Month: May 2003

Brilliant news-management from the Times, by having the latest scandal hit the fan during the Memorial Day weekend. But the pattern is identical: a Raines crony (Rick Bragg), pampered and protected by the big guy, cutting corners, passing off others’ work as his own, and getting special treatment. But Raines stays. Eventually, everyone will be held responsible but the man who is ultimately responsible.

“I just sent the following short letter to the New York Times in response to their request from readers for other “defects” in past articles. However this particular case gets resolved in the course of their investigation, the matter I describe is a serious indictment of what passes for reporting at the Times these days, and for that reason, I thought you might want to share it with your readers:

In an Editorial Observer column by Times reporter Adam Cohen entitled “Why the Supreme Court Needs to Visit Cass High School,” (March 31, 2003), Cohen reports under a Detroit byline on his recent visit to Detroit’s Cass Technical, an inner-city, virtually all-black high school in Detroit. Describing Cass as a “wreck, with dingy classrooms, ancient lab equipment, broken hallway clocks” Cohen cites Cass as the embodiment of his premise that schools with large minority enrollments tend to be seriously underfunded, and that as a general rule, the higher the percentage of black students, on average, the worse facilities a school has.
As someone who travels regularly in this part of Detroit, I don’t dispute the description, or even the premise, generally speaking, but I was nevertheless struck by a glaring omission in this article – the fact that a new Cass is under construction adjacent to the current Cass building. What’s more, after a few minutes of research on Nexis, I learned that the new facility is budgeted for $114.5 million. To put things in perspective, only two other high schools in the entire United States have ever been built in the $100-million range. The new building is a six-story, air-conditioned glassy building that is laboratory-intensive, with music, art and dance studios. How, I wondered, could Cohen have missed the gigantic construction site right next door to the school that he visited, or the sign prominently announcing that the building under construction is the new Cass Tech? In fact, much of the new building is already standing. How could the prospective move not have come up in conversations with administrators that Cohen supposedly interviewed?
At the time, I chalked the omission up to liberal bias, and penned a letter to the Times mocking Cohen under the heading “Why New York Times Reporter Adam Cohen Needs to Visit the New Cass High School.” In light of recent events, I wonder whether there is another explanation. I don’t suppose it is possible, is it, that Mr. Cohen never visited the Cass school in Detroit? It seems worth investigating, doesn’t it? The only other explanations I can think of are (a) incredibly slopply reporting, or (b) blatant bias. Which is it?

Of course, it could also be both.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “The news about Rick Bragg doesn’t surprise me. In Feb. of 2001, Bragg wrote a story after Dale Earnhardt had been killed at Daytona. It was written as if he had been in a Wal-Mart in Mooresville, NC, at the moment the news of Earnhardt’s death was learned by the shoppers. He described the sorrow of the locals and their specific reactions. At the time, I asked myself what-the chances were that Bragg happened to be in a Wal-Mar in Mooresville, NC, at the very moment people learned that Dale Earnhardt had died.-Not very great. In fact, more like nil. But that’s how the story was written. And it wasn’t written as if recounting the story from the memory of others. It-was a “first hand” account.-As an editor myself, I wondered why the NYT editors would not question this. Now I know.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Hey, I made the cut as a member of the VRWC. Eat your heart out, Jonah!

If you were Howell Raines and knew that another incident of one of your cronies’ fabricating by-lines or inventing color or falsely appropriating other people’s reporting would lead to your demise, what would your stategy be? It would be to delay any announcement of the errors, to parse them out slowly so as to minimize their impact, and release the first item on the Friday before Memorial Day. Sure enough, the first news of any Blair-like errors can be found in today’s New York Times:

An article last June 15 described the lives and attitudes of oystermen on the Florida Gulf Coast who faced threats to their livelihood from overuse of water farther north. It carried the byline of Rick Bragg, and the dateline indicated that the reporting was done in Apalachicola. In response to a reader’s recent letter questioning where the reporting took place, The Times has reviewed the article. It found that while Mr. Bragg indeed visited Apalachicola briefly and wrote the article, the interviewing and reporting on the scene were done by a freelance journalist, J. Wes Yoder. The article should have carried Mr. Yoder’s byline with Mr. Bragg’s.

How brief was Mr Bragg’s visit to Apalachicola? Did he make it out of the airport? Did he stay the night? The New York Daily News has some background on Bragg’s very close relationship with Raines. Somehow, I don’t think this is the first item we will read about Bragg. But its timing suggests how hardball Raines is going to play. Will Bragg face any consequences for what seems like clear deception? I guess we know the answer to that, don’t we? But this item opens the sluice-gates for other papers to report on Bragg. Tick, tock.

Spinsanity picks up on this blog’s early criticism of Maureen Dowd’s deceptive attempt to say that president Bush declared that al Qaeda was “not a problem any more.” He never said that. But Bill Press, Paul Begala, and other liberals on CNN repeated the canard. The New York Times has not run a correction. Dowd has not run a correction in her column either. Even after Jayson Blair, they’re shameless. I’d say the real test of whether Raines is serious about improving the quality of the Times is whether the paper corrects Dowd’s lie. We’re still waiting.

Thanks for all your emails on tax cuts and deficits. To make myself clearer: I’m all in favor of tax cuts. I think Americans are over-taxed; I believe that individuals can make far smarter decisions about where the country’s wealth should be spent than government usually does; I’m particularly persuaded that tax rates in particular should encourage work not redistribution. Where I differ from others is in their belief that deficits don’t matter; that government debt is no problem; and that drastically increasing that debt just before the entitlement crunch hits is good politics or economics. I think we need to decrease spending while we decrease taxes. At the very least, I think we should hold a line on spending while we decrease taxes. What I cannot support is vastly increasing spending while you cut taxes. Call me crazy, but I regard this as a question of responsibility. We have a responsibility not to leave the next generation in a huge hole of our making. At this point, it’s clear that the Republican party, at all levels, is simply fiscally irresponsible. This is true at the federal level, where Republicans have out-spent Democrats; and at a state level, as this USA Today synopsis spells out:

State legislatures controlled by Republicans increased spending an average of 6.54% per year from 1997 to 2002, compared with 6.17% for legislatures run by Democrats… Republicans cut taxes an average of 1.08% annually from 1997 to 2002 when they controlled both the legislature and governor’s office. Democrats cut taxes 0.59% annually when they were in charge of state government.

(My thanks to Hoosier Review.) So I was wrong yesterday. The Democrats aren’t worse. They’re actually better at controlling spending than today’s Republicans. True fiscal conservatives might want to rethink their long-standing preference for Republicans.

CUT SPENDING FIRST: The arguments against this are as follows. The only way to control spending is to cut taxes first, by starving the government of resources. One email spelled it out pretty clearly:

I’ve said this to you on more than one occasion – there is a singularly good reason for MASSIVE deficits… GW’s real job, like Reagan before him, is to ensure that all the money is spent, that when a Dem takes office, 33 percent or more is paying off debt.-This is called preemptive handcuffs. It isn’t my idea. It is David Stockman’s.-No money to spend when Dems are in office. You are being childish. The only rationale for fiscal responsibility NOW is if you want there to be $ for Dems to spend later. Stop being NAxcfVE. No one admits this – like many things I’ve been a party to – it isn’t a philosophy it is a strategy. Going deeper: The international markets understand this. “Oh, a deficit? That means nothing because they are spending the next Dem’s $.” This is really an analysis of why lib policy is doomed to failure. It can’t work, because it is soooooooooooo easy for Reps to undermine. That’s the real Keynes. Think!

Give the guy points for candor. But the result of this repetitive, partisan strategy is surely an increasing level of government debt, which doesn’t only restrict future spending, but restricts future tax cuts. I hate to bring up the national interest here, as opposed to cheap partisan advantage. The other point, of course, is that it isn’t the Democrats’ future spedning we have to worry about. It’s the Republicans’!

THE DEFLATION THREAT: One other reason for blowing a hole in the budget might be deflation. If that really is a threat, then maybe soaring spending and tax cuts are a useful temporary measure. If the GOP made this Keynesian argument, they’d be a little more convincing. But if that is indeed the idea, why not pursue Warren Buffett’s idea of a holiday in the payroll tax? Yes, this would only intensify social security’s future problems, but according to today’s Republicans, there’s nothing to worry about on that score anyway. Another answer might be the war on terror. Maybe we do need to go into deeper debt to forestall a future attack that could indeed cripple the economy. Again, I’d be open to persuasion on that as well. But we don’t even hear that. We simply hear the old argument that reducing taxes increases government revenue more than the tax-cuts themselves cost. Sorry. I’m not buying it. Look, I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the cheaper dollar, tax cuts and low interest rates will lead to a recovery that will bring revenues flooding into the Treasury. But count me as an Eisenhower Republican skeptic. And until the GOP actually proves it has the ability to restrain spending, I certainly don’t begrudge anyone for voting Democratic in order to keep the government within its limits.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: Anatole Kaletsky sees recovery ahead, and views our current malaise as a repeat of 1991- 1992:

It is widely believed, for example, that there is something unusual – even unprecedented – about the American economy’s slowness to respond to low interest rates in the present cycle. This is simply false. In the three years from 1990 to 1992, the Fed cut interest rates by 6.75 percentage points and the economy grew by a total of 5.2 per cent. In the three years from 2001 to 2003, growth will total 5.3 per cent, according to the latest OECD forecast, even though interest rates gave been cut by only 5.25 percentage points.

Put that down to productivity gains, I guess.

One way to resolve the thorny question of whether marijuana should be legal is to adopt an indirect approach. Instead of trying to get it legalized, which in this puritanical culture would meet stiff resistance from the usual busybodies, you can simply lower the penalties for use and possession. Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich has taken a brave stand on the least controversial measure – allowing people with serious illnesses, like AIDS and cancer, to alleviate their nausea by using weed. The fine for such usage is now $100 – in the range of a parking ticket. Good for Ehrlich for demonstrating compassionate conservatism.

THE CHURCH DIGS IN:The insurance companies aren’t exactly demanding compassion and contrition.

MORE SHOES DROPPING? Is Blair merely the first of NYT future scandals? The New York Post, hardly a disinterested party, seems to think so:

“There’s a big search going on inside the Times and outside the Times to find out if there are other Blair-like problems,” says our source. “Howard Kurtz [of the Washington Post] is rumored to be working on something. The Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times are supposed to be doing something. The Times wants to come out with something first. If somebody else goes down, then people think [top editor Howell Raines] is out. That’s the prevailing wisdom around here.”

Tick, tock.

THE MYTH OF GAY MALE PROMISCUITY: Actually, that’s pushing it. But Eugene Volokh, a pretty disinterested party, has done some digging and come up with some interesting data. Gay men are not as promiscuous as some would argue.

Ramesh Ponnuru responds today to Family Research Council head Kenneth Connor’s apoplexy that the head of the RNC, Marc Racicot, actually met with the largest gay group, the Human Rights Campaign. At first, the religious right complained that the meeting had occurred at all; Connor then finessed this by saying that his complaint was that the RNC head met with HRC in secret. I’m not sure it was “secret.” I heard about it the day it happened. With 300 people in the audience, it’s unlikely such an event would remain under wraps. Then Ponnuru takes on Connor’s threat that social conservatives will walk if Bush reaches out in any measure to gay voters and their families, or indeed to the huge majority of Americans who believe gay peole should be protected from discrimination in the workplace:

Connor notes that there was a drop-off in evangelical voting in the 2000 election, and suggests that there will be another one if Republicans do not take up the social-conservative cause on gay rights more vigorously. He provides no evidence that the drop-off was caused by evangelical unhappiness with the Republican party on gay issues, rather than by, say, the decay of certain Christian-conservative groups that used to turn out voters. He cites no polls on the degree of evangelical satisfaction with the president or the Republican party today. And he provides no argument that social-conservative voters would be wise to abandon Bush next year over his gay-rights record. If social conservatives really were inclined to do anything so foolish, which I very much doubt, I hope that their leaders would try to wise them up.

All good points. There’s more than a little bluff here. The religious right has been in sharp decline for a while now. They are swiftly losing public support in their continued resistance to any recognition of gay citizens’ civil rights. The younger conservative generation is nowhere near as uncomfortable around gay people as their predecessors, and see modest outreach tp gays as a no-brainer. At some point, the president will have to choose between appeasing a small but angry cadre of religious activists, and becoming a truly inclusive president.

The sanctions end. The French surrender.

The Daily Telegraph reports on what might have been another attempted terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia:

The men, believed to be Moroccans, were held in Jeddah as they queued to board a flight to Sudan. They were apparently behaving suspiciously at passport clearance. When asked if they were travelling together, one said no and one said yes. Under interrogation, one of them said they had planned to crash the airliner into the National Commercial Bank, the only skyscraper in Jeddah, Saudi’s commercial capital.

The Telegraph cites “security sources” for its story. What might be happening is the reverse of what happened in the 1990s. In that decade, crackdowns on Islamist militants in the Middle East led them to export their terror abroad to the West. Now that the U.S. and its allies have fought back hard, these murderers may by default be turning their attention back to the Arab autocracies that helped spawn the terrorism in the first place. Could this finally force the Saudis to take the threat seriously? Could the murder of fellow Muslims and Arabs undermine al Qaeda’s appeal among disaffected young men in the region? Here’s hoping on both counts.

GREENSPAN’S WARNING: While the president and his party put another huge hole in this country’s future fiscal solvency, Alan Greenspan, that notorious leftist, testified in Congress yesterday. Here’s how the Financial Times put it:

Mr Greenspan also expressed concern about the effect of plans for further tax cuts and increases in government spending. He warned “deficits do matter” and expressed dismay at what he characterised as a breakdown in budget discipline in Washington. He reminded lawmakers the US government was facing a “significant” budget problem as the “baby boom” population ages and draws on more healthcare and retirement benefits. “I’d like to see that addressed more seriously than it is,” he said. “I must say the silence is deafening.”

Worth repeating that: deficits do matter. Then you read pieces like Bruce Bartlett’s at National Review Online. Money quote:

Voinovich and Snowe are responsible for the $350 billion cap. For some reason, they decided that this was the biggest tax cut we can afford – even though it represents a trivial sum over 10 years in an economy that will generate well more than $100 trillion over this period. Chafee is simply a Democrat in all but party registration. McCain, however, is a conservative from a conservative state. He said there should not be any tax cut as long as the nation was at war. Yet he continues to oppose even a $350 billion tax cut despite the end of war.

So the war is now over? Surprising to hear that from National Review. But look at the assumption in Bartlett’s piece: that it’s absurd for a conservative in a conservative state to actually worry about the government balancing its books! The bottom line is that the U.S. government is going to go seriously broke in a few years because of demographic pressure and entitlement growth. Yet the current administration is merrily adding to the national debt by not one but two big tax cuts, while pushing spending to heights unseen since LBJ opened the spigots. I’m sorry but we saw the consequences of that kind of combination in the 1980s and it took a decade to bring the budget back to balance. The fact that the Democrats are no better is not an argument. It makes Bush’s negligence even worse.

THE BOMB AT YALE: No clue yet who planted it. Here’s the Yale Daily News’ story.

THE SCANDAL OF ROBERT SCHEER: How does he get away with it? Stefan Sharkansky has the goods on the far-left Los Angeles Times columnist. Scheer makes Paul Krugman look honest. And Scheer’s latest recycling of the BBC’s smear about the rescue of Jessica Lynch merely adds to the picture of journalistic irresponsibility.

HOW THE WORLD CHANGES: A conservative deputy in Australia gives a moving speech about why he is bucking his party’s formal position and supports legal equality for gay citizens. He has a gay son. He sees him as a human being:

Mr Turner said many young men he had spoken to in recent years had explained that they were forced to leave their families and live in Sydney because their small towns did not offer the support or acceptance they so desperately sought. “My son has a partner, a business and a home in Orange. He is accepted by friends of my wife and I, and he is accepted by the vast majority of people in Orange who have a reasonable understanding of the issue,” he said.

One person at a time; one family at a time. That’s what it will take to change minds and hearts.

THE CLINTON WARS: “So yes, I hate the man. I admit it. I’m not proud of it. But whenever I admit my hatred for the guy, I’m reminded of a scene in the movie about Ted Bundy called “The Deliberate Stranger.” These two cops are being interviewed by a reporter after years of trying to catch Bundy. The reporter notes that it sounds like “you guys hate Ted.” One cop says, “I don’t hate him.” The other cop says, “I hate him.” The first says, “I lied. I hate him, too.”” – more honesty on the Letters Page.