Category: Old Dish

It’s the big question. The weirdness of the current economic situation, however, makes it tough to answer. As Alan Blinder pointed out in the New York Times yesterday – in a rare moment of fair commentary on that page – the market may be crashing but the economy is doing fine. When the economy could be growing by around 3 percent this year, real estate booming and unemployment falling, it’s hard to see a huge political backlash in the wings. And yet the stock market crash inevitably freaks out many ordinary investors, especially those approaching retirement. Whom will they blame? It seems to me the logical object of blame are those executives who engaged in real corruption. The other justified blame-objects are those people who hyped the bubble, or presided over it (Greenspan, Clinton). My liberal friends think that the public will nevertheless blame Bush and the GOP. But why? It doesn’t matter, they claim. Bush is guilty by association – he’s a classic example of the crony capitalism that this burst bubble has helped expose. Besides, any business scandal will hurt the Republicans, almost by definition. Even David Brooks says the dearth of Republican domestic policy initiatives gives a key edge to the Democrats this fall. I guess all these people may be right. Maybe people are that irrational. It’s about as unfair a rap as the first Bush got, but look what happened to him. The alternative scenario goes something like this: the worst is probably over. The market may endure some more losses but is over-sold and will recover somewhat this fall. Consumers haven’t been spooked so far and they’ll hang in there. Bush will sign a tough, probably overly-tough, law to counter some of the abuses. Another terrorist strike will focus people again on the real menace. Democrats may overplay their hand by whipping up a dumb anti-business populism that will undo some of the good things Clinton achieved by aligning his party with wealth-creation in the 1990s. There’s the wild card of some unknown scandal, such as the one Chris Caldwell is worried about. But barring that, I’m not sure which scenario is more plausible. I’d put it at 50-50, which means the difference will be made by the political skill of both sides. Gephardt or Bush? Who would you pick?

IS OSAMA DEAD? This somewhat stunning essay from an Arab News staffer says so. The reasons given for the death of Islamism in the Arab world are also eye-opening. Could we be winning this propaganda war?

TWO NEARLY-PRIESTS: We’ve heard so much hyper-ventilation on the matter of gay and straight priests that I found Hanna Rosin’s account of two seminarians extremely insightful. It’s complicated. But what seems to me essential in the current Church is a frank and open discussion of homosexuality – in the priesthood and outside of it. But that discussion is what the older generation now running the hierarchy – dominated by heterosexual bishops who are digusted by homosexuality and closeted gay bishops who are terrified of it – canot entertain. This generation cannot muster even the vocabulary to discuss one of the gravest issues in the Church today. And if they can’t even talk about it, how can they resolve it? I think we just have to wait for this generation to die off. And pray that, by that time, the Church won’t be dead as well.

OKAY, I LIED: I can’t resist citing this piece by Donald Luskin from SmartMoney.com. Alas, it’s only available to subscribers, but someone sent me the full text. It compares this editorial from the New York Times about Coke’s laudable decision to count stock options as expenses in its income statement with the Times’ own practices. The Times huffed editorially:

With President Bush digging in his heels in defense of accounting tricks that hide the true cost of stock options, and Congress equivocating under intense corporate lobbying… [i]t is a bold commitment to reform, and one that, particularly given the meltdown in the stock market in recent days, the White House and Congress should take to heart.

There was no mention that the Times is, allegedly like president Bush, “digging in its heels” to avoid doing what it praises Coke for doing. But the impact on the Times’ bottom line is bigger than that on Coke’s. As Luskin shows,

Based on the pro forma disclosures buried reported deep in the footnotes to their financial statements, we see that reporting options expenses would have reduced reported net [New York Times Company] income by 7.6% on average from 1995 through 2001. By way of comparison, things go better with Coke. The Coca Cola Company’s reported net income would only have been reduced by 6.3% on average over the same period.

Moreover, the Times, in sharp contrast with its Rainesian populism, restricts these options to 900 elite managers out of over 12,000 employees. The Times’ defense is that its editorial and business departments are entirely separate and that hypocrisy is therefore not a valid charge. But doesn’t this smack of unbelievable media arrogance? Does the Times really believe that its writers and editors are so morally and ethically pristine that they are actually immune to any criticism based on the discrepancies between what the Times says and what it does? Actually, I think the Times does think that. And this arrogance is a major reason behind their accumulating lies, distortions and propaganda.

OKAY, I LIED II: John Ellis says he’d short the New York Times. The worst part of it is: The Times-gurus think their “ceaseless and moronic Bush-bashing” is brilliant journalism. And they cite their hand-picked Pulitzer judges as proof! The Mickster sees that front page double-barrelled piece on AOL-Time-Warner on Saturday as more Raines willy-waving. Weirdly, some of the gazillion emails telling me not to give up on the Times-bashing came from within the paper. Hmmmm.

MARY EBERSTADT, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Funny how a movie celebrating a 15-year old’s affairs with older women hasn’t yet evinced a squeak from the usual hysterics. The trouble for the social conservatives at the Weekly Standard and National Review is that the movie doesn’t really relate to their real agenda. If you can’t use pedophilia to resurrect ancient smears about gay people, why worry?

Very interesting post on Josh Marshall’s site from Josh Green. Are the Democrats already blowing their attempt to pin market collapse on Enron-connected Bushies? Green says – disappointedly – yes.

“We all knew the poll was coming. At regular intervals since he took over the New York Times, hyper-liberal new executive editor Howell Raines has tried to get traction on a president he despises. Usually, this is done by crude front-page editorializing – most memorably R.W. Apple’s front-page prediction of the Afghan campaign as a “quagmire,” or the saturation Enron-coverage a few months back. But polls are particularly tempting methods for advancing naked political agendas under the guise of objective journalism. They work well because a poll gives a patina of empiricism to the prejudices of its architects …” See the rest of my latest piece, this time for the New York Sun, here. And yes, I know. I’m gonna lay off the Times for a while. Enough’s enough.

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 cherry-picked two data points and argued an average trend between the two of them – about as dishonest a piece of statistical fiddling as you’ll find. Perhaps the original 7 degree number was from an even more strained attempt to skew the data. If you pick 1956 and 1981, for example, you could argue an annual average temperature rise of 11 degrees Fahrenheit! But if you’re an honest statistician, you’ll look at a seasonally corrected average. From that, you’ll find that the temperature has risen only about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the period cited by the Times. Notice the slyness of their correction:

A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska’s Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees [my italics].

When you first read that, you tend to infer that they’re talking about the same time period. But they’re not! They’ve switched from “the last 30 years” to just “30 years.” They moved the goalposts. This is not impugn their sources, who have gone out of their way not to make the kind of sweeping claims the Times has done. In fact, the researchers the Times cite have just told the Anchorage Daily News that “the strongest warming trend has shifted from Alaska into Northern Canada and the warming trend for most of Alaska … is now about half of the 1966-1995 value, or about 2-3 degrees F.” Say after me: all the news that’s easy to distort.

POSEUR ALERT: “If there’s anything that confounds the British more than American optimism, it’s baseball, which brings together on one bright pastoral greensward those twin nineteenth-century American deliriums: industrialization and individualism. Baseball turns into fun the oppressions of industry-management, productivity, accounting, specialization, even stealing-and yet the pageant of winners and losers in this proto-corporate world also allows for goodness to be measured, made immutable, and, thanks to the eternal vigilance of statistics, kept alive. Baseball is a game-some would say a ritual-of hope.” – John Lahr, The New Yorker.

And how.

Several of you emailed to counter my recent comments about America’s increasing international isolation on the matter of equal marriage rights for gays and straights. I asked: “If one member of a gay marriage, recognized elsewhere in the world, immigrates to the U.S., will his/her husband/wife be required to stay at home? What if an American citizen marries a German citizen legally in Germany and then is forbidden from bringing his spouse back into his own country?” Some of you countered: What about Muslim polygamists with dozens of wives. Isn’t that also Sophie’s Choice? The difference is an obvious one. A Muslim polygamist could still choose one of his spouses to be his legal equivalent in the United States. A gay citizen gets no such choice. Homosexuals are non-citizens of this country in one of the most fundamental ways imaginable – they are barred from having any actual chosen family. Think about that for a minute. They have one fewer option than a polygamist. (And please don’t tell me they can marry a member of the opposite sex. That’s a meaningless option for someone involuntarily constructed to be sexually and emotionally attracted to the same sex.) That’s worse than discrimination. It’s being erased from citizenship in one of its most important manifestations. That erasure must and will end. And maybe sooner than we think.

“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.

“A man does not come an inch nearer to being a heretic by being a hundred times a critic [of the Church]. Nor does he do so because his criticisms resemble those of critics who are heretics. He only becomes a heretic at the precise moment when he prefers his criticism to his Catholicism. That is, at the instant of separation in which he thinks the view peculiar to himself more valuable than the creed that unites him to his fellows.” – G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer (1932), as reprinted in Garry Wills’ new book, “Why I Am A Catholic.”

ALL GREEK TO HART: Several of you emailed to let me know that Gary Hart is not only a poseur, he’s not even a reader of “classical Greek.” Here’s the gist:

Anyone who knows ancient Greek and its literature would not refer to Homer’s Greek as “classical”, which generally designates the normative Attic dialect of Athens circa the 4th Century B.C.: Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, etc. It might be expanded to embrace the Ionic of Herodotus or the Doric of Pindar, but not the “Homeric” dialect of Homer. There is no doubt however about the joy of reading the Odyssey in, er, Greek.

THE GOLDSTEIN DEFENSE: Among some leftists, like Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler, the Goldstein defense is catching on. If you get something wrong, relying on a third-hand inaccurate source, it is not incumbent on you to actually check the source, or apologize. So when Katie Couric said on the air that Edmund Morris had called Ronald Reagan an “airhead,” it wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t really a mistake. “Why did Couric say what she did?” Somerby asks. “Because everyone thought it was true.” I guess we’re lucky that Somerby didn’t pull the Full Goldstein and actually blame Coulter for Couric’s error. But why can’t someone like Somerby, who postures as someone who deals in facts to counter “spin,” actually be honest and recognize that, however loathsome he finds Ann Coulter (and I’m no fan of hers either), she’s right on this one? I’m with the Mickster on this one.

BUSH HANGS IN THERE: If the New York Times cannot rig a poll to show his support is slipping fast, no-one can. Better luck next time, Howell.

CHILLING SCIENCE: The long campaign to bring the prices of medicines below what they cost to manufacture profitably succeeded in the Senate today. It will become much easier for people to reimport drugs from Canada, where the government, through its socialized healthcare system, leverages prices and profits down (while free-loading off the American free market in drug research and development). It’s price control through the back door. The result may well be more votes from the most pampered generation in history – today’s seniors – and cheaper, newer drugs for many people who couldn’t previously afford them. But it will also inevitably lead to an acceleration of the already steep decline in new drugs in the research pipeline. The war on the pharmaceutical industry has already led to a sharp drop in new HIV drugs in development, for example, from over 250 in 1997 to a mere 170 today – just when new research into a fast-mutating virus is needed. Other research paths will also slow. This is the trade-off when politicians decide to step in and run industries. More votes today. Fewer medicines tomorrow. And we’re surprised politicians decided to screw the future?

AND NOW, GERMANY: Equal marriage rights get support from the highest court in Germany. Within two years, they will almost certainly exist in Canada. Now here’s a question: if one member of a gay marriage, recognized elsewhere in the world, immigrates to the U.S., will his/her husband/wife be required to stay at home? What if an American citizen marries a German citizen legally in Germany and then is forbidden from bringing his spouse back into his own country? How about possible legal children of such couples? Would the U.S. demand they be separated from their parents as a condition for entrance into America? This is where the opposition to supporting gay relationships and families leads you to: a formal anti-family policy as the law of the U.S. Sophie’s choice, revisited.

IN DEFENSE OF AIDS COMPLACENCY: A British doctor examines the epidemic in Britain that never happened and is already petering out. The number of new HIV diagnoses in Britain last year? 558. Almost none heterosexually transmitted.

The Washington Post runs an article celebrating racial integration. On the same day, the Times focuses on the proud separatism of the black upper classes on vacation. Need we know more?

UPDATE: Readers email in the two essential money quotes from the end of both these articles. From the Post:

“There’s a kinship we have there. We’re all sort of in the same boat, and we understand each other. We’re military first, whether you’re African American, white, Hispanic, or whatever; we understand what we go through.”

From the Times:

“This is a historically black community,” said Lynn Hendy, president of the property owners association. “I’d like it to stay that way. White people can go anywhere. But how do you say that without sounding racist?”

Actually, Lynn, you can’t say that without sounding racist. When you say that, you are a racist.