Year: 2005

THE MALKIN AWARD WINNNERS 2005

This award is a relatively new one – reflecting the uniquely batty voice of Michelle Malkin, defender of Japanese internment in the Second World War, and far and away the break-out star of the hard right blogosphere in the past year. The award is for hyperbolic, divisive, mean-spirited, far-right boilerplate, of the kind Malkin produces on an almost hourly basis. The award has largely supplanted the old Derbyshire Award, named after NRO’s resident bigot and curmudgeon, John Derbyshire. Compared to Malkin, he’s a voice of calm reason. (He will be awarded his own prize later this week, so fear not.) Anwyay, drum roll, please, for the finalists ….

DISBARRED BUT WORTH A CITATION: “Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole,” – a headline on an Ann Coulter column at Townhall.com, January 6, 2005. (Coulter is disbarred from the contest, because others have got to have a chance.)

MALKIN AWARD HONORABLE MENTION 2005 : “The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War.” – Powerline blogger, John Hinderaker. And they call me excitable.

MALKIN AWARD RUNNER-UP 2005: “It’s time to ask, bluntly, whether self-government can work for people not operating within a Judeo-Christian worldview.” – Joseph Farah, WorldNet Daily.

MALKIN AWARD WINNER 2005: “[B]lood will tell, as the old saying goes: [Mark “Deep Throat” Felt’s] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it’s been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.” – Ben Stein, American Spectator.

Tomorrow, the equivalent from the nutty left: the Moore Award nominees!

– posted by Andrew.

GHOSTWRITERS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

Julian wonders whether non-Beltway insiders understand that most prominent people have ghostwriters penning “their” op-eds, books, etc., and whether there should be more outrage over this quasi-dishonesty. For my part, it’s never bothered me that a Times op-ed by, say, a U.S. Senator or the Secretary of Health and Human Services probably wasn’t written by the eminence themself – but I was shocked to find myself, during my first year in D.C., being introduced to a guy who ghostwrote for a syndicated columnist. I’m not sure what the difference is, exactly – I suppose there’s just something about a regular byline that made me assume, foolishly, that the “author” was writing the thing by himself.

This has been a Gregg Easterbrook pet peeve for many years, incidentally – though he tends to focus on praising celebrities and pols who credit their ghostwriters (like John McCain), and pillorying those who don’t (like Hillary Clinton, on both It Takes a Village and Living History).

FOR UNTO US A CHILD IS GIVEN: Unless, that is, you’re in Japan:

Japan’s population declined this year for the first time since the country began keeping demographic records in 1899, according to preliminary figures released by the government this week.

The decrease, which specialists say signals the start of an era of shrinking population, occurred two years earlier than had been expected . . . The number of deaths outnumbered births by 10,000 this year, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Excluding wartime figures, the number of births, at 1.067 million, was the lowest since records have been kept; births dropped 44,000 from the previous year.

. . . Japan’s current population of 128 million is expected to fall to 100 million by 2050 and to 64 million by 2100 if current trends continue.

And on that cheery note, Merry Christmas!

– posted by Ross

MERRY CHRISTMAS

I’m headed off to the in-laws for a Michigan Christmas, after a week of semi-coma (a kind of real life semi-colon), and book-writing. Many thanks to Julian and Ross for keeping the home fires burning. They’ll still be here next week and I’ll also be unveiling our annual award winners – for sundry examples of idiocy and insight over the past twelve months. Check in for solstice silliness. And have a wonderful peace-on-earth few days.

– posted by Andrew.

CORY MAYE

If you haven’t been following Radley Balko’s posts about the case of Cory Maye over at The Agitator, you should. In a nutshell, the story is this: Late in 2001, police in Prentiss, Mississippi, got a tip that Jamie Smith, who lived on the other side of a duplex with Cory Maye, was dealing drugs. Police execute a no-knock raid, bursting into Maye’s side of the duplex late at night, while Maye and his young daughter are asleep. Maye (who is black) wakes up, sees armed intruders, and fires off a shot—killing the (white) son of the chief of police. Maye now sits on death row.

You can read Radley’s first post on the case here, and here is his most recent post with trial transcripts, but it’s really worth scrolling through for the whole series.

—posted by Julian

LIVE, FROM THE PUNDIT NAVEL OBSERVATORY

Amid all the high-profile chin-stroking about journalistic ethics in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been wondering: Why does nobody much seem to have a problem with the common-as-water practice of op-ed ghost writing? Sure, presumably the nominal author of a piece written by some research assistant endorses the contents, but isn’t it a little odd that editors who make “disclosure” and “transparency” professional mantras seem not to blink at running articles purporting to be written by one person and actually written by another? I bounced the question off a few D.C. friends who seemed to think that precisely because the practice was so common, it didn’t really count as deceptive: Everyone assumes that an op-ed festooned with a sufficiently famous byline (of someone not a professional writer, anyway) was actually penned by someone else. But I rather doubt that really is most people’s assumption outside the Beltway. Sure, I can think of various reasons why you might not regarded at a terribly big deal, but it’s still a little surprising that it doesn’t even seem to be a topic of debate.

—posted by Julian

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, SPY, SPY AGAIN

Like Ross’ friend Jesus, the Department of Justice was denied three times by the federal courts when it sought to use cell phone networks to trace suspects’ movements without first going to the trouble of making a showing of probable cause. Earlier this week, however, the DoJ lucked out in the federal court for the Southern District of New York.

Without wading too deep into some exceedingly hairy legal territory, here’s the basic gist of the decision on the basis of a quick skim: The Fourth Amendment restrictions that would apply if the government had planted a tracking device don’t apply because (1) unlike in other requests, they’re not asking for enough data from cell towers to triangulate a precise physical location, and (2) they’re only seeking data from the towers when the user is actually on a call, so that the user is held to have voluntarily disclosed the cell tower information to a third party (the phone company). Now, statutes authorizing “pen registers” and “trap and trace” devices permit the government to obtain information about a communication by meeting a much lower evidentiary standard that would be required to get the contents of the conversation. But those statutes explicitly say that information about the user’s location can’t be gathered via those statues alone. So the government wants to combine the pen register authorization with other statues allowing the government to gather information about information service subscribers, subject to a slightly higher oversight standard—still short of probable cause.

The government has thus far refused to appeal any of these cases, so for the time being, it looks like we’ll be left with a confusing patchwork of rules about what kind of tracking then government can do with what level of judicial oversight. If the details interest you, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s archive of legal documents from the relevant cases.

—posted by Julian

FREE TO CHOOSE

I just got back from a bit of caffinated kvetching with Will Wilkinson and Tim “Undercover Economist” Harford about the recent spate of books bemoaning how affluence and the glut of market choices that go with it are making us all miserable—The Paradox of Choice and its many precursors and clones. Critiques of the “choice paralysis” argument typically focus on questions like whether the empirical data really does demonstrate more choices make people unhappy, and if they do, whether it’s not part of a temporary adjustment period as we become more adept at narrowing our choices in response to the glut—as, for instance, social filtering software such as Amazon uses makes it increasingly easier to do. But Harford pointed to a good John Kay piece that makes an elementary but underemphasized point:

The choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee may not matter much to the chooser but it matters a lot to Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

In other words: Maybe ceteris paribus having to pick from 20 very similar sorts of corn flakes at the supermarket is just an added hassle, and we’d be just as well off if the supermarket only stocked one or two of them. But ceteris ain’t never paribus: Having to compete with 19 other close substitues puts strong price and quality pressure on each manufacturer. So it’s not enough to point out that choice between a gaggle of similar products might be more annoying than a choice between some small subset of those same products—if the choice set were persistently limited for everyone, then you wouldn’t have those same products, put probably significantly worse ones. The fact that some people agonize over which of a dozen sorts of corn flakes to buy means you’re likely to do better picking one at random than if you agonized over the choice between the only two brands in the world.

—posted by Julian