MediaMinded has more links on this, and makes the following observation:
This doesn't really surprise me. In fact, I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a backlash. I've been tracking the progress of this book since it came out a few months ago, and I've found very few serious critiques of the substance of its arguments. Instead, there's been an emotional reaction from the usual suspects, who seem shocked that someone would dare question the "diversity uber alles" worldview. That only serves to confirm a central irony of McGowan's book -- members of the media, traditionally skeptical of groupthink, now willingly engage in it on a massive scale.
Here's an Amazon.com review from a reader who hates the book:
McGowan is a shoddy reporter who twists facts out of context or leaves them out entirely if they contradict his thesis. That's not just my opinion. It's also the conclusion reached by a brilliant reviewer for The Washington Monthly, a highly regarded political magazine. He wrote :" McGowan's book demonstrates an impressive ability to misinterpret and misreport facts. But McGowan, who seems to have begun this project with an ideological axe to grind, fails to even map the forest correctly. Coloring the News is filled with canards and an unsophisticated tendency to see conspiracies behind every door even as it fails to recognize the tremendous change that has occurred in American newsrooms over the past six years." This book adds nothing to the debate over affirmative action that has generated so much heat in recent years.
And somebody else who loved it:
I would highly recommend "Coloring the News". I learned a lot about why press accounts and coverage are so biased. I've also read "Bias" and "It Ain't Necessarily So", and this is definitely the best of the three for my purposes. Many of the examples are from print journalism, and especially from the New York Times and Washington Post. This is helpful since the rest of the press and the television networks take their cues from the coverage provided by those papers. The author helps one to understand the newsroom culture and the reasons for its rigid ideological conformity. It is intriguing that the blacks, gays, feminists, and so on that have been hired to promote "diversity" are the very people who enforce ideological orthodoxy on all others in the newsroom by means of their intimidation and demonstrations. Given the McCarthyism in today's newsrooms, there is little chance for even the slightest diversity of viewpoint or opinion. This book should help to educate the public about the hazards in believing what they read in their daily newspaper and the necessity of perusing other sources of information.
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12:17 PM
Taking The War Seriously... NRO's James Robbins writes about the New York Times' leak of secret war plans in Reckless Reporting?.
The London Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle prepared for June 2, 1944, four days before D-Day, contained the words "Overlord" and "Neptune." The first was the codeword for the Allied invasion of northern Europe, the second the code for the naval component of D-Day. The previous weeks' puzzles contained the words "Utah" and "Omaha" — the American landing beaches — and "Mulberry," the codename for the top-secret temporary harbors to be deployed to support the invasion. The Telegraph's senior puzzle designer, Leonard Dawe, a 54-year-old schoolmaster from Surrey and World War I veteran, found himself the center of MI5's attention when senior military officers spotted Utah and Omaha in the same puzzle. It turned out to be a coincidence, but it gave the D-Day planners a few sleepless nights...
The 1944 incident seems quaint by comparison — "tweedy English schoolmaster accidentally stumbles across codewords for greatest invasion in history while assembling puzzles" versus "irresponsible journalist reports on highly classified war plans for no apparent reason." Schmitt writes that the document "offers a rare glimpse into the inner sanctum of the war planners assigned to think about options for defeating Iraq." That's right, it is a rare glimpse, and rare for a reason. No one outside military-planning circles needs to know about it. It is like a periodic view into how to manufacture weapons of mass destruction or an occasional look at the names of deep-cover operatives — it serves no useful purpose, and could be distinctly harmful.
The whole column is worth a read. Among other things, Robbins dismisses the Times' weak defense of its publication:
Naturally, the Times defended publication of the article with some lawyerly boilerplate, but the statement does not stand scrutiny when interlaced with a few commonsense questions: "We are satisfied that the article ... was consistent with responsible citizenship...." How is this responsible, or representative of citizenship? If this is responsible, what would irresponsible citizenship look like? Or recklessness? "We took appropriate steps to determine that while addressing matters of legitimate public concern..." What steps were taken and how were they appropriate? How are the highly secret specifics of war planning a legitimate public concern? "...we were not jeopardizing current or prospective military operations." How can this not jeopardize a prospective military operation, particularly the attack scenario they compromised? How is the New York Times even qualified to make that assessment, especially without consulting the DOD? For all the Times or any of us in the outside world knows, they could have blown the entire invasion plan right then.
I'm going to bet a lot of money that New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt did not serve in the military. Separately, I believe a lot of reporters have reverted to viewing the war against radical Islamist terrorism as the Movie Of The Week.
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9:07 AM
U.S. To Permit American Flag To Fly In America... You can't say the Washington Times, and Rep. Richard W. Pombo, don't get results:
Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman apologized yesterday for what she called a "misunderstanding" in the U.S. Forest Service ordering a vacationer to remove from his summer cabin a flagpole that had been flying the American flag. Miss Veneman said in a letter to Rep. Richard W. Pombo, California Republican, that "as a gesture of good will," her department would send a U.S. flag that flew over the Forest Service's offices in Washington to Army veteran David Knickerbocker of Linden, Calif. The Washington Times reported on the front page yesterday that Mr. Knickerbocker was ordered to remove the flagpole outside his summer cabin in California's Eldorado National Forest. He complained to Mr. Pombo, who demanded the Forest Service "rescind this silly order." "We apologize for the misunderstanding," Miss Veneman wrote. "Please be assured that Mr. Knickerbocker's permit will be modified to allow the flagpole to remain at his recreation residence site."...
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Tuesday, July 23, 2002
2:29 PM
Interesting if true from Debka.com:
Notwithstanding its avowed reluctance to boost its presence in Afghanistan, the United States has launched two critical military steps:
First, A 45-man American unit, including special forces, will move into the presidential palace in Kabul and assume responsibility for Hamid Karzai’s safety. It will replace a contingent of Afghan commandos who will be sent back to base. Concern for the safety of Karzai, a linchpin of US regional interests, is acute since the recent assassination of the vice president.
Second, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly reported exclusively in its last issue on July 19, a spanking new American underground air base is nearing completion south of the Shiite city of Herat in western Afghanistan. To be the largest facility of its kind in that part of the world, it is scheduled to go operational in September as the new home of US aerial forces scattered around the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and other locations in Afghanistan....
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8:50 AM
The, uh, undocumented community is outraged this week. Hispanic Group Assails INS Enforcement Plan:
MIAMI BEACH, July 22 -- The National Council of La Raza thought this tropical resort city would be a perfect venue for its yearly conference, but today organizers said a number of smaller groups representing Latinos had called in the days leading up to the event to say people were afraid to come. A Bush administration proposal to deputize local police to seize illegal immigrants as part of the war against terrorism scared them off, said Michele Waslin, the La Raza analyst who took the calls from affiliates in Iowa and Arizona. The proposal, disclosed in news reports in April, has become a formal agreement between the Justice Department and the state of Florida.
Imagine--seizing illegal immigrants who have broken the law. When will the madness end?
"Generally, people are just really concerned," [La Raza analyst Michelle] Waslin said in an interview at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where 10,000 people have convened since Friday. "The undocumented community has been in fear since Sept. 11. It's increasing the level of stress, fear and anxiety they already have. It's driving the undocumented population deeper underground."...
The fear at this year's La Raza conference is a dramatic contrast from the hope at the organization's conference in Milwaukee last year, after President Bush announced his intent to allow illegal Mexican immigrants the right to earn citizenship by working in the country for several years and living by the rules."
Not counting the illegal immigration rule, of course. Border? We don't need no stinking border!
"We are angry," said Raul Yzaguirre, president of La Raza. "We are outraged. Eight million people work without their papers. Our economy depends on them. That issue got moved to the back burner."
First things first. We'd kinda like to prevent the country from being incinerated by terorrists, and then you have a nice county whose laws you can break. It's win-win!
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Monday, July 22, 2002
11:03 PM
Memo To Androgyny Feminists: The men visiting PostWatch will remember this story a few weeks from now, but not as intensely as women. From Salon:
New study says female brain is wired for emotion
By Paul Recer
Matrimonial lore says husbands never remember marital spats and wives never forget. A new study suggests a reason: Women's brains are wired both to feel and to recall emotions more keenly than the brains of men.
A team of psychologists tested groups of women and men for their ability to recall or recognize highly evocative photographs three weeks after first seeing them and found that the women's recollections were 10 percent to 15 percent more accurate. ...
Turhan Canli, an assistant professor of psychology at State University of New York Stony Brook, said the study shows that a woman's brain is better organized to perceive and remember emotions. "The wiring of emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women than in men," said Canli, the lead author of the study. "A larger percentage of the emotional stimuli used in the experiment were remembered by women than by men."
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10:56 PM
Not in the Post Watch: From today's Washington Times, Forest Service orders removal of poles flying American flag:
The Forest Service has told California vacationers to remove poles flying the U.S. flag from property the service has leased to them. The order has angered one lawmaker, who has written the government, demanding that it "rescind this silly order."
David Knickerbocker, an Army veteran and retired police officer, has been ordered to remove his flagpole, which has flown the American flag for more than two decades outside his summer cabin in the Eldorado National Forest. "I feel it is at times like these our country needs to be showing our unity and patriotism, not promoting ill-thought decisions, which prohibit flagpoles on United States soil," Mr. Knickerbocker said in a letter to Rep. Richard W. Pombo, California Republican.
The "no-flagpole order" came from Debbie Gaynor, recreation forester, who said in a letter to Mr. Knickerbocker that "flagpoles are not authorized for recreation residences and must be removed" for him to continue leasing the land."My flagpole has been up for more than 23 years, and like many in our cabin tract I am a patriotic American who has a flagpole," Mr. Knickerbocker said....
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6:22 PM
Straw Man Alert: Eric Boehlert has trouble making some very simple distinctions. In Howard Kurtz's column today, Kurtz quotes from the former's Salon column:
Don't tell "liberal media" bashers Bernard Goldberg or Ann Coulter, but bleeding heart Phil Donahue just debuted his prime-time cable talk show on MSNBC and the move was considered big news inside the business. Why? Because the TV and radio landscape has become so dominated by conservative talkers -- a fact that flies in the face of the authors' recent claims that the mainstream media reads off of the same lefty script.
Everybody knows and acknowledges that talk radio is dominated by conservatives, and that has zip to do with Bernard Goldberg's accurate analysis of television news programs. As for conservative "TV" talkers, that would be cable TV, and the absence of conservative voices on the major broadcast networks is what created the audience for them on cable.
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6:08 PM
Late Hit by me, not by OmbudsGod, who Saturday posted on Michael Getler's Sunday column in which he comments on a Getler lament about late and underplayed stories. But when it comes to the female hormone story, that's not what bothers OmbudsGod the most:
Nevertheless, Getler continues to miss the major problem with The Post’s coverage of the Hormone Replacement Therapy study, which is not that they didn’t break the embargo after other papers did, but that they didn’t question the dubious conclusions reached by the study’s authors.
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6:00 PM
Curious is this Howard Kurtz account of how a conservative figure is being labeled by the usual media suspects while being ignored by Fox News:
Larry Klayman seems to be getting new respect from much of the media.
The founder of the advocacy group Judicial Watch, Klayman, a self-described conservative, was often dismissed as a right-wing gadfly when he was suing the Clinton administration. But now that he's turned his legal guns on the Bush folks, things have changed.
In reporting earlier this month that Klayman had sued Vice President Cheney in connection with his tenure as CEO of the energy firm Halliburton, CBS, CNN and NBC described the organization as "a watchdog group," while ABC called it "a legal activist group." The Media Research Center cited numerous instances in which the networks labeled the group "conservative" during the Clinton era.
Dropping the conservative label now is strange because attacks are more credible when they come from within your own wing. So The Right Wing Paranoia version of events (in other words, my version) predicts that a guy like Klayman is more likely to get the tag now, not less, though in any case conservatives are more likely to be labeled as such by liberal media types who live within a small liberal world.
But that's not what's happened.
What's more, get this:
But Klayman has a bone to pick: "Fox hasn't given us much coverage the last year and a half. They're playing to the conservative audience. I have in effect been boycotted off the network. . . . For Fox to be playing this game is, in my view, hypocritical for a network that claims to be fair and balanced."
Kurtz goes on to talk about various ways that Klayman has been snubbed.
Klayman was miffed when Hume began an on-air discussion of the lawsuit against Cheney by saying that the activist "never got much coverage when he was going after Bill Clinton." Mara Liasson of National Public Radio added that "he's a true gadfly, as in 'pest.' . . . I think he should be denounced, in bipartisan fashion."
There's more. But even for an opinion panel, that's a little harsh. Either he's just an annoying guy or something else is going on.
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8:45 AM
A brief AP dispatch on page A3 reports on a survey done by the National Urban League that compares the economic progress of blacks and whites. It finds there are many areas, not all, where black Americans have improved as a group over the past 30 years, including lower unemployment and a boom in the number of blacks holding elective office. Then we have this incoming fly ball from left field:
There were more than 9,000 black elected officials in 2000 -- more than at any other time in the nation's history. But Rep. J.C. Watts (Okla.), the sole black Republican in Congress, recently said he would not seek another term.
Nice little twist of the knife.
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Sunday, July 21, 2002
10:37 PM
StooopidWatch from the Sunday Washington Times in Parents want apology for too-real slavery lesson:
Parents in a California suburb have filed a complaint against a local public school system after a middle school teacher tied up her students with masking tape during a history lesson on slavery. The parents' attorneys claim the eighth-grade teacher, whose name was not released, bound her students' hands with masking tape and duct-taped each of the students to the floor as part of an exercise to show students how slaves felt as they were transported to America on slave ships. Also, the parents claim neither the teacher nor any other school officials notified them such an exercise would take place. One student who participated in the exercise has been emotionally traumatized, the attorneys say.
Of course, we're dying to find out what races were involved, but the story doesn't say.
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10:29 PM
You can thank Republican Dick Armey for preserving your civil liberties a bit longer:
House Majority Leader Dick Armey, in his markup of legislation to create a Homeland Security Department, yesterday rejected a national identification card and scrapped a program that would use volunteers in domestic surveillance. Mr. Armey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, included language in his markup of the legislation to prohibit the Justice Department from initiating the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, also called Operation TIPS. Mr. Armey's bill also would create a "privacy officer" in the Homeland Security Department, which he said was the first ever established by law in a Cabinet agency. Mr. Armey said this person would "ensure technology research and new regulations from the department respect the civil liberties our citizens enjoy."
This was in the Post of course, but I'm trying to boost their numbes, alright?
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10:12 PM
The same Dept. of Media column accuses the Post of sitting on a story for 18 months, namely news of an unusual loan granted to Rep. Jim Moran by mega bank MBNA around the same time Moran was working on legislation affecting the banking industry. Fair enough. But then the put-down:
...the story's timing underscores a more disturbing and enduring reality: Washington is essentially a one-newspaper town. A juicy story on a local figure with a history of financial difficulties sits in a public file for 19 months, and no news organization aside from the Post takes note. In this slacker news market, hell, the Post could have held the Moran piece until Election Day—or even 2004.
[Executive Editor Leonard] Downie says, "We're the only large news organization in the area with the kinds of reporters to do a lot of investigative reporting at one time....We were not deciding that, 'Oh, just because we can do this, we'll just wait around and take our own time on it.'"
The Washington Times scoops the Post on a regular basis, particularly on local and military news. They also report regularly on issues the Post pretends don't exist, such as the raging debate over the extent to which the Catholic Church sex scandal is a gay sex scandal. They don't nearly have the resources (money and bodies) that the Post has, nor the circulation, but scoop they do. For one recent example, they were miles ahead of the Post on the many shenanigans of soon-to-be-former Fire Chief Ronnie Few. The Post had a golden scoop of its own at the end, but that was reactive.
Hard to tell from this one column (this is only the second time I've referred to it) if the columnist doesn't bother reading the Washington Times, dismisses it because of its ownership by a corporation ultimately controlled by Sun Myung Moon, or if the Times' circ numbers don't reach some kind of Washington City Paper threshhold.
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10:02 PM
Washington City Paper's Dept. Of Media Column reveals that the Grand Prix motor racing event held here the last few days signed some kind of promotional deal with the Washington Post that the paper neglected to mention to its readers, though for the most part its coverage has been pretty aggressive:
...until Wednesday, Post editors didn't squeeze in one other detail: That the Washington Post has a business relationship with the event.
The newspaper signed on as an "exclusive print and online advertiser" effective Jan. 1, 2002, according to Post spokesperson Eric Grant, who declined to say how much cash trades hands in the deal. "In any advertising agreement, there are usually cash considerations," says Grant....
Most of the paper's grand-prix coverage, anyhow, has appeared in the Metro section under the byline of reporter Serge F. Kovaleski, who has broken story after story on the shenanigans of the Sports Commission. Kovaleski's hard reporting shields his editors from charges of corporate-reportorial collusion.
Dept. of Media writer Erik Wimple still doesn't like it, though, saying it "fuels public cynicism about corporate shilling by news organizations." You'd never know it from most of the coverage, which rapped DC government for how it's handled the affair and given voice to complaints about noise. Wimple notes a story in the sports section has "all the hallmarks of boosterism," but hey, Erik, it's the sports pages, and they're supposed to like sports.
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9:53 PM
Meryl Yourish is a blogger who posted some amazing stuff when she reported in May about Jewish students being virtually assaulted by a mob of Pro-Palestinians at San Francisco State University. Now I gather she's moved to somewhere in Virginia, and when I was scrolling through her blog, I found this:
A few people (Kevin G., Bill Allison, Richard A., M. R.) have disagreed with my views on Ann Coulter; specifically, they've mentioned that she's right about Frank Rich and that Scoobie Davis is incorrect in his fact-checking on that particular issue. Okay. If they're right, they're right. But that's really not my point in taking Ann Coulter to task, and frankly, Coulter's accuracy level barely reaches my radar screen.
My problem with Coulter is that the woman uses hyperbole on steroids to defame in the broadest of terms those she disagrees with. When she calls liberals more dangerous to America than terrorists, she deserves nothing but scorn. When she calls liberals a disease, she should be excoriated. When she says liberals are not real Americans, she has moved out of the realm of mere name-calling and into the realm of demagoguery. And it bothers me no end that so many in the conservative camp just shrug their shoulders and giggle and say, "Well, that's our Annie."
I guess I'd say bomb-throwers have their role, but I do wince when Coulter launches some of those reckless volleys. I tend to see her brand of name-calling more on the left than the right, but of course that's where I'm looking.
Accuracy matters, though. Memo to Katie Couric: Accuracy is good.
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2:01 PM
Deception, ignorance or carelessness? Those are your choices in interpreting references to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a Travel section cover called The Last Refuge; As Congress debates oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, our correspondent took a 60-mile walk on the tundra in question.
Except the author in question, Steve Hendrix, almost certainly didn't trod on the 2,000 acres that would be allowed for drilling, a virtual speck of the 19-million-acre refuge.
Nor will the drilling be done in the flower-speckeld photo taking up more than half of the section's front page. "This valley is not far from the coastal plain that Congress is considering opening to oil exploration," the caption claims. How far is not far? Never mind that.
Under another photo, this one of a caribou trotting across a field, we read this:
One of the 155,000 caribou that migrate thorugh the refuge in early June. Their calving ground is where oil might be found.
That's certainly true if you count the 1.5-million acres on the costal plain where the story says the caribou calve. But again this is misleading given the minuscule footprint of the drilling complex that would be permitted. According to this comparison, the exploration area is the size of Delware. The 2,000 acres that ultimately would be used is about the size of Dulles Airport.
Hendrix's piece really isn't concerned about investigating the drilling zone. Here's the only other reference to it in the story:
These 19 million acres represent some of the last truly undeveloped wilderness in the country. To the south towers a rank of snow-marbled black peaks, a majestic Jersey wall between us and all the peopled latitudes below. To the north, under a cobalt tureen of sky, the valley opens into a broad prairie of tundra extending out to the Beaufort Sea 25 miles away. This is the 1.5-million acre coastal plain, where the caribou are headed. It's also the so-called 1002 Area, where the oil is.
The map that accompanies the story shows Alaska, and within Alaska the refuge, and within the refuge the 1002 Area. It doesn't show a 2,000-acre drilling zone because that's too small to show up on the map. Neither the story nor the captions mention the tiny size of any drilling facility or the growth in caribou herds after oil facilities were built in Prudhoe Bay.
It's the passing references that can show you where the editors are coming from.
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11:15 AM
Your right to shove a sex organ in my face is defended by reporters Marc Kaufman and Susan Okie in For Mothers Who Want to Nurse, Obstacles Abound.:
Abbe Dotson was nursing her hungry daughter last month at a mall outside Los Angeles when a security guard approached and told her she would have to leave because her breasts were exposed. Distraught, Dotson quickly left.
Distraught.
Dotson, 27, later contacted the California Women's Law Center and sued the shopping mall, which promptly apologized and promised to better train its staff about the rights of nursing women.
Never understimate the ability of the law to aid feminists in these quests.
Most of the story is about the physical and mental-health benefits of breast-feeding, which are many for both mothers and children. But there are lots of activities that are positive and healthy that educated societies practice privately. Many feminists don't get it, but if infant nutrition were aided by male sex organs, maybe they would.
Of course, the other big medical-news story is that every opponent of public breast-feeding has apparently been struck mute. It must be so because all the comments in this story are pro-public. For example:
Neely said women call her almost every week to report being harassed for breast-feeding, including recent calls from women who were told they couldn't nurse in a library, a school and a health clinic.
Listen, lady, if you expose your breast and force me to listen to or watch your slurping baby, I'm harassed.
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8:33 AM
The Elephant in the Sacristy... was the title of a Weekly Standard piece by Mary Eberstadt on the gay sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, and how thoroughly various parties were avoiding defining it that way despite the fact that the vast majority of victims were boys or male teens abused by male, of course, priests. I'm reminded of it by a front-page story today by Hanna Rosin, which is very good on its own merits, directly facing for probably first time in these pages the existence of a gay subculture in some seminaries and its effect on priests (better late than never). But even though it ably tells the story of a gay and a straight who both left a Catholic seminary after being dissatisfied by the seminary's handling of sexuality, it fails to acknowledge the obvious:
Until now, the church's position on ordaining gay priests has remained ambiguous. Pope John Paul II's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, recently said of gays: "People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained." But it was an offhand response to a question, and generated much controversy because in fact church policy does not forbid ordaining gay men.
For some conservative Catholics, however, the priest sex abuse scandal has made the issue unavoidable. Much of their anger is directed at the seminaries, gatekeepers of the priesthood. In "Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church," published this year, Michael S. Rose described the schools as havens for "homosexual dilettantes" who alienate heterosexual candidates, ridicule the orthodox ones and make a mockery of the church's moral teachings.
Catholic liberals attribute the sex abuse scandal to the requirement of celibacy or the absence of female priests. To them, the focus on gay priests is just a witch hunt, and many would prefer not to open the subject at all.
Note: Our recent tribulations are called "the priest abuse scandal." No gays abusing boys here--not even in a story about gays in the seminary written for, after all, what reason? Just some amorphous priest abuse scandal.
Again I say that the Andrew Sullivans of the world lost a unique opportunity to become moral leaders on this issue, throwing the moneychangers out of the temple or in this case the abusive gay priests and a particular subculture, which at this time and this place made it possible to sexually abuse males. Looking the other way, which even today's front-page story remarkably does, is part of the problem.
Footnote: In last week's Weekly Standard there's a lenghty and lively letters section on Eberstadt's piece, not available online. And at Mark Shea's blog, Catholic and Enjoying It, there's a pretty intense debate about the book Goodbye Good Men, which has drawn a lot of criticism for not adequately checking sources and misrepresenting what certain individuals did or said. But at that blog, NRO's Rod Dreher defends the book and author Michael Rose.
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Saturday, July 20, 2002
2:28 PM
Gun Safety Non-Study.. Instapundit notes an excellent Daily Pundit debunking of the Post's story Friday, Report: Gun Safety Programs for Children Don't Work. Here's the lede of the Helen Rumbelow story:
Gun safety programs aimed at young people do not work and have done little to reduce the toll of 20,000 children killed or injured by guns in the United States every year, according to a foundation report released yesterday. It found that children's curiosity and teenagers' love of risk make them resistant to efforts such as the National Rifle Association's Eddie Eagle campaign and others run by gun control advocates to keep children away from weapons. In some cases, it was feared the programs increased the appeal of guns, said the child health specialists who wrote "Children, Youth and Gun Violence" for the Future of Children, a journal of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
But Daily Pundit says the study (NOTE: long .pdf) doesn't have much to back up claims that the progams don't work. It points out that claims by the NRA that its "Eddie Eagle" gun safety program reduces deaths are based on "correlational data"--the fact that child deaths by gun have fallen. Daily Pundit says the study says there are other studies showing the programs are ineffective, but says these are not backed up by statistics:
So all this hoo-rah is based on these two grafs: one says that:
"Although no study has systematically evaluated such programs for children," [emphasis mine] gun safety programs have been found to be ineffective in decreasing the firearm injury and death rate among adults.
And the other, in evaluating the NRA Eddie Eagle program, reports:
"However, to argue that the Eddie Eagle Pro-gram is successful because the number of gun-related injuries among children decreased in one year fails to consider other variables that may be responsible for behavior change over that time period."
I don't know about you, but I don't find either of these analyses terribly persuasive as to proving the contention that child gun safety programs "do not work."
In fact, this "study" appears to be merely anti-gun propaganda of the "save the children" variety, and completely devoid of anything that resembles scientifically-grounded conclusions. If this is the best the Packard Foundation can do, it's not very good.
That sounds right. I haven't read much of the report, so I stand to be corrected. But here's a curious line that Daily Pundit quotes:
The [Eddie Eagle] program does not give children a reason for avoiding guns (such as that guns are dangerous), but program developers do emphasize that children should be taught that real guns are not toys.
Well, if you go the the Eddie Eagle website and don't dawdle too long over ordering the temporary Eddie Eagle tatoo, you'll soon see the four basic rules they teach kids:
STOP!
DON'T TOUCH.
LEAVE THE AREA.
TELL AN ADULT
The program does not give children a reason for avoiding guns, "such as that guns are dangerous"?
Huh?
It clearly teaches that guns can be dangerous to unsupervised kids. I think what rubs the study's authors the wrong way is that it doesn't teach that adult ownership of guns is always morally wrong and dangerous to everybody at all times. Of course, they're dangerous to criminals coming after me, which is why I'm armed.
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1:52 PM
The Silent Majority... Also in Free For All, this correspondent berates the Post for leaving out a big chunk of America:
The Need for Speed
I would like to know whether your paper is ever going to wake up and smell the burning rubber. Your NASCAR coverage is atrocious. NASCAR is the largest spectator sport in the country. NASCAR and drag racing have a fan base of at least 50 to 1 over horse racing.
I just can't believe that a newspaper as large as yours cannot devote more resources to covering one of the most popular sports in the country.
-- Russell G. Taft
It's true--NASCAR outdraws every major league sport you can think of. I wouldn't read much of it, but starting just 30 miles outside Washington to the west and south you enter serious NASCAR territory, which doesn't thin out until somewhere near Los Angeles.
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1:45 PM
Interesting twist on gender issues in this letter to the Free For All section:
What About the Husbands?
Monte Reel's July 15 story "Married to the Uniform; Navy Spouses Face New Roles and Age-Old Issues" should have been headlined "Navy Wives Face New Roles and Age-Old Issues." I searched the article almost frantically for any insights and observations about the sacrifice of husbands whose wives are Navy officers or enlistees.
Although I applaud your paper's efforts to cover the military, it was unfortunate that your headline writers thought it more important to be gender inclusive than the author of the piece did. As more and more women distinguish themselves in the Navy as well as in other branches of the military, more and more men find themselves in the historically unfamiliar role as spouses of active duty women.
The most interesting observation apparent in Reel's article was the one he did not make.
-- Scott Lewis
The story was part of a long series on family and social issues in local military life.
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Friday, July 19, 2002
10:44 PM
David Horowitz now has a blog in addition to the magnificent FrontPageMag.com, which was recently redesigned. I see he responed to Andrew Sullivan's critique of Horowitz's "Wichita Massacre" item:
It's always a pleasure to be corrected by Andrew Sullivan, who takes me to task for calling the Wichita killings a hate crime and for implying that "there are apparently no black hate crimes," when blacks have been prosecuted for such (and in fact I myself have written about this). I plead guilty to a case of careless expression. I should have written "there are apparently no black hate crimes as far as the media are concerned," because that is what I meant. Calling the crime itself a hate crime is only a marginally different matter. The fact that one of the perpetrators had a white girlfriend or that there were no racial remarks reported would be more persuasive if the same were not true in the Rodney King beating. Officer Powell who beat King had a black girlfriend. That didn't seem to impress anybody at the time (except the first, correct but overturned Simi Valley jury). Surely if the four victims had been black and the predators white there would have been little hestitation on the part of the authorities and the press to do so, particularly since the local community was clamoring for same. The mere fact that the Justice Department has intervened in Inglewood on a matter that on its face does not bear any marks of a racial incident indicates the double standard with which these labels are applied.
Horowitz, I'm pleased to say, also doesn't think the notion of "hate crimes" is a useful category:
...I don't like the legal designation "hate crime" at all. All rapes are hate crimes, but nobody calls them that. I don't like the idea of thought crimes which is what hate crimes are (since the behavior itself is punishable under pre-hate crime law).
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10:30 PM
Andrew Sullivan, Science Sleuth... There's a story in the Post today about melting Alaskan ice called Study Fuels Worry Over Glacial Melting. It's more balanced than many other environmental stories I've seen, noting that though ice is melting its meaning isn't clear:
Scientists can't say whether the extraordinary melting is the result of man-induced global warming, the slow natural advance and rapid retreat of the glaciers, or dramatic but natural variations in weather patterns. But the phenomenon is an example of the kind of effects that can occur because of alterations in the Earth's climate
But it uses a disputed figure about how much Alaska's temperature has risen. Referring to a study, reporter Eric Pianin writes:
Indeed, the study has provided fresh evidence for Alaskan officials, researchers and environmentalists who say their state exemplifies the ills of global warming. Over the past 30 years alone, the annual mean temperature in Alaska has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit -- four times the average global increase, according to the University of Alaska's Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, an academic research center.
As Sullivan points out, the 5.4 degree increase varies from a 2.7-degree hike cited by other authorities, both in turn varying from a 7-degree increase cited in an earlier New York Times story that Sullivan knocked down. When the Times ran a correction on that figure, Sullivan wasn't satisfied by the overly careful wording in it.
Got that?
So now the Post has used the 5.4-degree figure, and Sullivan cracked the case:
I knew there was some solution to the competing claims about Alaskan temperatures. How could one body say that annual average temperatures had risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last thirty years and another say it's merely 2.7 degrees? The answer lies in this chart. The number used by the Times and now the Washington Post is not the last thirty years. It's based on a period between 1966 and 1995. By picking 1966 as the base-point, you can get that result. But 1966 is a freak year. It's one of the four coldest years in Alaska this century. And 1995 was one of the hottest. The Times picked two random data points and argued an average trend between the two of them - about as dishonest a piece of statistical fiddling as you'll find
Not only that, but the Times correction appears intentionally deceptive. According to Sullivan, the seasonally adjusted average for the 30-year period cited in the original Times story actually only increased a single degree. But when they ran their correction, they selected a different 30-year period that weighed in at 5.4 degrees. Incredible.
There are more details and I don't want to just rob Andrew Sullivan so go take a look at that great blog. Now the question is whether the bogus 5.4-degree figure will continue to appear in the Post (and whether it'll run a correction). I guess it also raises the question about how the Post ended up using a Times-generated number. Okay, actually it raises a lot of questions.
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11:09 AM
She's baaaack.... Camille Paglia writes about the "gay inquisition" in a piece at FrontPageMag.com:
On July 13, C-SPAN 2 aired a remarkable tape of a debate among open gays about gay ideology that took place at the New School in New York City on June 27. Unfortunately, the debate too often resembled an inquisition.
The miscreants summoned to answer for their sins were Andrew Sullivan, one of the most prolific and accomplished public intellectuals in the U.S. and U.K., and Norah Vincent, a courageous and outspoken libertarian whose columns appear in the Los Angeles Times, the Advocate, and the Jewish World Review.
No better evidence could be sought of the current deplorable state of gay activism, with its ranting, sanctimonious demagogues and reactionary insularity. The moderator, Joan Garry, the executive director of GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), was well-intentioned but painfully out of her depth in managing the give and take of ideas. Though she trumpeted her neutrality, she repeatedly cut off discussion when her activist friends on the panel were closely questioned by other panelists or the audience....
Sullivan posted about this before and after the event (slacker, not during), and though I haven't checked I'll bet he posted something today.
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8:19 AM
It can be hard to tell... From today's Corrections feature, I reprint the following in its entirety:
A picture of Kurt Godwin's canvas "Perpetuity" was run upside-down with the Galleries column in the July 18 Style section.
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Thursday, July 18, 2002
11:31 PM
Don't say I never told you.... Today's blog tip du jour (yes, I just said "Today's blog tip of the day") is that Salon.com is going to host "thousands" of web logs, and that Radio UserLand will supply the software. You can hunt through some of this stuff at Medianews.org but I've got it nailed for you right here from Tonie.net:
Salonblogger: Webmagazine Salon.com gaat ook webloggen: blogs.salon.com. (Ontdekt door the one true bix).
There you go.
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11:10 PM
Shameless Self-Promotion Department... The Corner blog at National Review Online asked its readers to notify them of "cool sites" if they haven't been featured in NRO's cool-sites button. NRO has a revolving list of sites that it links as they day progresses. They do need a few ideas--just now they're listing Nasa.gov, which is cool but probably not in need of a boost. I can't bring myself to send them my own URL, but if any of my readers--any that actually like what they see here--want to drop them a line at coolsites@nationalreview.com, I certainly wouldn't hold it against you.
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11:01 PM
Just don't take it personally... via Medianews.org, columnist Bruce Dobie of the Nashville Scene retires his weekly media column Desperately Seeking The News after thirteen years. His parting shot:
Reporters are the most thin-skinned species alive, and covering them has been a pleasurable exercise. There have been some great reporters in this city. It's been a joy to read them and to praise their work where appropriate. But quite a few members of the media in this city have proved to be no different than your average government hack--greedy, sloppy, egotistical and sometimes just outright stupid. It's been a joy to cover them too.
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10:53 PM
Carry that weight... Ann Gerhart wrote a love song for the WNBA in Unspoiled Sports; The WNBA's All-Stars Attract a Crowd as Dedicated as They Are. It's not all bad. The WNBA is a jewel in the crown of professional women's sports, and there's a lot riding on it, and the relatively few fans who zealously love it are a marvel to behold. But there are a few items worth noting.
One was pointed out to me by a PostWatch reader, who thinks a white guy could never get away with writing about the black-dominated NBA like this:
When the NBA All-Star Game blew into Washington 17 months ago, it brought the gushing bottles of Cristal and the entourages and the celebrities and the hootchy mamas, their taut haunches rolling under Lycra stretched to its limits. It brought the stench of sex and money and the disappointment that comes from worshiping indifferent stars.
Yeah, probably so. There's a bit more of that in the story. Gerhart contrasts the seedy, run-down NBA with the women's rainbow love coalition:
When the pro women basketball players brought their all-star show to MCI Center on Monday night, the grand total of stretch limos idling at the curb seemed to be one.
Instead, streaming off the Metro, here came young girls in cornrows and Chamique Holdsclaw jerseys. Suburban families -- Mom and the kids, all in sneakers and shorts, meeting Dad, his suit jacket draped over his arm, shirt sleeves rolled up. Young couples on dates. Lesbians by the myriad, from all classes, old and young, black and white.
She makes the widely observed point that WNBA players can knock themselves out for their fans. They try harder, they're not spoiled yet, and she's probably right. She gets carried away though.
Teresa Weatherspoon may have had dinner after the game with a beautiful woman in skintight clothing, but here the similarity to her male colleagues ends. The women were dining in . . . a bookstore, Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle.
Okay, but that's the Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe and it ain't the British Museum. It's a combination bookstore/pickup joint with a latte bar on one side and a separate restaurant/bar that starts in a loft with live music on weekend nights while the rest of it spills outdoors in a lovely romantic sidewalk cafe. Romantic when you don't get panhandled. I love it, and more power to Teresa Weatherspoon. Speaking of groupies, which Gerhart does, how does she know who Weatherspoon picked up and where they went?
Pardon. As I was saying, after a Title IX reference Gerhart continues:
Cynics predict that if and when real money comes to women's basketball, the gals will turn out just like the guys. Those open, genuine faces will turn to impassive poses, and the autograph-hunting kids will be ignored, and the athletes will begin some sorry disassociation from their fan base until they're just another set of jerk millionaires. How would women act who are too rich and too worshiped? Hard to say. There aren't too many examples outside of the plastic surgery pavilion....
So the women players remain mostly unspoiled, and that, combined with play that gets better all the time, produced an abiding sense of pride Monday night. Worshiping women for being strong and fast and powerful is a relatively new religion, and the righteous in the WNBA house stomped and chanted with the spirit.
How new is relatively new? Martina Navrativlova? Chris Evert? Billie Jean King? Gymnasts? Runners? Swimmers? I can't cite figure skaters, because they're too feminine and that doesn't go over too well.
Look, major-league female megastars operating on the same level as men's athletics are new, and I guess that's what she means, but wondering how too-rich, too-worshiped women would act hasn't been much of a mystery in any age.
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6:20 PM
At least this story has a lede… Karen De Young covers a conflict between the Senate and the Bush Administration as a horse race and misses a big part of the story in Senate Panel to Defy Bush, Vote on Women’s Treaty.
In an almost unheard-of challenge to presidential prerogative, the Democratic Senate is preparing to consider ratification of an international treaty the White House has indicated it may not want approved. Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) has scheduled a committee vote today on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a 23-year-old United Nations document that was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and has languished ever since.
The Bush Administration originally seemed inclined to sign it, but conservatives weighed in:
After the administration originally said it approved of the treaty, which is known as CEDAW, conservative organizations launched an energetic campaign against it. In letters, e-mails and phone calls to President Bush, Powell and Republican senators, groups such as Concerned Women for America have denounced the treaty as a "dangerous, anti-family document" and "a thinly veiled cover for demanding abortion and decriminalizing prostitution."
That’s practically the only explanation for conservative opposition, but there’s much more.
As outined by the Concerned Women of America (an organization with many more members than the National Organization for Women), they cover a number of social issues but the common theme is that it gives foreign groups some power to interfere in the personal lives of Americans—all with a leftist tilt, of course. For example, according to the following excerpts from CWA:
* CEDAW legally binds every signatory country to implement its provisions. After signing, each country must submit an initial report with a detailed and comprehensive description of the state of its women, "a benchmark against which subsequent progress can be measured." This initial report should include legislative, judicial, administrative and other measures the signatory nation has adopted to comply with CEDAW. The country must submit follow-up reports at least every four years.
*According to this document, any "distinction, exclusion or restriction" could be changed if a woman claims that such distinctions "nullify her recognition, enjoyment or exercise … of human rights and fundamental freedoms." This language is far too vague and would invite an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits in the United States. [Note that this conforms to the feminist belief that men and women are interchangeable in all ways, and that any differences are immoral and litigable. Title IX enforcement fans will love it-pw]
*The CEDAW committee determines those "stereotyped roles." For example, in its analysis of Denmark, it "noted with concern that stereotypical perceptions of gender role continued to exist in society … [that] kept men from assuming an equal share of family responsibilities." In its 2000 review of Belarus, the committee complained that "Mothers’ Day" and the "Mothers’ Award" encourage women’s traditional roles. Also, the CEDAW committee urged Armenia to "combat the traditional stereotype of women in the noble role of mother."10 Further, it complained to Luxembourg about its "stereotypical attitudes that tend to portray men as heads of households and breadwinners, and women primarily as mothers and homemakers."
*Regarding children’s interests, CEDAW conveys that government, not parents, knows best. The Committee derided Slovenia because only 30 percent of children under age three were in day-care centers. The remaining 70 percent, the committee claimed, would miss out on education and social opportunities offered in day-care institutions. Its review of Germany urged "the Government to improve the availability of care places for school-age children to facilitate women’s re-entry into the labor market
*CEDAW would captivate our children to the Left’s agenda through a U.N. mandate. Single-sex schools could be discouraged and eliminated because their "perspective" on gender is not acceptable to the international government. Taxpayers could be forced to pay the high cost of "gender neutralizing" all textbooks and school programs. America could become a nation of androgynous children who are not allowed to believe that any gender differences exist beyond the external… [The Committee] called upon Austria’s government to "integrate gender studies and feminist research in university curricula and research programs."
*CEDAW jeopardizes the wage laws that have been set at the federal and state levels. Article 11d requires women receive the "right … to equal treatment in respect to work of equal value." This phrase is a thinly veiled "comparable worth" mandate. Comparable worth actually calls for equal pay for unequal work. This concept wars against our free-market system, where the supply and demand of workers determines the value of a job in a given profession. This respects a worker’s experience, expertise and ability.
Much more at the site. I don’t agree with everything at CWA—for just one example, I think gays and lesbians could use a lot more protection than they have in other cultures—but the structure of CEDAW doesn’t allow you to pick and choose between policies. The main thing is that CEDAW does undermine American sovereignty. The Euros keep trying to drag us into some kind of utopian groupthink, so we’d better hang on tight to our Constitution.
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12:41 PM
Call me when you figure it out... Just to make it more obvious, here's a short post from this morning that I had to hang onto the comments feature when Blogger was sick:
One story I'll call your attention to is the mega-file called Unconventional Transactions Boosted Sales. I'm guessing it says something about America Online cooking the books, but there's not a lede in sight for the first six grafs that are on page 1, so who knows. The Post continues to print these dark-and-stormy-night ledes that I'm convinced nobody has time for in these busy days. When I want art, usually I turn to novels.
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8:50 AM
Visa Watch... You really gotta wonder what those guys are smoking over at the State Dept. NRO's Joel Mowbray:
The State Department is fighting a terrorism task force's recommendation that suspected terrorists be denied visas — this is the same department that wants to hold onto the visa-issuance power in a time of war when our enemies want nothing more than entry into the United States. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage responded to the recommendation by writing to the Justice Department that "[believing that] an applicant may pose a threat to national security... is insufficient [grounds] for a consular officer to deny a visa." No, this letter wasn't written before last year's tragedy; it was written on June 10, 2002, one day shy of the nine-month anniversary of 9/11.
The other nice thing about Mowbray is that he knows where to place the lede (see comments in the post before this one, when Blogger was down). By custom, it's in the first graf.
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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
11:21 PM
Race Matters... Sullivan's second post says David Horowitz has it all wrong when he says the torture and murder of four white people by two black assailants is not a hate crime. I think that's what he's saying:
WHAT WICHITA SCANDAL? David Horowitz is trying to argue that scant media attention to a horrifying group rape and murder in Wichita is a function of racial correctness. His point is that the criminals were black and the victims white and that this was therefore a racially-motivated hate crime. He writes:
While the federal government rushes to Los Angeles to investigate an incident in which a handcuffed youth was slammed into the hood of a car and punched by an officer, a pall of silence still blankets the horrendous racial murder of four young people whose murderers are now on trial.
But read the long story detailing the crime and you will find precious little evidence that race had anything to with it. No racial insults were used over several hours; one of the perpetrators had a white girlfriend; none of the thugs who committed this atrocity had a membership in a racist organization. Calling this a "racial murder" is just inflammation, of a type usually used by the left. David is surely right that civil rights in this country have become conflated with a victimology that insists that no whites are ever victims of racism or that blacks cannot be racist. But that doesn't mean then right should retaliate in kind, using exactly the kind of racial language and posturing to obscure what are simply human events.
Actually Sullivan raises a good question about the extent to which these murders were motivated by race-hatred. But still. Personally, I don't care if a black murderer has a white girlfriend; you can still be a bigot with a girlfriend exemption. Sullivan addresses half, at best, of what Horowitz is saying. Because his other point, as I blogged yesterday, is that these murders don't attract a fraction of the attention they would if the races were reversed, regardless of what the murderers said or didn't say. If the killers were white and the victims were black, Sharpton and Jackson would have chartered a jet and the media would have covered it more than they did, which was virtually not at all.
Sullivan adds:
(David's also wrong about one thing. He says there are barely any hate crime allegations against blacks. In fact, if you check out the FBI's statistics, one of the paradoxes of these laws is that blacks are far more likely than whites to be convicted by them.
But why is this a paradox? Most inter-racial violence consists of blacks attacking whites. There's nothing much to cheer about here, but if Horowitz is wrong, it's good to know the hate-crime convictions roughly follow the distribution of assailants by race. I suspect Sullivan doesn't know what that distribution is.
Of course, if it were me, I'd eliminate the hate crime category. If you kill me, I'm truly dead whether you loved me or hated me--or whether you hated me in the properly designated way.
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11:12 PM
Modem Installed... I knew you were worried. I still plan to file on Ann Gerhart's piece noted earlier today, but it's late and that requires actual thought. Two easy hits are a couple of Andrew Sullivan posts. The first is his misdirection play on the Catholic sex-abuse scandal:
REMEMBERING THE WOMEN: The clerical abuse of boys and minors was bad. The abuse of girls and women is no better. Yet the Catholic church has often behaved as if abusing women were somehow less problematic than abusing boys. "Girls and women are the only group that, if you're in a deposition, they're asked if they liked it," a therapist of female abuse victims tells the Miami Herald. "I've probably only had that asked of one adult male, ever. The girls are asked what they were wearing; they are accused of being seductive. That is virtually routine. The way in which it's dealt with is totally different." The sexism that pervades the Catholic hierarchy - epitomized by its completely incoherent refusal to permit women priests - is also a factor that helped cover up abuse. If the Church is to regain its footing, that sexism must end as well.
The Herald story is about the Church's cold dismissal of sex abuse allegations made by women, which I guess is supposed to nullify the Church's cold dismissal of sex abuse allegations by boys and male teens. No sale, Andrew. The Catholic Church has often behaved as if abusing women is less problematic than abusing boys possibly because the vast majority of allegations has concerned boys. From the Herald story:
"They were totally unwilling to really acknowledge that what happened to me was really terrible," said Corinne Corley, a Kansas City attorney who said she was sexually abused by a priest in the Archdiocese of St. Louis when she was a teen-ager in the 1970s. "Because of the heterosexual factor, they're going to assume that you were Lolita, a temptress."
Proving there are many different ways to abuse people. But how unique is it to say the church, in Corley's case, was "totally unwilling to really acknowledge that what happened to me was really terrible?" And when Sullivan says:
The sexism that pervades the Catholic hierarchy - epitomized by its completely incoherent refusal to permit women priests - is also a factor that helped cover up abuse.
He's just going off the rails. You can disagree with the refusal to permit women priests, but it's anything but incoherent, and it has precisely nothing to do with covering up sex abuse, which as studies has shown does not take place in significantly higher or lower amounts than other denominations that allow women ministers.
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1:49 PM
Straw Men... Columnist Sally Jenkins raises false issues and doesn't seriously engage the critics of Title IX enforcement in Monday's See How They Run. She does this while highlighting the advances made by enterprises like the WNBA. Nobody, to my knowledge, is challenging the existence of Title IX, including the College Sports Council, Tilting the Playing Field author Jessica Gavora, the Dept. of Education or the commission it created to examine how Title IX has been applied. But Jenkins repeatedly overlooks this distinction, casting opponents to current procedures as actions against the law itself.
If certain members of the Bush administration are going to challenge Title IX, and they are, they ought to take proper notes....
The current administration has been positioning itself for a Title IX rollback for some months now...
Obviously, Title IX proponents would love for the WNBA to demonstrate that it can become a stand-alone commercial success, because it would help silence Title IX critics on the thorny subject of women's interest in sports...
Which brings us to the next point, the thorny subject of women's interest in sports. Again, some people, and I don't want to use the f-word here, seem think that men and women should have pretty much exactly the same interest in everything, and if they don't it's grounds for a lawsuit or social engineering--or both. Jenkins:
A policy adviser to Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, Jessica Gavora, has authored a book that is a full-scale attack on it, "Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX," in which she labels the law -- which prohibits discrimination based on sex at any institution receiving federal funds -- an unfair quota system that makes casualties out of men's sports. She goes so far as to suggest women may be naturally less interested in sports than men.
The founders of the WNBA differ. They offer up as evidence a sellout crowd at MCI Center for the All-Star Game, and, Exhibit A, a striking acceleration in the talent level on the arena floor, which seems to get better moment by moment.
Glad to see the sellout crowd, but it's an all-star game in one of the league's two most popular cities. Many if not most of the other franchises are struggling with attendance, so this one game doesn't settle anything. But let's concede part of Jenkin's point. Interest in women's sports has been growing. That's good. Does it mean all women have as much interest in competing as all men? Of course not. I'll link this later, but the Independent Women's Forum's Christine Stolba makes the following observation:
"In intramural sports, for example, which are driven entirely by student interest, women’s participation rates are 22%, compared to men’s 78%.”
Jenkins also quotes Sen. Birch Bayh, one of the law's sponsors, about how hard it was for women to participate decades ago. Note to Jenkins: that was decades ago. Then this:
Bayh's opponents on Title IX have generally taken three forms over the years: disgruntled football coaches who fear cuts in their luxurious budgets, disgruntled wrestlers whose programs have been slashed by economically strapped athletic departments, and, most recently, conservatives who assume a knee-jerk opposition to anything that smacks of a numerical quota.
I've addressed the largely bogus football question before. It's depressing to see Jenkins so cavalierly dismiss the fortunes of wrestlers (and swimmers and baseball players and tennis players and others) who have paid the price for Jenkins' utopia. I encourage Jenkins to apply her fondness for numerical quotas to even out the proportions of men and women going to college, which has a far greater impact on more people's lives.
Despite Gavora's contention in her book that the law has cost men athletic opportunities, the number of men's teams offered at universities has risen overall since its passage, according to a General Accounting Office study -- which concludes that 72 percent of colleges and universities have managed to comply with Title IX without cutting a men's sport.
Yet. As mentioned before, the "three-pronged test" in practice creates an irresistible march towards the gender quota. And I hope the number of men's teams has grown, since the population has grown by millions since 1972. And by the way, that's the same GAO study that found that more money is spent per female college athlete than on each male. Yes, there are more men, but the current state of the college union can hardly be that women as a rule are uniquely downtrodden in high school and college sports.
Jenkins rightly notes that there should have been an opponent of her view at a Title IX lovefest panel at which she appeared during the WNBA All-Star runup. Somebody could have explained to her the difference between opposing Title IX and opposing the bureaucrats who have twisted the law into requiring precisely the quotas that its sponsors said it did not.
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10:33 AM
Later today: My comments on a Sally Jenkins Title IX piece that ran Monday, and which I unfortunately found today; and an interesting Ann Gerhart story in today's Style section on the WNBA All-Star game.
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9:10 AM
Blew a modem.... So once again I am posting from a remote and more expensive location. All I have time for this morning is to note a recent post by Media Minded, which chastised the Post on a Bush Harken story.
When President Bush was recently questioned about Harken, he told reporters to "go look at the minutes" of the board of director's meeting. But Dana Milbank complains that White House officials then "failed" to provide the records. Check out this, and pay attention to the language used:
But Bush's aides quickly rescinded the invitation. A couple of days later, Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications director, said Bush would not ask Harken for the minutes. "He personally would not have access to them," Bartlett said. "These are company documents. I can't release something I don't have." Curiously, the about-face repeated the rationale Bush's then-spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, used in October 1994 in Bush's first gubernatorial run in Texas. "He has no way to make a company release records," Hughes told the San Antonio Express-News. So while Bush himself says, "You need to look back on the directors' minutes" to settle the matter, his aides for eight years have said they will not provide the minutes.
Questions: What's so outrageous about White House officials basically saying "Go do your own homework"? Serious reporters would do the research required to find the Harken minutes instead of waiting for a handout from the administration...
I take his point but this exchange highlights the natural secretiveness that's going to hurt Bush in the end--not least because the Administration can't seem to distinguish between legitimate defense and intelligence confidentiality on the one hand and a blanket policy to keep everything under wraps everywhere. That's part of what's going on with the leaks, by the way--reporters are saying to the Administration, we'll show you.
But in this case it's inadequate for Bush to tell reporters the answers are in minutes he surely knows are not available.
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Tuesday, July 16, 2002
7:01 PM
The Race Desk... One of my readers who writes PostWatch fairly often recently questioned what kind of rationale is used by newspapers when printing stories on out-of-town developments. For example, the videotape of a white Inglewood, Calif., cop slamming a handcuffed black suspect on the squad car's trunk has been replayed on national TV very often, and developments in the story have been and will be replayed many times in the Washington Post and elsewhere.
There's no question that white-on-black violence is overplayed in the media, and that black-on-white violence is ignored or downplayed. In my view, this is a cut-and-dried example of liberal media bias, underscored by at least two facts: Most black victims of violence in America are attacked by black criminals, and most inter-racial violence consists of blacks attacking whites. You would never know this from watching television or reading newspapers, and most people don't know.
There's a series of stories on this theme at FrontPageMag.com today, including a David Horowtiz leader on the depraved murder of four whites by two blacks in Wichita, Kansas last year:
We reported the story of the Wichita Massacre in these pages two years ago at the time it happened. Outside the local Wichita press, however, virtually the only media to report this hate crime were Frontpagemagazine.com and the American Renaissance newsletter. While the federal government rushes to Los Angeles to investigate an incident in which a handcuffed youth was slammed into the hood of a car and punched by an officer, a pall of silence still blankets the horrendous racial murder of four young people whose murderers are now on trial. The difference in the responses to these two stories can hardly be attributed to anything other than the skin color of the perpetrators and the victims involved. Apparently the sexual torture and brutal executions of four promising youngsters is of no interest to the nation's moral guardians, because the victims happen to be white.
Stephen Webster's account of these events provides a revealing window on the disturbing - not to say disgusting -- state of the civil rights delusion in America. The U.S. Justice Department has reported that 85% of all inter-racial violence in America is committed by blacks against whites. But there are apparently no black hate crimes; and there is certainly no white civil rights movement to create sympathy for the victims...
Another example Horowitz provides concerns the murder of Ken Tillery. Never heard of him? Why not?
Everybody in America, for example, knows who James Byrd is, and that he was brutally murdered by three whites in Jasper Texas four years ago. Byrd's lynchers offered him a lift in their pickup truck, beat him and chained him and dragged him to his death. An entire nation was outraged and guilty. The President issued a statement, legislators wrung their hands and the media keened over the inhumanity of the act and what it portended for the country's future.
Four years later - this year in fact - a white man named Ken Tillery, hitched a ride in Jasper, Texas. He was given a lift by four black men who then murdered him to a deafening national silence. Like Byrd, Tillery was held hostage and beaten. Then he was run over and crushed to death. The copycat nature of the crime made it a natural news story. But there was none, save a modest account in the Houston Chronicle, to which nobody paid any attention. This savagery was apparently nothing. The pigments were politically incorrect. It was only some white guy, whose ancestors probably owned slaves.
Another story in this vein was published by Timothy Eagan in the New York Times (though
I found it in its entirety at FrontPage mag; what's up with that?) Police do feel micromanaged when it comes to taking actions against black suspects, partly because of the protests and new rules that can be imposed on them after they take action. In Seattle recently protest organizers were revving up their machines after a black man was shot by a white officer. Eagan continues:
But the protests and the regulations were abruptly put on hold by the killing three weeks ago of a white King County sheriff's deputy by a black man who had a history of run-ins with law enforcement. The deputy, Richard Herzog, was shot after he tried to restrain the man, who had been running naked in traffic. Deputy Herzog used pepper spray, but he was knocked to the ground, lost his weapon to the man and was repeatedly shot in front of nearly 50 people.
The killing has generated a backlash against efforts to make officers more sensitive to race, with officers saying they feel inhibited from fully protecting themselves because of fears of racial recriminations....
The highest-ranking black elected official here, County Executive Ron Sims, said in an interview that he believed the deputy had been inhibited from using force because of fears of racial reprisal. "There's no question race probably had an inhibiting effect," Mr. Sims said.
The question is not whether white-on-black abuse should be reported. Of course it should be, and there is no lack of evidence that a stubborn strain of racism still exists in the fevered minds of hateful lunatics like this Boston couple (go Sox!) that the New York Times says planned to blow up the Holocaust Museum and "black and Jewish landmarks" in the hopes of starting a race war that would leave the Aryan Nation in control.
That kind of stuff should be reported, and is. And not counting the last 100,000 times the video was played, the media really should keep an eye on allegations of police brutality, including those cases where it's racially motivated. That happens in the uglier part of the real world.
What shouldn't happen is denying the facts on the ground. One of those facts is the much higher proportion of black-on-white crime. Another is that national media don't show up when blacks attacks whites any more than Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton do.
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1:49 PM
Security Department This Los Angeles Times story quotes a memo from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who's concerned about valuable intelligence being leaked in the press.
WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned senior military and civilian officials at the Pentagon this week that classified information obtained by the press is being used by Al Qaeda operatives to plan attacks on the United States, according to a memo obtained by The Times. In the July 12 memo, Rumsfeld wrote that leaking of information from the Pentagon to the media "is damaging our country's ability to stop terrorist acts and is putting American lives at risk." He attached the memo to an unclassified CIA report, prepared at his request, saying that Al Qaeda planners "have learned much about our counterterrorist intelligence capabilities from U.S. and foreign media."...
Rumsfeld's memo was prompted by a recent New York Times report on the Pentagon's plans to invade Iraq, a senior Pentagon official who requested anonymity told The Times. The article relied on a classified planning document the paper said it had obtained from a defense official. The report infuriated Rumsfeld, Pentagon officials said.
Here's the New York Times story, but you may have to register for it. Here's the the Dennis Pluchinsky Op-Ed I've linked a few times about trying to get reporters and government officials to take this war seriously.
More from the LA Times today:
Intelligence officials were furious in September when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that the United States had intercepted a call between two associates of Osama bin Laden suggesting their involvement. Intelligence officials said later that the release of the highly classified information caused Al Qaeda operatives to stop using telephones.
According to the CIA report distributed by Rumsfeld, captured fighters have stated that Al Qaeda operatives are extremely security-conscious and have altered their practices in response to what they have learned in the press about Pentagon capabilities.
Public disclosures have "jeopardized highly fragile and very sensitive intelligence capabilities that we require for the successful prosecution of the war against terrorism," the report says.
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9:01 AM
Inside Baseball... A few days ago OmbudsGod blogged about reporters breaking a news embargo on that hormone-replacement study that asserts it causes more problems for women than it solves. Breaking the embargo is also noted in last Sunday's column by ombudsman Michael Getler. Though Getler cites the New York Times as saying the embargo was broken by a "news service," apparently it was a Detroit Free Press reporter, who was subsequently banned from future advance copies of medical studies by the Journal of the American Medical Association. The interesting thing is reporter Patricia Anstett says she got the story from other sources, and as her editor notes, you can't impose an embargo on independent reporting. What undoubtedly happened afterwards is that other reporters followed suit, since the custom is that if the embargo is broken, the floodgates open and everybody files (Getler was chastising his paper for not doing so).
Here's a series of letters from Medianews.org that includes one from JAMA, an email from Anstett and a letter from her editor.
Incidentally, Ombudsgod quotes the Atlanta Constitution ombudsman Mike King as writing that breaking the embargo signals a welcome development that reporters and the pubic need not wait for doctors to pronounce from on high anymore.
[G]etting that news disseminated to the public got hung up on an ancient protocol that holds steadfastly to the notion that doctors need to get such information first and decide for themselves what and when to tell their patients. It is a prescription for control of major medical news stories that, thankfully, many newspapers have begun to reject in cases such as the hormone replacement study.
Malarkey, and I gather OmbudsGod agrees. If any reporter adopts a new policy of breaking embargoes--which give advance copies of lengthy or important documents to reporters so they have the time to be less ignorant--if a reporter decides to break that embargo, they are indeed banned, and rightly so, from getting the information ahead of time.
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Monday, July 15, 2002
8:15 AM
Here's a fun piece at Opinion Journal on the NRO reporter detained at the State Dept. last week.
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5:00 AM
Sins of Omission... There was a very strange story in the Los Angeles Times on July 11 which provides another example of how reporting can seem almost balanced when it's actually a damning distortion. It paints a Bush Administration official as an opponent of Title IX and shamefully neglects to list his record in defending the rights of women as well as men. As you'll see in a moment, its a pretty long record.
Writer Maryann Hudson Harvey's piece has the following hed: Goldstein Concerns Title IX Supporters; Government: Chicago attorney, who has represented plaintiffs challenging sexual discrimination law, is appointed to high post in office that enforces it. You can't read the story without registering at the LA Times, which doesn't cost you anything except time and aggravation. It's strange because it seemingly lacks any news hook, other than the reporter getting a tip from an unnamed source who obviously doesn't like Goldstein.
If leading proponents of Title IX weren't already fearful of the Bush administration's motives last month, when formation of a panel to reevaluate the law was announced, they now have this to consider: Chicago attorney Lou Goldstein, who has represented male athletes in litigation against colleges challenging Title IX, was recently named to a high post in the very office that enforces it....
But as the story notes, "proponents" of Title IX have "now" been able to consider this since April 29, when the guy was appointed. The I-hate-Goldstein source (someone "close to the department") says the position of deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Office for Civil Rights wasn't announced at the time:
"There's a lot of stuff going on and no one is paying attention because they are too wrapped up in the flag," the source said.
Okay, you're off my foxhole list.
The main problem with the story, however, is that it grossly distorts Goldstein's record. Here's what we learn from the Times:
[Goldstein] unsuccessfully represented male soccer players and wrestlers in a reverse sexual discrimination suit against Illinois State University, which dropped the men's teams and added a women's team to comply with Title IX. In a similar suit, he represented male athletes against Miami of Ohio, which eliminated three men's varsity sports to comply with Title IX.
Here's what they left out, according to my contact at the College Sports Council. Goldstein:
*Was the attorney who won a landmark case representing a black basketball player at Creighton who could not read or write after he completed his athletic eligibility.
*Represented female nursing students in a Title IX complaint
*Represented female athletes and forced the creation of a women's intercollegiate team
*Rescued a dropped women's swim team at an Illinois university
*Represented a female African-American basketball player who was being discriminated against at her university
*Sued the Chicago Board of Education for a female high school volleyball player
*Represented a girl who was wrestling on a boys team who did not want to comply with the demand of officials that she cut her hair.
*Coached US girls in international competition in Nowrqy and Canada
*One of the girls he coached in Judo became a two-time Olympian
He did all of this pro bono.
This is a different man than the one described in the story, which is a mess. Slipping in a few quick quotes defending the Administration in general terms doesn't begin to make up for it.
And here's an amazing quote from Donna Lopiano:
"I'm not familiar with Lou Goldstein, but it doesn't surprise me that he was hired," said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation. "It is clear that the Bush administration is seeking a way to weaken Title IX. It was clear when they included a plank on the Republican platform that specifically addressed Title IX."
Don't know him, but I'm sure he's bad. And the plank, as the Times reports in disapproving fashion, supports "an approach to Title IX that would expand women's opportunities without adversely affecting men's teams."
Honestly, there's a certain brand of feminism that just doesn't like the idea of men.
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Sunday, July 14, 2002
9:38 PM
Not In The Post Watch... Courtesy of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a bunch of state attorneys general have written to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft expressing their support and appreciation of his stance that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to bear arms. VCDL:
Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor was joined by 17 other state Attorneys General in a letter Pryor sent to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft supporting his interpretation and enforcement of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The July 8, 2002, letter commends the U.S. Attorney General's "position that 'the text and the original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.' We agree that this is the proper reading of the Second Amendment, and that this policy best protects the fundamental interest of Americans in security and self-preservation." The state Attorneys General offer Ashcroft "our wholehearted support for your efforts." The Alabama Attorney General's letter was signed by the Attorneys General of Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Here's a link to a press release by Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, and the letter itself.
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2:31 PM
Bang The Drum Quickly...Today's effort to keep flogging Harken is an A1 story called Harken Papers Offer Details on Bush Knowledge; Motive for Stock Sale In '90 Remains Unclear. When it doesn't mimic points being made at American Family Voices, much of the story is based on the following:
A confidential Harken chronology, obtained by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, said that 16 days before he sold the stock, Bush was sent the company's "weekly flash report," giving "information provided by subsidiaries regarding estimated historical and projected earnings."
Well, the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity gets a heck of a lot of funding from liberal advocacy groups. From a January, 2001 NRO piece by Stephen Hayes:
Both groups [the other is the Center for Responsive Politics] are funded by several of the largest and most influential foundations on the political left, including The Ford Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Florence Fund, The Joyce Foundation, and The Florence and John Schumann Foundation.
The Post story, by Mike Allen and George Lardner Jr., does save you the trouble of wading through the CPI's documents and chronology, which I'm willing to believe they ably reproduce.
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1:47 PM
Right Wing Conspiracy Research Dept.... The Post's Dan Balz today briefly mentions a group called American Family Voices, which I blogged recently after noticing an NRO piece by Byron York that attributes the resurrection of old Harken Energy stories to AFV. Balz simply notes the anti-Bush ads that AFV has run, and identifies AFV as a "liberal advocacy group." That it is. AFV's president is Michael Lux, which Byron and Balz note is a former Clinton aide. But as York details, AFV heavily funded the Gore presidential campaign and has been trying to make trouble for Bush ever since.
Lux founded the organization in 2000 to be "a strong voice for middle and low income families on economic, health care, and consumer issues." The group got going with $800,000 donated by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. To this day, the union remains AFV's largest single contributor, although Lux says the group also receives money from "other progressive groups and a wide variety of donors."...
Through much of 2001, Lux worked at his Washington consulting firm, Progressive Strategies, while AFV received almost no attention in the press. Then, as 2002 began, the group found a new cause...
The cause was Enron. Lux has developed relationships with reporters and spawned a few web sites. He also tapped a writer whose Harken work appeared in Mother Jones in the 1990s. Then he started pitching the old stories to reporters.
There was no reason to expect that this [June 27] release would receive any more notice than the ones that preceded it, but a short time later, Lux found his words featured in the editorial pages of America's most powerful newspaper. On June 2, five days after the American Family Voices release, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told the story of Bush's stock sale. Krugman quoted Lux's line about the foxes and the chickens — he credited it to thedailyenron.com — and also compared Bush's stock sale, unfavorably, to Martha Stewart's financial troubles. Given a prominent place in the Times, the Harken story had new life...
For example, on Thursday both the Times and the Washington Post ran front-page stories on Bush's two loans from Harken. Both stories tied the loans to Bush's speech on Wall Street, in which he said, "I challenge compensation committees to put an end to all company loans to corporate officers." And both suggested that there was more than a little hypocrisy in Bush's position. The Times said the loans "raised the question of how [Bush's] toughened standards today would have applied to his own corporate experience," while the Post wrote that the "contrast between Bush's record as a business executive and his rhetoric in the face of corporate scandals underscores the challenge his administration faces in trying to credibly foster what he calls 'a new era of integrity in corporate America.'"
The loan story dominated news coverage all day, but, like the insider-trading allegations that had dominated coverage a few days earlier, it was not exactly new. Word of the loans was first reported by U.S. News & World Report in March 1992, as Bush's father began his presidential reelection campaign
But Lux's recent successes has him spooling up other projects, and according to York a new Lux creation called the Progressive Donor Network intends to coordinate efforts by groups like People for the American Way, Emily's List, and the National Abortion Rights Action League:
At its first meeting, network organizers heard from Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, and other party leaders. The meeting also featured appearances from operative/pundits James Carville and Paul Begala.
So this is an anti-Bush, anti-Republican advocacy machine that now has a pretty good line into Media Central.
Lux websites and causes include The Daily Enron and American Family Voices. Lux's American Family apparently does not include white guys, judging from that site's homepage which features very cheerful images of an Asian couple, a black Dad and his daughter, and older white woman. Usually with the union backing, they at least let you throw in a sturdy white guy in a hardhat.
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12:41 PM
If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses... not zebras. That's an old saying supposedly used in medical circles when teaching new doctors how to diagnose symptons. Liza Mundy searches for a much deeper explanation than necessary to explain why last fall's terror attack is known as 9/11:
Why did we not adopt, similarly, a place name for the national innocence that ended last fall? Was it because it happened in planes, in the air, everywhere and nowhere?
I think that's part of it. This was an assault with a strangely un-regional quality; despite the intensity with which the attacks were felt in New York and Washington, they were also experienced by those watching, live, on television. All of America was the target. The attack happened on a single day, a singular day, a day that shocked us not only with the attacks themselves but with the sudden recognition that the forces that caused them had been gathering, unknown to most of us, for a long time. In the same way, those relatively few historical events that are remembered by their dates--July 4th, Cinco de Mayo, Juneteenth--are days when something that had been coming for a long time happened; the social order had been changing, but now the change burst into the open. Nine-eleven is the dark opposite of those celebratory occasions
Geez Louise, it's nothing more than the following, which Mundy acknoweldges but largely dismisses:
Granted, there is some especially odd thing about these numerals; it is weird that 911 is what people punched on their cell phones, often in vain, to seek help that day.
9/11. 911. National emergency, call for help, headline writer's dream. End of column.
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Saturday, July 13, 2002
12:08 PM
The Truth Will Out... Free For All writer Mike Fishkin shares A City Slicker's incredulity over high poll ratings for Dennis the Menace:
Comic Demographics
I have just perused the results of your comics poll, and I must say I am baffled [Comics, July 7]. All groups of men from ages 19 to 55 pick "Dennis the Menace" as their favorite. Several of these groups also rank "Mary Worth" in their top five. This cannot be possible in the real world. Who are these men? I demand accountability -- I cannot believe that my fellow men of the Washington area have this kind of taste in comics. Good grief -- even women barely mentioned "Mary Worth." I can only believe that these results have been tampered with by unknown forces to depict Washington men as vapid ninnies. By the way, I like "Doonesbury," "Pickles" and "Beetle Bailey.
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12:04 PM
Good writing: Columnist Lisa de Moraes
CNN has figured out what to do about all those news stories comparing its ratings with Fox News Channel's.
Tell reporters to stop.
CNN must have sent its executives to the State Dept. School of Communications.
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11:35 AM
Ombudsgod notes that Post ombudsman Michael Getler raps his paper for reporting too late on a study showing hormone-replacement therapy does more harm than good, then cites another source saying the study is baloney anyway. Ombudsgod:
John Brignell, of British based Number Watch, has taken a look at the study and concluded: "[A]ll this panic is caused by experimental results that are just about exactly what you would expect if there were no causal effect at all."
In other words, the real story appears to be that there was no story, just junk science and media hype that is unnecessarily scaring people.
I haven't followed the argument, so damned if I know.
There are one or two other items in Getler's Sunday column (published in advance online) worth noting, but since the golf course beckons I'll blog just one for now: Getler acknolwedges the botched Pakistani airlift story, but seems unnecessarily serene about its main failing. Getler:
At the bottom of the front page that same day, July 10, another story, datelined New York, said, "U.S. Deported 131 Pakistanis in Secret Airlift." This was a fascinating tale about the airlift, which took place June 26. But on June 27, the Pakistani Embassy in Washington put out a press release describing the operation, and on July 1 the Washington Times topped its Embassy Row diplomatic column with it. The Post story was bigger and better. But it was presented as something of a scoop, apparently because The Post was unaware of the press release and the Times item had not been spotted. A Post editor said that this was an oversight and that the Times would have been given credit had they known about it.
Blogged here July 11. Oh, and I didn't notice it, the Washington Times did. I credit Getler for facing this one, but giving front-page billing to a phony "secret" being revealed is more boneheaded than Getler seems to recognize. Maybe we should just detain reporter Steve Fainaru in the New York consulate for a half-hour or so, to send a message.
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9:18 AM
UPI has a few more details on the case. That classified cable business really got their backs up. As UPI reports:
"I do understand he was stopped and he was questioned because he had announced on a microphone that he was in possession of a classified cable," a senior State Department official said Friday. "None of us are allowed to take classified information out of the building." This official added, "Announcing to all the cameras that you have a classified cable on the assumption you are not authorized to have it certainly invites the guards to do their duty." Indeed, the signs at the entrance of the building announce that guards may search individuals before entering or leaving. Mowbray has been one of the fiercest critics of the State Department's consular affairs program, testifying before Congress and writing for the National Review Online on the subject of how embassies issue visas.
I guess they've been waiting for a chance to get back at this guy.
And does anybody here know the State Dept. official who's a little shaky over the meaning of the word "detained?" Because this would really help him:
Two diplomatic security officials told UPI later that instructions were issued to guards at the 23rd Street entrance to the building not to allow Mowbray to leave without responding to questions.
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8:46 AM
Fourth Amendment Refresher Course... The Style section has more details on the State Dept.'s gross bumbling yesterday when it detained National Review reporter Joel Mowbray. They were clearly trying to bully the 26-year-old reporter, partly over a classified cable he was quoting from. You've seen me rail about the stupidity of leaking intelligence and mlitary information in these perilous times, but Mowbray's cable is a great of example of how reporters (and sources) can serve the public interest by exposing official lies. And State was pissed because they got caught lying, among other things, about the reason for the dismissal of Assistant Secretary Mary Ryan, who ran the clueless visa program. From the Post earlier this week, quoting the same cable for which Mowbray was detained:
One program under Ryan's watch that generated congressional ire was something called "Visa Express," which permitted travel agents in Saudi Arabia to forward visa applications for residents in Saudi Arabia. Three of the Sept. 11 hijackers used the program and were not interviewed by a U.S. official when they received their visas. State Department officials have repeatedly defended the program, including yesterday, saying it was merely a clerical function to ease overcrowding. State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the only change made in the program in response to the criticism is that it will no longer be called "Visa Express." However, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert W. Jordan, cabled the State Department this week that he had decided to begin interviewing all adult applicants and eliminate the role of travel agencies in forwarding visa applications. "I am deeply troubled about the prevailing perception in the media and within Congress and possibly the American public at large that our current practices represent a shameful and inadequate effort on our part," Jordan wrote.
A bit different from Secretary of State Colin Powell's official explanation that it was part of a normal personnel rotation for Jordan to be removed. Fine, they have every right to be angry. But "angry State Dept. officials" is usually not considered ground for barring the free movement of American citizens. Hey, maybe it's part of the new world order under the International Criminal Court.
Added a senior department official: "I don't know what the meaning of 'detained' is. He was stopped by the guards and questioned about the cable."
Well, Mr. Clinton, "stopped by guards" is a clue. Also the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
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Friday, July 12, 2002
11:35 PM
Utterly Clueless State Dept.... This is just so numbskulled, I had to post it. From NRO. Their reporter, Joel Mowbray, has written about State's shameful mishandling of visa responsibilities. Mowbray attended a press conference today and made the unforgiveable error of questioning the official, laundered account of the day.
Mowbray had challenged [spokesman Richard] Boucher on his account of events at State this week, which had to fire its longest-serving career diplomat in response to the congressional uproar created by Mowbray's reporting on the "Visa Express" program (the program gives the Saudis easy access to U.S. visas — see Mowbray's reporting here.
Mowbray read from a classified cable that had been leaked to him and that contradicted Boucher's spin (both Mowbray and the Washington Post quoted from the cable earlier this week). State Department officials were not amused. Very not amused.
When Mowbray was leaving the briefing, a State Department official, accompanied by four guards, asked him to stay to answer a few questions. Mowbray said he could come back later. The official said, no, they wanted him to answer a few questions immediately.
When Mowbray began to get the feeling that he couldn't leave even if he wanted to, he asked, "Am I being detained?"
When a diplomatic security official — who had showed up on the scene — told him "no," Mowbray announced that he was leaving.
At which point, the guard stepped in front of Mowbray and said, "Now, you're being detained."
The guards wouldn't let him leave until Mowbray had called a lawyer from his cell phone and National Review had called the State Department's press office to ask what was happening — about a half-an-hour after the run-in began.
When NRO contacted an official in the State Department's press office later this afternoon to ask if State had a comment on the incident, she said, "He wasn't detained!"
Asked to elaborate, the press official continued, "I wasn't there! I don't know what happened!"
But for at least a few minutes, Mowbray had a harder time leaving the State Department than many Saudis have had entering the country.
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3:06 PM
There is none better: Among political journals, it doesn't get any better than City Journal, published by The Manhattan Institute. The summer issue is out, and importantly for us surfers, available online. Everybody should read every issue of City Journal and commit it to memory.
If that's too taxing, at least read this Victor Davis Hanson essay called The Civic Education America Needs. Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture and a National Review contributor, talks about the kind of education he and his multiglot classmates received. It sounds a lot like mine, though his classes were much more diverse:
The idea of civic education was that to survive in an often hostile world as well as to keep our democracy vibrant, free Americans had not only to be materially successful but also had to learn in the very first years of school those self-evident truths on which our unique country rests—unlike almost all other nations, which are founded on a shared race, religion, or birthplace.
Going to school in multiracial rural California during the early 1960s, I did not merely hear about the checks and balances of the Constitution or learn a repertoire of patriotic songs and brief life stories of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. My classmates and I also developed a sense of American exceptionalism—a deep appreciation for just how distinctive the culture of the United States had proved to be over two centuries and more, and how it belonged to and benefited all of us. After the flag salute and the singing of “America the Beautiful” or “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in our classroom decked with silhouette figures of Jefferson, the Wright brothers, and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as our own celebratory papier-mâché renditions of themes of the current American holidays, we took up group discussions about our own values and culture, the only common bonds among students who looked quite different from one another and spoke English with a variety of accents.
The Civil War? As fifth-graders we learned that thousands of Americans had died to end an evil institution that was as old as civilization itself. We all admired the romance and pluck of the South. We even drew the “Stars and Bars,” learned to sing “Dixie,” and talked about the Missouri Compromise. Nevertheless we all concluded that the Confederate cause, inseparable from slavery, was morally wrong and to be defeated, through bloodshed if need be.
Unions? Our seventh-grade history teacher sketched out in harrowing detail the struggles of the coal miners and steelworkers. He told us that in a free and capitalist society, the poor always had to organize to protect their rights against the powerful. Other mentors enlightened us pre-teens about the sometimes arduous ordeal of the immigrants—the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, the Mexicans—not to confirm that America was racist and oppressive, but to explain that because our homeland was more tolerant and more welcoming than other countries, more filled with opportunity and liberty, most of our parents and grandparents wanted to live here, and in turn had to take it upon themselves to improve what they found wanting. People, we learned, vote with their feet—and so for a reason had cast their lot to come here.
The class was about 65 percent Mexican-American, 10 percent Asian and African-American, the rest mostly poor rural white whose parents had fled the Dust Bowl. Yet I cannot recall a single reference by our teacher, a native Oklahoman, to race, class, or gender, which might so easily have divided us. Instead, we repeatedly heard that President Lincoln, Mark Twain, and John Henry belonged to a heritage we all shared—that we natives had no more claim on FDR or Guadalcanal than did the new arrivals from Oaxaca or the Punjab....
Today we teach either nothing significant about history, or the absurd idea that all nations are equally good, or failing that the ahistorical belief that the U.S. is uniquely bad.
Immigrants are not only great for America, they are necessary for America. The problem of immigration is not that it's happening, but that we've abandoned the idea of assimilation and the creation of a positive national ideal. The most urgent nation-building mission that exists today is the one within our own borders.
Other gems online at City Journal include The End Of Herstory, Kay S. Hymowitz's look at feminism's biggest problem--women--and The Black Cops You Never Hear About, by Heather Mac Donald, on black officers who don't buy the notion that most policing is racist:
...I set out to talk to black cops and commanders from eight police departments across the country about why they became policemen and how they view today’s policing controversies. What I found was a bracing commitment to law and order, a resounding rejection of anti-cop propaganda, and a conviction that racial politics are a tragic drag on black progress. The thoroughly mainstream views of these black cops are a reminder that invisible behind the antics of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are many black citizens who share the commonsense values of most Americans.
So just read the whole issue and I promise you'll become much more intelligent and attractive.
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12:32 PM
What's the big deal about Harken? asks.... The Washington Post editorial page. The editorial examines and dismisses the significance of various actions by President Bush when he was a Harken executive, the subject of various front-page stories in the Post and elsewhere:
There are cases in which an official's past dealings deserve to become a public issue: It will be interesting to see what emerges from the SEC's investigation into Halliburton, the company that Vice President Cheney headed until 2000. But the Harken story took place years ago. It has already been investigated and aired. It affected far fewer people than the billion-dollar scandals that have been in the news lately. Congress's focus must now be on preventing more corporate dishonesty, not on Harken.
The real scandal isn't Harken, the Post says, but rather that he "claims to be outraged by corporate misbehavior" but doesn't back a bill the paper thinks would help.
It is no accident, as the communists used to say, that the Harken tempest is taking place now. Check out this NRO piece on the coordinated effort by Bush opponents to ressurrect allegations that had been examined and dismissed before:
...A look at recent events suggests that the Harken resurrection was the result of a well-planned, well-funded, and well-executed campaign to damage the president politically at a time when his approval ratings seemed almost unchallengeably high. Those involved in the effort include former officials in the Clinton White House, veterans of liberal interest groups, sympathetic journalists, and some of the nation's richest labor unions.
The writer, National Review White House correspondent Byron York, ain't just guessing. It's worth a read.
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8:31 AM
Tough to beat this lede in Donna Britt's Metro column:
Michael Jackson is black. Again
Britt's writing about Jackson's weird diatribe against the racism of the music industry and longtime mogul friend, Sony Music Chairman Tommy Mottola. Even Al Sharpton doesn't see it, which, who knew, places Michael Jackson to the left of Al Sharpton.
Britt, who happened to know the Jacksons as a kid, is annoyed at black celebrities who wrap themselves in blackness after years of celebrating its irrelevance. She points to O.J. Simpson, Jackson, and Clarence Thomas:
Think of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas -- with his white wife, church and congressional sponsor -- screaming "high-tech lynching" after a black woman said he'd harassed her....Many thought Thomas's Senate hearing travails would "sensitize" the ultraconservative to black people's problems. That worked out well.
Race is such a discombobulated mess in this country. For now I'll just say it's startling to notice how many people cannot accept the idea that conservative principles are intended to ease every people's problems, even, stay with me here, black people's. That's a different way of looking at things than hoping that tough confirmation hearings would turn somebody into a Democrat.
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Thursday, July 11, 2002
9:52 PM
And now to the Times again, once more with feeling... The Washington Times owned this story on the falsification of wildlife data concerning the spotted owl, lynx and other animals, starting last spring, as I blogged (that's 100 years ago in blogtime). The Post has virtually ignored the story; it hinges on environmentalists making things up so habitats can be seized and permanently protected. Anyway, the Times reports on a new bill that would require decisions like those to be based on hard data:
The House Resources Committee yesterday approved a bill strictly defining the use of science in enforcing the Endangered Species Act, a move prompted in part by reports in The Washington Times about a fraudulent study on lynx habitat. Recent fiascoes involving the act — including the Canada lynx fraud and federal mismanagement of the Klamath Basin in Oregon — underscore the law's excessive power and the need to base decisions on empirical data instead of federal guesswork, sponsors of the legislation said. The measure passed 22-18 and now goes to the House floor for final consideration...
Biologists in Washington state falsely labeled hair samples of the threatened lynx as having come from national forests as part of a national habitat study, The Washington Times first reported and government investigations confirmed. Water was cut off last summer to more than 1,000 farmers in the Klamath Basin of California and Oregon to protect endangered fish species. But a peer review by the National Academy of Science found the reasoning behind the decision was not based on sound science. The water was returned this summer, but the basin's economy suffered and many farmers went bankrupt...
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9:32 PM
Saudi Academy Epilogue... One of the few times the Post has questioned whether all immigrant and Muslim activity is a happy rainbow wonderland was in a January story about the Saudi Islamic Academy, a school in Northern Virginia. That really is too far back in the Post archives to raid, but it exposed outrages including the use of textbooks that obliterated Israel from maps of the Middle East, and reported allegations of what I guess you'd call Hate Studies, where students were taught about the finer points of hating Jews. Today's story is called Muslim School Withdraws From Association; Saudi-Funded Academy Loses Accreditation; Va. Agency Had Raised Questions, and it goes something like this:
The Saudi Islamic Academy has withdrawn its membership from a respected association of private schools in Virginia and has lost its accreditation with the group after the organization asked questions about how the academy is funded and governed, sources close to the decision said... Another accrediting group is also reviewing its relationship with the school, according to an organization official..
The association's standards require that the governing board be independent, that the administration be stable and that funding not come primarily from a single source. The Saudi academy has in recent years had significant turnover in administration and teaching staff. It has a governing board that is headed by the Saudi ambassador to the United States and says much of its funding comes from the Saudi government.
Reporter Valerie Strauss notes the earlier Post story but her sources discount it:
The Washington Post in January reported that some Islamic studies classes at the school use Saudi Arabian textbooks that promote hatred of other religions. However, the curricular concerns were not part of the questioning that led to the withdrawal, sources said. Earlier this year, B. Mont Bush, director of accreditation services for the Secondary and Middle School Commission of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, said he would be concerned if the school was teaching hatred.
He didn't seem too riled up about it, though, as I recall.
In contrast to the Washington Post, which tiptoes around stories like that once every vernal equinox, the Times smells a fresh trail and keeps at it. Gertz, below, is one example. Militant Muslims seek Virginia base, which ran July 1, is another.
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9:12 PM
Gertz Strikes Again... Partly it's superb sources, but stories like this one, 5,000 in U.S. suspected of ties to al Qaeda, are more likely to appear in the Times because it requires challenging the status of immigrants, legal and otherwise, which goes against the grain of the Post. Unless something changes, you're just not going to see alot of enterprise for digging into the domestic activities of Muslims or any other group designated for special understanding in the multicultural zone. Fortunately, that doesn't slow down Gertz:
U.S. intelligence agencies are watching several groups of Middle Eastern men thought to be part of an infrastructure of as many as 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters in the United States, The Washington Times has learned. Small groups of about a half-dozen men in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta are under surveillance by FBI and other intelligence agencies and are thought to be part of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, said intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In one case, five men of Middle Eastern origin rented rooms in Seattle and conducted activities that officials would not specify but called unusual....
Earlier this year, U.S. government officials put al Qaeda numbers in the United States at more than 100 active members with hundreds of sympathizers. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials detected signs of preparations for an attack against a cruise ship in Los Angeles in late May. Two men were spotted at the Port of Los Angeles World Cruise Center in San Pedro, Calif., about 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, U.S. law enforcement officials said.
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9:00 PM
More Bang For The Buck..., or How to be better educated for 15 cents less... I like the Washington Times' version of the International Criminal Court story better than the Post's, which is written as if only the Bush Administration and mean countries like China and Russia have reservations about the ICC.
The Times gave a much fuller picture:
Some nations of the Security Council welcomed the latest U.S. offer. But the proposal threatened to provoke a split between the administration and a group of prominent U.S. senators. In a letter sent last night to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Republican Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and John W. Warner and George Allen of Virginia, and Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia argued that nothing less than a permanent exemption was satisfactory...
The new U.S. draft... was proposed as a stand-alone resolution rather than an insertion into a resolution renewing the mission in Bosnia, which expires Monday. This would avoid having a crisis over each of the 15 peacekeeping missions as they come up for renewal. But the senators objected even to the tougher language being proposed earlier by the administration...
"For the sake of our service members and officials, now and in the future, the [Bosnia] mandate renewal must completely and permanently immunize American peacekeeping personnel from the ICC jurisdiction," they wrote.
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8:20 PM
Not In The Post Watch, or Around The World With the Washington Times. Several items today contrasting the two papers, which I'll blog briefly in series.
The Times' Inside the Beltway column ponders the meaning of "secret":
It was front page news in The Washington Post yesterday: "U.S. Deported 131 Pakistanis In Secret Airlift." Except that this "secret airlift" was first reported in James Morrison's "Embassy Row" column on Page A16 of The Washington Times on July 1. The airlift was so secret, in fact, that it was announced in a June 27 news release from the Pakistani Embassy. "If it was secret, we never would have issued the press release," said Asad Hayauddin, press attache at the embassy...
"This policy ensures that Pakistani nationals are treated fairly and that those in detention for visa violations are expatriated quickly," the Pakistani Embassy explained in its press release. Mr. Hayauddin professed to being mystified about why The Post would call the deportations "secret" or report them on Page One two weeks after the event had been announced in a news release. "I don't know any reason why," he said...
Post Ombudsman Michael Getler doesn't know why, either. The Times called about it, and he fessed up: . "I don't know. I can't answer that." Maybe in this Sunday's column?
The Times stumbled a little bit on this one too, though. It ran a UPI dispatch on July 10 citing the Washington Post story. It recounts most of the main facts in the Post story but omits the word "secret." And it doesn't mention the Times' earlier July 1 story, which I can't link or read since it's in $Archive Land$.
UPDATE: Huh, it may be searchable, but I can't find it. The Times' search function confuses me--can you tell?--but it does go back at least that far outside the payola archive. Separately, I wonder whether the UPI dispatch noted above ran only in the online version, which helps explain how the Inside the Beltway's John McCaslin saw the mistake in the Post but not the Post story, sans "secret," in his own paper.
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8:40 AM
Alarming development on the International Criminal Court in a Colum Lynch story, U.S. Drops Demand for War Court Immunity
UNITED NATIONS, July 10 -- The Bush administration agreed today to drop its demand that the U.N. Security Council grant Americans serving in U.N. peacekeeping missions permanent immunity from the international war crimes tribunal.U.S. officials said they are seeking a temporary exemption from prosecution that would buy the United States time to negotiate bilateral accords and military agreements barring individual governments from surrendering U.S. nationals to the International Criminal Court.
But it is a significant reversal, as Lynch reports, and the U.N. knows it:
U.N. diplomats said the turnaround reflected Washington's failure to calculate the intensity of international support for the court, particularly from European governments, and its reluctance to jeopardize U.N.-approved missions that serve U.S. interests.
Given our reluctance to unilaterally abandon global peacekeeping missions that only we can conduct despite endless lectures from the Europeans, there may still be a way to finesse all this:
A U.S. resolution, presented today to the 15-nation council, would go much further, providing a blanket deferral from prosecution for one year to all nationals from countries that have not ratified the International Criminal Court. The resolution also calls on the council to express its intention to renew the deferral each year.
I guess this means we could fly somebody out of town before he or she was seized by an unelected foreign tribunal whose traditions are reflected in a U.N. Security Council that includes terrorist-sponsor Syria.
The [American] proposal failed to satisfy the court's strongest advocates, who maintained that any exemption not explicitly sanctioned by the tribunal would undermine its integrity. Canada's U.N. ambassador, Paul Heinbecker, said any exemption for American nationals would "send an unacceptable message that some people -- peacekeepers -- are above the law."
Above what law? The ICC is created by international treaty, certainly not by a law that most Americans willingly would submit to or endorse if they had a chance to vote for it. Some people seem to think we already have world government. For the sake of civil liberties, thank God we don't.
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8:39 AM
Surprised the hell out of me.... The House passed a bill that would arm pilots with handguns by a 310-113 vote. What makes it even more amazing is a dramatic change to the bill during the floor debate. The original bill called for just 250 pilots to be trained and armed at first, ramping up over two years to just 1,400 pilots, a minuscule fraction of the total. But a Democrat, Peter DeFazio of Oregon, proposed an amendment permitting all pilots to be armed. And it passed. Who knows what will happen in the Senate. Sen. Ernest Hollings is the chairman of the committee that would normally vet such a bill, but he won't hold hearings on it. The Sara Kehaulani Goo story says there are other ways to get it passed, and that even Majority Leader Tom Daschle isn't sure which way to go. Last night, Sen. Barbara Boxer, very much a California Democrat, said she supports it. Amazing. But the Transportation Department and President Bush still oppose it.
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Wednesday, July 10, 2002
5:56 PM
Good v. Evil... Eugene Volokh posts part of a Mark Steyn column titled Whatever you do, don't call it a hate crime. Steyn's writing about the FBI's unnecessary hesitation to call Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohammed Hayadet a terrorist or to say he committed a hate crime when he gunned down two people (and surely was hoping for more) at the LAX El Al counter:
But let's take the Feds at their word when they insist there's "no connection" between the LAX killer and any terrorist organizations. In its way, that's even more disturbing. Mr. Hadayet doesn't fit the poverty-breeds-desperation-breeds-resentment routine: He lived in a prosperous L.A. suburb and ran his own business. America had been good to him, at least when compared with the economic basket-case he emigrated from. On July 4th, he had plenty of reasons to get out the bunting and firecrackers. Instead, he went Jew-killing.
Osama and al-Qaeda are a small problem, which since September 11th has been managed about as well as can be expected. But the broader culture of "intolerance" in certain unassimilated communities is a potentially much bigger problem. You win wars not just by bombing but by argument, too: Churchill understood this; he characterized the enemy as evil, because they were and because it was important for the British people to understand this if they were to muster the will to see the war through. In Vietnam, the U.S. lost the rhetorical ground to Jane Fonda and co., and wound up losing the war, too. It's critical that the same thing does not happen here. The organizations that purport to represent Muslims in North America and Europe have their own excuses for turning a blind eye to the torrent of hate from respectable sources within the Muslim world -- mosques, media, government. There's no reason why the FBI and other U.S. agencies should sign on to their fictions.
Steyn's a gem, and this piece explains better than I could the significance of President Bush's clarity on the war, as well as the puzzlement and sheer embarassment by others over stark bracing ideas like good and evil.
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1:39 PM
And speaking of Measures Not Likely To End Abuses, I note the lede:
The world according to George W. Bush is often portrayed as a matter of good and evil, you're either with us or against us. Yesterday, he brought the same approach to issues of corporate ethics and responsibility.
The writer is Steven Pearlstein, and it feels as if concepts of good and evil are somehow out of place. So I quote a Jonah Goldberg item that's somewhere on NRO but also, excerpted today, in the Washington Times:
"Some ideas are dangerous. If you are a reasonable person, you will concede this point — even if you disagree with me on which ideas were dangerous. My list includes those notions which constitute the cores of Nazism, Stalinism, communism, postmodernism, Maoism, relativism, scientific socialism, Hale-Boppism, running-with-scissorsism, et al.
"For lots of Americans, the idea that there are no objective standards of truth or morality is incredibly sophisticated and intelligent. The authors who write the clever novels, the film directors who get awards and rave reviews for blurring the lines between good and evil, the professors who claim George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are morally indistinguishable: These are the 'thoughtful people' in our culture. Meanwhile, the people who talk in terms of right and wrong are ridiculed by the sophisticates...
"There are legions out there who believe postmodernism means there is no truth, no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. They believe it because they either misunderstood [Stanley] Fish and his disciples or because they understood them all too well."
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1:30 PM
Huh, I see the Post's outside homepage headline on the Bush speech is now headlined Plan May Not End Abuses, but they've kept Measures Not Likely To End Abuses on the story itself inside.
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12:37 PM
Tape at 11....and 12 and 1 and 2.... I like NRO's Jack Dunphy on the tape of an officer roughing up a suspect in Inglewood, Calif.
It seems plain from watching the videotape that Jeremy Morse, the Inglewood police officer at the center of the controversy, used excessive force when taking Donovan Jackson into custody. Morse, who looks like a man who knows his way around the weight room, can be seen picking Jackson up from the ground and slamming him forcefully onto the trunk lid of a police car. While Jackson is still bent over the car, Morse strikes him in the face with a closed fist. He is then restrained by a fellow Inglewood officer when it appears he is about to hit Jackson again.
Okay, it looks bad, and if the investigation reveals it to be as bad as it looks, then Morse deserves whatever fate the criminal- and civil- justice systems might mete out.
Still, much remains to be learned. In the video, Officer Morse can be seen bleeding from a cut near his left ear. If it was Jackson who caused the cut, he is not the cherubic little lamb his supporters are so eager to present. The oft-repeated claims that Jackson was just standing there when he was set upon by the officers strike me as preposterous, as do the inevitable reports that officers used the "N-word." I won't surrender my credibility by claiming I've never heard a cop use the word, but I strongly doubt anyone used it on Jackson that day.... For a cop to use the word in a busy gas station, on a busy street, in front of officers he doesn't know is all but unthinkable. In police work these days, it's almost better to be accused of killing someone than calling him a you-know-what....
Good column, read it all. Dunphy is an LA cop who writes for NRO under a nom de cyber. See, it isn't just me (and MediaMinded and The Truth Laid Bear and etc.)
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8:13 AM
The Post announces Bush wasted his time in yesterday's corporate-abuse speech in the story Measures Not Likely To End Abuses. At least it's labeled "Analysis."
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Tuesday, July 09, 2002
10:46 PM
Not In The Post Watch... The Post seems oddly quiet about Louis Farrakhan's Appeasement Tour of Iraq, covered by many including The Washington Times in Iraq says Farrakhan tells of U.S. Muslims' support:
DAMASCUS, Syria — Iraq's state-run media has quoted Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as saying during a visit to Baghdad that American Muslims are praying for an Iraqi victory in a war with the United States.
That may be, but why is Farrakhan pretending to speak for American Muslims? The Nation of Islam bears virtually no fidelity to Islam.
As for Farrakhan's trip, I have two words for you: Jane Fonda
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10:15 PM
Hitch Goes Off The Rails on a piece about the Catholic Church and the sex-abuse scandal. I noticed it while surfing through Eleven Day Empire which in turn notes Eric Alterman noting Christopher Hitchens. The latter has done stunning work in trying to slap some sense into leftists who, unlike himself, can't tell the difference between Western policies that groan for change and the plain, inexcusable evil of Sept. 11.
But Hitchens loses it in Pedophilia's Double Standard, saying that the Catholic belief system, something about the essence of the Church itself, positively mandated pedophilia.
No doubt there are some secular institutions, such as prisons, where the incidence of sexual torture and rape is, so to speak, part of the system. But even these places take some care to protect the underage from predators. What continually strikes the reader of each successive case involving the churches is that the ghastly recurrence is truly systematic, if not indeed routine. I do not wish to seem sectarian, but I will risk the accusation. The Protestant churches and some prominent synagogues in Florida and New York appear to have been bad enough, in resorting at once to denial and to cover-up. The Roman Catholic Church, however, has been behaving as if, without the opportunity for sex with the underage, its whole ministry would collapse.
Hitchens seems unaware of several credible studies that find no higher incidence of pedophilia in the Catholic Church than in other institutions and other parts of society. And he makes the very basic error of sticking with "pedophilia" as the chief crime, ignoring as most in mainstream and liberal circles do that this is largely a gay sex-abuse scandal and that many if not most of the victims are pubescent teen boys. This is about something that has cracked in gay culture, finding a home in some precincts of the Catholic Church that followed its faith not too much but spectacularly too little.
He's rightly disgusted by the serene manner in which many church leaders have encountered this scandal and the lack of steps to truly remedy it. Then:
It is quite obvious that, with recidivism at this level, one must look to the actual practices of the Catholic Church. The celibacy requirement, which is peculiar to Catholic Christians, is obviously a part of it.
Hitchens is not very well informed. Celibacy does not cause sex abuse.
Moving along the continuum of priestly and episcopal hierarchy, one finds elderly but somehow useless men who may never have abused a child themselves, but cannot quite see why there is any outcry. I wager that they would not act like this if they had had the chance to be fathers or grandfathers themselves.
This is just dumb. Out in the wider world, fathers and grandfathers unfortunately commit the same crimes. (And incidentally, when it comes to abusing kids, men commit most sexual abuse; women most violent physical abuse).
Hitchens, of course, is famous for many things including his debunking book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. I haven't read the book. Everyone should be challenged and one of Hitchen's virtues is fearlessness; he'll take on anything.
A reader who liked it:
The reason it is important to read this book - and important to find out if Hitchens' allegations are true - is because Mother Teresa was a very powerful woman who set up a series of medical facilities which are still in operation. One of Hitchens' most disturbing criticisms - which has since been confirmed by former members of the Congregation - is that the millions of dollars' worth of donations sent to Mother Teresa by people like you and me were NEVER used to make these clinics more sanitary or to provide basic medical care for the indigent people who arrived at their doorstep. The reason, Hitchens says, that Mother Teresa is known for her work with the dying is that so many people died in her clinics! Listen, folks, if even *one* person died unnecessarily, that's one too many and more than enough justification for Hitchens to conduct this long-overdue investigation!
A reader who didn't:
Mr. Hitchens, who understands nothing of Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular, has done a little research with the apparent intent of proving his preconceptions. He fails. As always, his writing is clever but too obviously self-impressed. He is rarely worth reading, and this book is probably the most worthless of anything he has published. Read it only if you hate good people and want to be supported in your hatred.
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9:21 PM
Yucca Mountain bill passes in Senate.... but apparently I'm going to have to keep an eye on Postie Eric Pianin, who wrote this story with Helen Dewar before the Senate voted today to designate that Nevada site as the repository for nuclear waste.
In Nuclear Waste Site Debate, Visions of Transport Disaster
Yucca Mountain's Foes Cite Fears of Terrorism and Spills
Bylines, June 8 date, then this:
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) says her "worst nightmare" has terrorists blowing up a truckload of lethal nuclear waste and contaminating a heavily populated stretch of Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Nevada. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) sees danger in moving thousands of tons of nuclear waste through Chicago's dense hub of railways and highways or, "God forbid," on barges crossing the Great Lakes or traveling on the Mississippi River. And Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) dreads a repeat of last year's Baltimore rail tunnel accident and fire, but this time conceivably involving spent fuel from Maryland's Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant. "We cannot risk this happening with nuclear cargo," she said.
The story gives alot more room to opponents than supporters, but it looks as if you can figure out what's going on in the world. But Ramesh Ponnuru of NRO/The Corner points to a Weekly Standard piece by Stephen Hayes attacking Pianin, and Ponnuru himself says Pianin is "one of the Post’s worst, most biased reporters. (A few years ago, a top aide to the House Republican leadership mentioned to me that Pianin was the only reporter he had ever thrown out of his office.)"
Hayes:
Earlier this spring (in Nevada Goes Nuclear), I asked the Las Vegas PR whiz how he planned to turn the world against storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. He answered with one word: transportation. Then he elaborated. "We're not trying to scare people, but these shipments are vulnerable to terrorists and, potentially, spills. This waste isn't liquid and it's not going to get into the water, but a spill would have serious health effects," he argues. "These are 3,000 to 4,000 terrorist targets, and I don't mean that as a scare tactic."...
Brown and other Yucca Mountain foes could not have imagined an article more helpful to their case than Eric Pianin and Helen Dewar's in yesterday's Washington Post. And the timing is superb, since the Senate prepares to vote this week on the project's fate. The headline offers a clue: "In Nuclear Waste Site Debate, Visions of Transport Disaster: Yucca Mountain's Foes Cite Fears of Terrorism and Spills."
The article opens with not one, but three U.S. senators musing aloud about the likelihood of catastrophic spills. It goes on from there....
What the authors don't discuss is why opponents of Yucca Mountain changed their approach. That's no small oversight--the enviros and other scaremongers have essentially lost the scientific arguments. And, of course, arguments about contaminated water and design safety necessarily appeal most directly to those living in the areas that could be affected. Focusing on transportation risks accomplishes two things: It moves beyond site-specific science and, more important, allows opponents to scare people from coast-to-coast.
The Post reporters lend credence to the approach favored by Yucca Mountain opponents in another way, by arguing that the opponents simply want "to store the waste where it is, in leak-proof steel and concrete cylinders, under increased security."
Who could possibly oppose "leak-proof" storage? What the Post reporters fail to mention is that the storage casks they describe as "leak-proof" are significantly weaker and less safe than the casks used to transport the waste...
This is superb analysis. I read the Yucca story and didn't think too much of it--slanted to the opposition, yes, but I could see that one side was saying transport was dangerous, another side said it wasn't. What Hayes points out is the decisive missing context:
1. For years, opponents said the storage site was too dangerous, but they didn't have enough science to back them so they're changing the subject.
2. Storage vessels on site are more vulnerable to damaging people and the environment than what they'll be transported in.
3. (Not referenced above) Environmentalists' ultimate goal is to shut down nuclear power in the U.S., since to keep the plants running we have to start moving the waste now.
No. 3 would have been nice but points one and two are essential, and I'm afraid it confirms my theory of the Post.
By the way, the story also points out that opponents have published detailed maps of the routes the radioactive shipments will follow. Classic conflict of values; citizens have a right to know what their country is doing to them, and everybody collectively has a right to be protected against the results of a terrorist attack based on that information. But there's no acknowledgement in the story that there's any conflict here at all, and I gotta wonder how detailed this information is:
"If the terrorists miss the 10:30 truck, they can pick up the 1:30 truck -- it will be that simple," said Fred Dilger, a transportation and anti-terrorism adviser to Nevada's Clark County.
Well, yeah, now it will be.
The Ramesh Ponnuru post has four other links on alleged Pianin offenses.
Okay fine, here they are, One and Two and Three and Four. The last one seems most pointed: Pianin Strikes Again / Reporter Eric Pianin lives up to his reputation. By NR's John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
Don't forget you can open new windows to all these links and not leave my site by right-clicking.
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1:39 PM
Church and State... Reader Bruce Reinstein and I are having a nice little discussion on church-and-state issues in the comments section of my Declaration-of-Independence post below. You can't see it as I write this blog, because at 1:40 p.m. on Tuesday Blogger is continuing a long run of instability and my comments tags, courtesy of YACCS, are not showing up. They shall come back. I won't go on at too much length about his comments because he's well equipped to speak for himself. But his observations reminded me that I hadn't commented much on the Pledge of Allegiance ruling by the Ninth Circuit that said it violates the establishment clause of the Constitution because it includes the word "God."
Briefly, I noted on June 26 this Post story that quotes blogger and scholar Eugene Volokh:
"It is eminently defensible," said Eugene Volokh, a specialist in church-state law at UCLA Law School. "I'm not sure it's ultimately the right result. But the court is applying principles the Supreme Court has established." Volokh suggested, however, that a majority of the court may ultimately decide that "under God" in the pledge, like the cry of "God save the United States and this honorable court," which opens each Supreme Court oral argument, qualifies as what the late justice William Brennan once called "ceremonial deism" -- traditional references to a higher power so frequently invoked that they have lost any specific religious meaning.
Sounds right to me. But in any case I think there's a very good argument to be made, both on constitutional and civic grounds, that the Pledge of Allegiance is more sound if you remove the word "God." The point of America is that we can't be forced to believe anything. You gotta convince us.
However.
There is a sense among some liberals that all references to a deity must be removed from the public square, particularly if they are Christian. That's a problem. Most Americans say they believe in God, and most of them believe in a Christian God. The government cannot completely eradicate God from public discourse without alienating most of the governed. That's politically and socially reckless and, thank God, unnecessary.
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1:08 PM
Hyperbole Department... A Post story attributed to "news services" recounts events at the NAACP convention, where leaders losing their grip over reality though probably not their followers. The hed is Black Leaders Attack Bush on Civil Rights, and they certainly do:
"Today we have a government that is enfranchised by miscounted or uncounted votes. Even though it lost the election, it operates as if it has a mandate to take our rights," [Jesse] Jackson told the convention. "Today we face the most threatening combination to civil rights in 50 years," he said, referring to [President] Bush and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.
That brings us to 1952. Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in Major League Baseball just five years before. Jim Crow laws effectively barring many black Americans from voting were still in effect. Throughout the South, separate and unequal public facilities were common, from restaurants and hotels to schools. Brown v. Board of Education would not overturn the separate-but-equal doctrine for another two years. And Jackson wants us to believe the world we live in today is at least as bad as that.
"We have an attorney general who is a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Falwell," NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said in an address Sunday. "There is a right-wing conspiracy, and it is operating out of the United States Department of Justice."
Uh huh. Have a nice day, Mr. Bond.
Mfume drew a few groans when he told 3,000 delegates that he considered Bush "a likable fellow." The groans turned to cheers when he said, "But I don't like his presidential practice of divide and conquer when it comes to black organizations and black people. . . . You can't be president of all the people when you only want to be the president for some of the people."
If by "divide and conquer" he means principled conservatives don't look at black Americans as an undifferentiated monolith, okay, nailed us. And if you mean that we support and promote leaders who agree with our principles of equal opportunity even if they're black, yes, uh, divide and conquer, fine.
And of course NAACP is still pushing the disenfranchisement myth.
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Monday, July 08, 2002
11:58 PM
Reporter Boredom Alert It's really hard work trying to cover the war against terrorism, not that the Bush Administration is helping much, but Tuesday's dispatch President Defends Record at Oil Firm shows how much more fun it is to needle the President over a ten-year-old accounting snafu:
President Bush said yesterday that he is worried corporate scandals could cause the country to lose confidence in the free enterprise system, and he vigorously defended his actions as president and his ethics as an oil executive....Facing repeated questions about his role as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy Corp. a decade ago, when the company faced an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bush argued that the matter was an "honest disagreement about accounting procedures" rather than corporate wrongdoing. "All I can tell you is that in the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures," Bush said in defending Harken....
Bush, who appeared irritated by the questioning, glared at reporters in the White House briefing room when he heard titters after that answer. "There was an honest difference of opinion as to how to account for a complicated transaction," he said. "And you're going to find that in different corporations. Sometimes the rules aren't as specific as -- as one would expect, and therefore the accountants and the auditors make a decision."
The headline is akin to "President Denies Beating Wife," so the coverage that follows isn't a big surprise. Actually, that's the inside headline once you click to the story. Right now on the Post homepage, it's President Defends Ethics As Former Executive
The story says Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is calling for the release of records of the SEC's 1992 investigation of Bush's trading in Harken shares. As if.
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5:51 PM
A City Slicker also has a lovely link on July the 4th to the Declaration of Independence. I am certain that few Americans understand how shattering this was, and how singular it still is. Just the beginning:
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
Hopefully the Ninth Circuit won't declare the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional.
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5:36 PM
Blogger Barry Molefsy of A City Slicker thinks the Post has been conned in its latest survey of comics-page readership:
The most interesting result is how popular Dennis the Menace is. It was the favorite of men in nearly every age group (results by age and sex are not on the Post's web site, they were published in the printed comics section). This does not compute. I think the Post has been had.
Dennis the Menace? That's still printed?
I read the comics much less than I used to. The Post makes me work to read my two favorites, Doonesbury and Dilbert, which are in the Style and Business sections, respectively. Dlibert is more in sync with modern times, but even though Trudeau is hopelessly liberal, I like the way he's followed his characters as they age. I just tune out when he goes after Bush; all those strips lack are Herblock-style placards with "Big Oil" or "Tobacco Lobby" painted on them.
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8:27 AM
Here's a sample of some of the comments by reporters bewildered by the need for military and intelligence secrets, posting in the letters section at MediaNews.org
I wonder which public Dennis Pluchinsky prefers, a smart one with an understanding of the dangers we face, or a dumb one that won't think anything's amiss when the driver of a tanker truck starts behaving strangely. It's a small thing to put an idea in the terrorist's head, it's a large thing to successfully plot an attack ... to assume that censorship will prevent the next attack is to assume that the terrorists are too stupid to look at a target-rich environment, assess the risks and carry out a successful attack on their own. Certainly it's bugged me that we seem to be sending the terrorists a target list, but I have no reasonable alternatives, and neither does Pluchinsky. The real traitors are the ones who believe we are weakened by having a free, open society.
Hey, it's very nice that you're bugged by the idea of sending the terrorists a target list, but the alternatives are clear and Pluchinsky explained them to you. There's lots of good and essential reporting that needs to be done that doesn't include doing a risk assessment survey for the terrorists. Or releasing an order-of-battle for Iraq. I sure hope that New York Times story was psyops. (registration required).
And this:
Is Dennis Pluchinsky sincere about the media's traitorous behavior, or is this just another attempt to distract us from the government's pre-9/11 bungling? Oops! Did I just commit treason by asking that?
Yep, that's it, there's nothing between a police state and posting all the CIA's files on the internet.
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Sunday, July 07, 2002
10:17 PM
Evenhandedness... Arab apologists often say that what the U.S. lacks in its Middle East policies is "evenhandedness." They say this when we side with Israel. It is a criticism that avoids analyzing the questions at a given moment--is Israel justified when it sends tanks in to kill terrorists after another suicide bombing? Do they have good reason to believe that many Arabs and Palestinians really do intend to remove that country from the map? It doesn't matter. What matters is a policy that's some kind of mathematical midpoint between Israel and the Arab world. But that's not where the truth lies, nor does good policy lie there. What counts is whether what you're saying makes any sense and is connected to the truth.
I see the same strategy in today's Op-Ed piece by Clyde Prestowitz with the hed, Why Don't We Listen Anymore?. And the answer is: What on earth are you saying?
"The way things are going, it will soon be the United States against the world." That comment, by a top political leader in Kuala Lumpur, was just one of hundreds of expressions of a new and disturbing alienation from America that I heard during a recent swing through 14 Asian, European and Latin American capitals.
Alienation is bad, but if the rest of the world goes mad we're really not helping by joining the loony bin. Prestowitz's main point is that the U.S. isn't taking into account the views of other nations. You've heard this a lot from the Euro elite and from some Democrats who are more comfortable with the United Nations than they really should be. Prestowitz makes a couple of fair points--faulting the Bush Administration for preaching free trade while adopting tariffs to protect U.S. steel; advocating for democracy while propping up some unsavory regimes. But mostly he's faulting U.S. policy because lots of other countries disagree with it.
He says most of his contacts in Asia disbelieve there's any threat that China will invade Taiwan. But China is steadily building up its military, is particularly expanding its armaments aimed across the strait, and most of all does not need to invade to possess Taiwan by force.
He says "The gulf between the American view of the Middle East and that of virtually everyone else could not be wider. That helps explain why when President Bush recently called for new Palestinian leadership as a precondition for a Palestinian state, U.S. allies said they would deal with whomever the Palestinians elect, Arafat included." Well then, those U.S. allies are fools. Oh well! Then this:
Strategically important and traditionally practitioners of a liberal Islam, neither nation [Indonesia and Malaysia] has significant economic or political ties to the Middle East. Yet no conversation there can get past the Israeli-Palestinian situation that has caused many, including longtime friends of America, to conclude that the United States is attacking Islam itself
Look, when it comes to separating the fight against terrorism from an assault on Islam, Bush has done everything except make a hajj to Mecca. In fact, he's probably done too much, and we need to identify the targets more clearly if we're going to win the war against radical Islamists.
The perception abroad of a new American unilateralism is even more serious. A number of U.S. actions -- our rejection of the Kyoto treaty on global warming; refusal of initial offers of NATO help in Afghanistan; rejection of agreements to create an International Criminal Court, ban land mines and restrict chemical and biological warfare; as well as the U.S. declaration of a "first strike" policy that might include an attack Iraq -- have convinced foreign observers that the United States no longer feels any need to consult its friends or, indeed, any need for friends at all.
From the top: Kyoto is nonsense; we were busy with a war and couldn't fly NATO to Afghanistan, and neither could you; the ICC is accountable only to itself, so no thanks; land mines help win wars; and in a world with rogue nuclear weapons and pathetic smallpox vaccine policies, we can't wait for the bad guys to kill us first, sorry. As for restricting chemical and biological warfare, we've been pretty good at that and the only country that's used chemical and bio weapons since World War I is that nice Iraqi country that we're not supposed to strike first.
Another former EU commissioner and current corporate chairman in London said, "You no longer want allies or institutions, but only volunteers for posses to chase various gangs of bandits." Citing the world order the United States helped create, he added, "If you now turn your back on it all, we can only feel a sense of disappointment and betrayal, and of deep foreboding."
Somebody's got to chase the bandits, buddy. If you'd llike to help, and can take some time off from developing your sense of deep foreboding, that would be great.
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9:13 PM
Making Distinctions... Patrick Scully, director of communications for the Catholic League, wrote in Saturday's Free for All section about the remarkable uniformity of abusers in the Catholic sex-scandal:
Sean T. Bickerton rightly states that scientific research finds that pedophilia is not related to homosexuality ["Pedophilia and Homosexuality," Free for All, June 29]. Where he goes wrong is the premise that the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is a problem of pedophilia. A Dallas Morning News database of abuse cases show 82 percent of the cases are homosexual in nature -- that is, the adult male (the priest) and post-pubescent males. It is not an indictment or an attempt "to cast blame on gay men" to state the facts: Most gay priests certainly are not abusers; but most abusing priests in this scandal are gay. Until we can talk honestly about the facts without being branded prejudiced, we can't solve the problem.
The Post, of course, appears to have a commitment to avoid the subject. Nothing to look at here, keep moving along.
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8:53 PM
Smallpox vaccincations... In the meantime, Instapundit noticed this New York Times story saying the government is planning mass smallpox vaccinations. Actually, it sounds as if the feds still have a reactive strategy, planning mass vaccinations if outbreaks occur, which will be too little, too late. But perhaps they are slowly getting the message. I never understood why I could be vaccinated as defenseless little boy but cannot be permitted to make that choice for myself as an adult.
According to the NYT:
In the days of wide vaccination, roughly one person in a million died.
Government planners that won't defend the U.S. against a mortal threat because they're afraid of killing one patient out of every million from side-effects simply aren't serious about the war. They're living in a pre- 9-11 world. They're as bad as reporters who never saw a defense secret they wouldn't print. Maybe they both think they're in a movie.
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8:44 PM
I'm baaack.... tried to post something quickly this morning, which Blogger promptly ate. A couple of posts to come tonight.
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