“It has taken the IRA 30 years to apologise. Let us hope it does not take the Israelis and Palestinians so long, writes Simon Tisdall.” – The Guardian, equating IRA terrorism with Israel’s self-defense. I wonder why he doesn’t ask for Britain and Ireland to apologize to the IRA as well. Oh, never mind.
THE NEW YORK TIMES’ HYPOCRISY: Great Howie Kurtz column on media conflicts of interest in the corporate acounting scandals. Not only have New York Times columnists, like Paul Krugman, had sweet-heart consulting deals with Enron, but the Times itself is knee-deep in Enron collusion. Howie reveals that the Times has had a 5-year “newsprint swap” deal with Enron that it has never disclosed in all its hyper-ventilating editorials on the subject. He also reveals that – oh joy! – the Times has practised exactly the same stock options maneuver that it has so piously attacked others for. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the mega-rich kid who finances Howell Raines’ diatribes against corporate executives, has almost $2 million worth of stock options that are not counted as expenses and Times president Russell Lewis says the Times has no plans to alter its policies. Don’t you think the Times should practise what it preaches in this respect? Then there’s this column in the New York Post, criticizing the Times’ front-page denigration of the rival plans to rebuild the WTC site, without disclosing its own corporate interest in keeping office space limited in New York City, given its massive investment in new midtown offices. So let’s check this out: president Bush is tainted because of corporate corruption scandals but the Times, which has been deeply involved with Enron and doesn’t count stock options as expenses, is squeaky clean. Those guys on 43d Street are as self-righteous as they are full of it. The good news: they’re not getting away with it any more.
AND ISRAEL TOO: Useful little piece uncovering New York Times bias on the Middle East here.
THOSE ALASKAN GLACIERS: The Washington Post repeats the 5.4 degree Fahrenheit thirty-year warming number based on no data that I can find. Well, at least they didn’t fall for the 7 degree rise touted relentlessly by the New York Times. I’m going to try and contact the authors of the study directly to see what the basis for this number is. One clue might be from this CNN report: the temperature change is dated from the mid-1950s, making it a forty year number ending in the mid-1990s. Then there has been another swift rise in warming in the last decade. But notice how CNN distorts the study shamelessly. Here’s the lead paragraph:
A new study indicates that glaciers in Alaska are melting faster than previously thought, providing further evidence of global warming, researchers said Thursday.
Then read further on and you find the actual researchers’ view:
“We know that the climate has had to change for that to happen. Whether or not these changes in climate are due to human influences, that’s not for us to say, but it’s possible that it is linked to a larger-scale change in global climate caused by human activity.”
That possibility is rendered a certainty by the story’s play. Again, ideology is driving the news, not the other way round.
OLD LABOUR REDUX: First, the Blair government goes back to tax and spend economics. Then it faces a widespread public sector strike – last seen under the last socialist government in 1979. Now it confronts an ex-communist taking over the second biggest labor union in the country – against one of Blair’s allies. Blair’s balancing act – appealing to Middle England, while throwing bones to the old left in his party base – is getting trickier and trickier. The public has stopped buying it – and so has the Old Left.
REIMPORTING DRUGS: A reader has a very good rejoinder to my depressed view of the ill effects of allowing drugs to be reimported from Canada. Here it is:
You’re wrong on this one. The reason is simple. The Canadians will have to start pulling their weight in terms of drug prices. I think drug companies cave to the Canadian health care authorites on lower prices because it doesn’t hurt them that much. They make a few bucks and avoid a big public fight. But, with reimportation now increasingly common (and now legal), they’ll be less eager to just fall down for the Canadians knowing they are effectively setting the price for America as well. In other words, they’ll give the freeloading Canadians a price and if they don’t like it they can go pound sand – after all it’s a market a tenth the size of America. The net effect is that it’s likely the Canadian prices will go up somewhat while American prices go down a little, both positive developments. The Canadian media will figure this out the first time a drug company cites reimportation as a reason for not changing their prices for the sacred socialized health care system. They’re going to be apoplectic. I can’t wait.
An other option is for drug companies to start preventing export of new and expensive drugs to Canada or Europe, ending the free-rides these socialist parasites have had on America’s free market in pharmaceuticals. I wonder what the Euros will say then.
The Dish 