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NOTES ON A STANFORD "SCANDAL." Writing in National Review's "The Corner" recently, Stanley Kurtz drew attention to "an important article detailing what appears to be an egregious incident of academic political correctness at Stanford" that had recently been published in the Regent University Law Review. Readers can follow the links above for details on the actual claims, but in brief here's the story. A former Stanford Law School student and a self-described "non-leftist," Ty Clevenger, is claiming that out of political correctness, the editorial board of the Stanford Law and Policy Review first asked him to solicit -- and then spiked -- an array of articles that "question or criticize various tenets of gay rights orthodoxy" for a two-sided symposium on gay rights in the journal. (This allegedly happened in 1999; time passes rather slowly in the world of law journals.) In a second post, Kurtz makes quite a huge deal out of Clevenger's allegations:
Ty Clevenger claims that reviewers had qualms about the quality of both the conservative and the liberal articles, but that the board of the journal went ahead and pulled the conservative articles but published the liberal ones. Clevenger had even agreed to hold all articles on both sides until better ones could be solicited. Also, apparently at least one of the pieces critical of gay rights was later deemed good enough to be published by one of Harvard's journals, while one of the pro-gay rights articles that had been particularly criticized for its quality was published by the Stanford Journal anyway. So if Clevenger's account is accurate, this would indeed be a case of unsupportable bias.
Indeed, one of Kurtz's colleagues in "The Corner," Robert A. George, went so far as to use this episode as an opportunity to label Stanford "The New Berkeley."
All of this made Tapped a bit suspicious, so we looked into the matter. And we can tell you two things that already that make this supposed "scandal" seem far less of a big deal than Clevenger and Kurtz are making it out to be. First, Tapped hears that among Stanford law journals, the Stanford Law and Policy Review doesn't really compare in prestige with the Stanford Law Review, which has actual student competition for staff positions. So let's keep in perspective that this is hardly the law school's flagship journal. Moreover, we're talking about a law school that has something of a reputation for conservatism -- especially compared with Berkeley. (Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor were classmates at Stanford Law School.)
But more importantly, there doesn't seem to be any real evidence contradicting the obvious conclusion -- and the Stanford Law and Policy Review's stated position -- that the articles were simply killed because their academic merits were lacking. The claim by Clevenger and Kurtz that "one of Harvard's journals" saw fit to publish some of the articles that the Stanford journal rejected, and that this somehow proves that they were worth of publication, is unconvincing. Here's why. The Harvard law journal in question, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, is itself at least as likely to be biased in favor of conservative claims as the Stanford Law and Policy Review is to be biased to the left. Bush's energy secretary Spencer Abraham helped to found this journal as well as the conservative Federalist Society while at Harvard; TAP's Nicholas Confessore has referred to it as "a right-wing version of the law review." Indeed, the Federalist Society itself describes this journal as "devoted to publishing conservative and libertarian scholarship." Tapped is unclear how closely they're linked, but we note that in a 1987 article in Policy Review, Michael W. McConnell dubbed the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy the "affiliated academic journal" of the Federalist Society.
In a way, all this is typical of how debates over bias in academia work. Conservatives, reacting to a perceived bias, deliberately create counter-organizations within academia like the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy to promulgate their ideas. Then, when the occasion comes to wail about academic prejudice and political correctness on campus, they cite these outlets approvingly without bothering to note that they're equally biased -- indeed, deliberately so. Beyond Clevenger's one-sided account, Tapped doesn't know what went on behind the scenes with the Stanford Law and Policy Review, and it's certainly possible that the journal acted in a biased fashion. But the fact that its editorial board originally sought out articles on both sides of the issue certainly doesn't suggest it. And the fact that the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy as well as the second tier Regent University Law Journal saw fit to publish the rejected articles isn't enough to convince us that their academic merits were up to snuff. [posted 12:30 pm]
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UNBELIEVABLE. We kid you not: There is actually a petition circulating demanding that the upcoming Lord of the Rings film The Two Towers -- named after the second of J.R.R. Tolkien's three volumes, which were published in the mid-1950s -- have its name changed out of sensitivity to the memory of 9/11. This is almost as bad as when, shortly after the World Trade Center massacre, Clear Channel Communications tried to tell its radio stations not to play songs like James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" and Cat Stevens' "Peace Train." [posted 12:00 pm]
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh, citing Lane McFadden, claims the petition appears to be a hoax that MSNBC got duped by. Tapped plans to look into this. [posted 1:10 pm]
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JUST IN TIME FOR MOTHER'S DAY. Apparently there's a study in the journal Science suggesting that mothers who have sons tend to have shorter lives than those who have daughters -- or at least, that such was the case among Finnish nomads centuries ago. What terrific timing. Still, this cheerful Mother's Day story has this Tapper feeling reassured, as the mother of two terrific young women. While she can't claim to descend from the Finnish nomads studied, she looks forward to a ripe old age. [posted 3:45 pm]
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UNMASKED. Yesterday we noted that a group funded by the pharmaceutical industry -- to the tune of $3 million dollars -- was going to launch an early TV campaign supporting the Republicans' prescription drug bill. Today, in response, a senior-labor-consumer coalition -- led by US Action -- kicked off their own campaign to expose the drug companies' ruse. First tactic: Six organizations filed a letter requesting that the Federal Trade Commission open an investigation of deceptive advertising by the drug industry. Second, they launched a call-in campaign to Pfizer's CEO Henry McKinnell to demand a stop to the ads and a return to drug research. [posted 3:45 pm]
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RETIREMENT INSECURITY. Seniors are headed for serious trouble. The Times reports that corporations that used to provide generous health benefits for retirees are cutting back dramatically. This follows a study released last week by the Economic Policy Institute showing that despite the recent unprecedented stock market boom and proliferation of 401(k) retirement plans, typical Americans now facing retirement will have to tighten their belts harder than previous retirees. More findings: More than 40 percent of households headed by someone between the ages of 47 and 64 will not be able to replace even half of their pre-retirement income once they stop working. Nearly 20 percent will have retirement income below the poverty line. How will they be able to afford health insurance? Do tell. [posted 1:40 pm]
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WHO NEEDS BOB WOODWARD ANYWAY? The American Journalism Review publishes a list of twenty "lesser-known Washington journalists" who are doing "sterling work in the shadows." "Lesser-known," but not necessarily "lesser." Cogratulations to all of these reporters. [posted 1:10 pm]
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ON THE PROWL. The American Prowler's Wlady Pleszczynski takes a whack at our recent post on the International Criminal Court, but misses the point. Our point is that Yassir Arafat is equivalent to Pervez Musharraf not in that both are terrorists, but in that both are unelected heads of state (or quasi-state). And, for better or for worse, this fact alone has never much affected the conduct of American statecraft. We're sure Wlady would also like Colin Powell to tell Jiang Zemin to go take a hike the next time he wants to visit the White House, since the Communist regime in China has no doubt produced more death and misery than Arafat ever has. But that's not going to happen, either. [posted 12:35 pm]
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LEAHY HIM ALONE. A hawk-eyed Tapped reader drew our attention to this article about judicial nominations by Marci Hamilton on FindLaw. Hamilton contends that, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy has been the slowest chairmen yet when it comes to approving nominees:
There are 89 vacancies in the federal courts. President Bush has nominated a total of 100 nominees, but the Committee has only confirmed 52, most of them on the federal district courts, rather than on the more powerful and influential appeals courts.By contrast, at the same point in the Clinton Administration, the Republican-controlled Committee had confirmed 66% of President Clinton's nominees. This shows that Senator Leahy is doing very well in the game as compared to Senator Hatch. (Indeed one might say Leahy's performance puts Hatch's to shame, except that the shame is really Leahy's.)
There's only one problem with all this: "at the same point in the Clinton administration" the Judiciary Committee wasn't "Republican-controlled." Its chairman was Delaware Democrat Joe Biden. The Republicans hadn't yet regained control of Congress. Is it any surprise, then, that Leahy would be holding back more Bush nominees than Biden held back Clinton nominees? [posted 12:30 pm]
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WHAT STUDENT TRACKING SYSTEM? The Washington Post's Cheryl Thompson reports today that, according to anonymous sources in the Justice Department, the government's new foreign student tracking system is ready to roll. Tapped actually knows quite a lot about this topic. What the Post isn't reporting is that the system the Justice Department, or more specifically the INS, is preparing to roll out is a fraud -- a dumbed-down version of a much more robust and useful student tracking system originally developed in the late 1990s. Here's the key difference: The original system would have linked up State Department, INS, and law enforcement computer databases in real time, so that if a guy like Hani Hanjour applied for a student visa, he would probably be flagged by law enforcement.
The new system basically just sticks the visa application on a computer database. This is an improvement over keeping the applications in a warehouse in Kentucky. But it's not, as Terry Hartle of the American Council of Education tells the Post, "the single best step the federal government can take to keep closer tabs on international students studying in the United States." In fact, the ACE was one of those groups who up until 9/11 were plotting to repeal student tracking entirely. (It was originally mandated by Congress in 1996.) So why does Hartle sound so positive? Because opponents of student tracking know that the dumbed-down system is the closest they're going to come, in the post-9/11 environment, to no system at all. You can get the whole story here. (Hopefully, the article will also convince you, as writing it convinced Tapped, that a student tracking system is a good idea.) [posted 12:05 pm]
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USE THE FORCE, ANDREW. We swore to ourselves we'd lay off for a few days. But there he goes again: Andrew Sullivan is apparently above doing the reportorial research necessary to refute claims that he disagrees with. Instead, he seems satisfied to simply intuit that they are wrong. Here's what he writes today about an article by Geoffrey Nunberg in the Prospect:
I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg's piece in the American Prospect in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by numbers, because it so flew in the face of what I knew that I figured something had to be wrong. (And I was too lazy to do all the enormously laborious number-crunching to refute it. So sue me.) I figured someone would correct it at some point. And so they have. Check out this blog, Zonitics from Arizona and scroll down to May 7. Let me say again for the umpteenth time: I have no problem with good old bias. If Howell Raines wants to run a newspaper tilted left, that's fine by me. But there needs to be honesty about this or you lose credibility. By the way, a reader sends in the following tally from the Times in the last month: use of "far-left" - 16 times; "far right" - 38 times; use of "left-wing" - 26; "right-wing" - 63.
When Tapped was on Sullivan's site there was no link to Zonitics. Here's the link. It's not clear that Zonitics has authoritatively debunked Nunberg. Zonitics doesn't make that claim, and in fact, if you scroll down (did Sullivan?), Zonitics and Nunberg are currently engaged in a robust and thoughtful e-mail debate over the data. As opposed to Sullivan's anonymous correspondent, who can't think of a reason why the Times would have used the terms "far right" and "right-wing" a lot in the past month. Here's a hint, guy: There was this election in France. Maybe you heard about it? As for Sullivan, he says it himself: He's lazy. [posted 11:45 am]
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TAKE THAT. Federal Judge Charles H. Haden II in Charleston, West Virgina, slammed the administration's decision last week that would have pumped up the mining industry's ability to dump dirt and rock from their operations into nearby valleys and streams (a result of the mining practice known as mountaintop removal). Haden said the revision of the rule was illegal and that the administration was way off-base by rewriting it. Local environmentalists cheered, and the mining industry was stunned by the scope of the decision, which stopped new permits dead in their tracks. The Post reports that in the last 10 years, mining companies have leveled hundreds of square miles, covered more than 1,000 miles of streams, and increased the levels of sulfates and other pollutants that have harmed aquatic life. [posted 10:35 am]
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GRAHAM, CRACKERS. The Washington Post outs one of the most potentially damaging administration appointees. Tucked away in the bowels of the Office of Management and Budget sits John Graham, the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the man in charge of overseeing regulatory changes for the Administration. Graham came to the administration from an industry backed sinecure at Harvard, and everything he's done thus far reflects his industry bias. Check out some of the details of his decisions on the environment and highway safety issues here. What concerns Tapped most is that by all indications, Graham is just the tip of the deregulatory iceberg in this administration. [posted 10:25 am]
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PIRATE'S TREASURY. Alex Bolton has a really terrific story this week on how the Treasury Department, though use of Executive Orders, has circumvented the Hill in pushing through changes (like a provision that allows executives like Ken Lay to receive tax-free compensation) unknown to key members of Congress. Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had no clue. Neither did senators Kent Conrad (D-ND), John Kerry (D-MA), Jim Jeffords (I-VT), and Olympia Snow (R-ME), all of whom sit on the Senate tax-writing panel. All together, experts estimate that the unilateral actions will provide corporate America with billions of dollars of tax relief. [posted 10:10 am]
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SIR PAUL. This morning, Paul Krugman is hitting on all cylinders. Liked Tapped, he wonders why Thomas White is still in office even after it was disclosed this week that White's Enron Energy Services was rigging the market. Like Tapped, we're sure he's still wondering. [posted 10:05 am]
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RATS. Reading William Saletan's latest "Frame Game" piece about robotizing rats in Slate, Tapped was left feeling rather unsatisfied. "Frame Game" is usually remarkable for its deft parsing of arguments, but in this article Saletan never actually presented a real argument against turning rats into robots. Instead, he opted for outrage. For example:
What Chapin's team gave the rats was, in the words of the team's paper, "a virtual 'touch' to the left or right whiskers by stimulating their respective cortical representations." The "chief benefit" of this technique, according to the paper, is "its ability to dissociate explicit schedule variables such as cues and rewards from the physical variables that are normally associated with their delivery." In other words, you don't have to put a wall in front of the rat or give it an edible treat. You just make it think that it has touched a wall or been given a treat. That isn't information. It's deception.
And again:
In the Los Angeles Times, Talwar mused, "The rats could almost understand what you wanted them to do." Rewards? Understand? There were no rewards, and the rats understood nothing. An animal controlled by a whip or bridle knows, at least, that it's being dominated. An animal controlled by fabricated sensations and gratifications doesn't.
Um, forgive us. We don't want to seem like we really hate rats or anything. But Tapped fails to see how it is dead obvious that there's something egregiously unethical about manipulating the brain of a rat. Such an action may be morally wrong, but isn't it at least worth offering an argument to explain why? The closest Saletan comes is the claim that if we robotize rats, we'll do the same thing to "dogs, monkeys, or humans." (In the process, he misunderstands the aimless and directionless process of evolution, writing that dogs are "more evolved" than rats and monkeys are "more evolved" than dogs.) Again, there may be something bad about messing with the psyches of these animals. But that still isn't an argument for why we shouldn't manipulate the brains of rats. [posted 9:00 am]
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CLONE THAT ARTICLE. Charles Krauthammer, not content with having penned a recent New Republic cover story advancing a "secular argument against research cloning," goes and does the same thing in his column. Is somebody obsessed? Let's compare some passages. From The New Republic:
Research cloning is the ultimate in conferring thingness up on the human embryo. It is the ultimate in desensitization. And as such, it threatens whatever other fences and safeguards we might erect around embryonic research.
From Krauthammer's column in the Post:
It is the ultimate commodification of the human embryo. And it is a bridge too far. Reducing the human embryo to nothing more than a manufactured thing sets a fearsome desensitizing precedent that jeopardizes all the other ethical barriers we have constructed around embryonic research.
And again, from The New Republic:
Where cloning for research takes us decisively beyond stem-cell research is in sanctioning the manufacture of the human embryo. You can try to regulate embryonic research to prohibit the creation of Brave New World monsters; you can build fences on the slippery slope, regulating how many days you may grow an embryo for research; but once you countenance the very creation of human embryos for no other purpose than for their parts, you have crossed a moral frontier.
Now compare today's column:
What makes research cloning different from stem cell research--what pushes us over a moral frontier--is that for the first time it sanctions the creation of a human embryo for the sole purpose of using it for its parts. Indeed, it will sanction the creation of an entire industry of embryo manufacture whose explicit purpose is not creation of children but dismemberment for research.
Gee, it's good to see Krauthammer has something new to say. [posted 7:00 am]
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MISLEADING SUBTITLE WATCH. There it was, on the front page of the Washington Post: "Palestinians Reconsider Suicide Tactics After Deaths of 3 Teenagers." Tapped, being suspicious, read the article and found that it showed no such thing. Apparently three 15-year-old Palestinians went off half-cocked for an attack on a Jewish settlement and were slaughtered. And apparently Hamas disapproves of youth "planning to become martyrs." But is the organization moving away from suicide attacks? No, they just don't want any amateurs trying it:
The deaths of Anwar, Ismail and Yusef were distinguished from other Palestinian suicide attacks by three things. First, the boys were barely old enough to shave and, their elders contended, were not mature enough to make a decision that amounted to a suicide pact. Second, their attack -- running headlong toward the heavily guarded settlement with no real weaponry -- was futile bravura, unlikely to inflict casualties on the enemy. And finally, according to their parents, the three had decided on their own to rush the settlement, without guidance or preparation from any Palestinian organization and without giving any hint of what was to come.
This isn't a renunciation of terrorism. It's a renunication of inefficient terrorism. [posted 6:40 am]
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A RECIPE FOR SUBSIDIES. Never say that The Wall Street Journal doesn't have a sense of humor. Today, as a sidebar to a news story (subscription required) on how an alternative soybean-based fuel -- biodiesel -- just got its very own special tax break in the Senate energy bill, the Journal provides a recipe: "The main ingredient in this fuel concoction is typically soybean oil. Add one big tax break, supporters say, and you have an affordable, nonpolluting 'miracle fuel.' When burned, it smells like french fries."
There are several additional observations here. The same folks who brought you an ethanol subsidy that lasted for 25 years say they'll only need 3 years for biodiesel. Those folks are the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation, which has averaged about a million dollars each year in political contributions for the last four or five election cycles. Meanwhile, farmers, many of whom alternate between growing corn one year and soybeans the next, will make out just fine. As if the farm bill wasn't enough. [posted 5:45 pm]
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FREE SPEECH, GOP STYLE. Apparently there was quite the brouhaha at the White House over the fact that George W. Bush's chief media advisor, Mark McKinnon, gave some big money to Texas's Democratic nominee for the Senate Ron Kirk. Now, McKinnon is backpedaling, saying the contribution to Kirk sent the wrong signal about where his loyalties lay and that he's really a Bush man. All of this has Tapped confused. If money equals speech, as Republicans like to claim, then isn't McKinnon in some pretty serious free speech jeopardy here? [posted 4:30 pm]
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SAD STORIES. The stories being told by the young people attending the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children now underway can make you weep. Just for starters: 10 million children die every year from preventable diseases and 120 million are not in school. Tapped would like to remind our readers that the United States is the only country in the world, other than Somalia, that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child which spells out political, economic and cultural rights for children. [posted 4:30 pm]
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THE LIBERAL BLOGOSPHERE. We're taking nominations/recommendations for the best liberal blogs (and blog-equivalents) out there. At some point in the future, we may incorporate a list into the site design. For now, we'll take the best and throw up a post with links so people know where to find you. Feel free to nominate yourself. [posted 3:15 pm]
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THE ICELANDIC CASE AGAINST PRIVATIZATION. In the latest New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, has a lengthy essay on the history of Iceland. (Subscription required.) Tapped, scholarly though we are, didn't know much about the last millennium on this volcanic protrusion of an island, and when we read Diamond's essay we were shocked. Diamond turns his review into a kind of brief against Reaganism, writing:
Upon their occupation of the previously uninhabited Icelandic landscape, those settlers [Norwegian plunderers] established a society like none other on Earth. They arrived with an anti-big-government attitude and found that attitude reinforced by necessity born of extreme poverty. For both of those reasons they privatized government beyond Ronald Reagan's wildest dreams, and thereby collapsed in a civil war that cost them their independence for the next seven hundred years.
Later, Diamond explains exactly how this came about:
By 1260, Icelanders had to admit that their system of government did not work, and that they could not agree to or afford to govern themselves. Incredibly, the descendants of those settlers who had fled Norway to escape the growing power of Norway's king now invited Norway's king to govern them. They reasoned that a distant king was less of a danger to them than were their own nearby chiefs....I cannot think of another historical case of an independent country that became so desperate that it turned itself over to another country.
Egads! Note to Tapped (from self): Whenever making the case against privatization and shrinking government, CITE ICELAND! [posted 2:25 pm]
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WHO'S PARTISAN. This website, the curiously named Lying in Ponds (from Monty Python?) claims to rank the columnists of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post in terms of how partisan they are (i.e., how frequently they refer favorably or unfavorably to one or the other political party). Tapped wasn't at all surprised to learn that the clutch of writers at The Wall Street Journal came in first in terms of partisanship (the Times was second). Individually, Paul Krugman is classified as the single most partisan pundit, presumably for his trashing of the Bush administration (which just goes to show you that partisanship ain't always a bad thing). You could certainly quibble with various aspects of the quantitative analysis performed on Lying in Ponds, but at least the methodology is well explained. Also, the writers on the partisan list are sometimes not who you'd expect. Tapped found this site to provide a lot of food for thought. [posted 1:50 pm]
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PROPS TO DON RUMSFELD. Okay, so you won't read those words on our site very much. But Rummie deserves credit for cancelling the Crusader boondoggle. (Sometimes it takes a Republican to get real defense spending reform.) Let's see if Republicans on the Hill beat him down on this one. [posted 12:10 pm]
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THE EDUCATION PRESIDENT? Our readers have probably noticed, in the past few days, a flurry of articles about George W. Bush and education -- usually keyed to some visit Bush is making to an elementary school or something. Cleary Karl Rove is trying to beef up the president's domestic agenda presence a bit, and education is a good place to start. But here's something the papers aren't reporting very well: Bush's budget basically screws Bush's education plan. There's just not enough money in it to do all the things Bush said he wanted to do. And his allies on the education bill last year -- particularly Democrats George Miller and Ted Kennedy -- are outraged. Tapped colleague Noy Thrupkaew has the goods. But Tapped wants to advance this notion a bit. Recall that education was the number one item on Bush's domestic agenda. More broadly, it was his claim to fame as a pragmatic, center-right Republican. What does it say about the Bush Administration that it won't fund its own education package? Shouldn't this be more of a scandal? [posted 12:05 pm]
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ARE PEACE ACTIVISTS HUNG UP ON STALIN? That's what Ron Rosenbaum seems to think. To wit:
As someone who has long considered himself a liberal, I think what's going on here has something to do with the deep denial -- the displaced fearfulness -- the left has about any discussion of the Holocaust, because it might inevitably bring up the one thing the left is too frightened to face: Stalin's Holocaust, the mass murders that killed more people than Hitler.Some thoughts. Rosenbaum's complaint is primarily against older leftists. But there aren't many of them left. (So to speak.) The great mass of peace protesters these days are very young. (There aren't a lot of leftists in their 30s and 40s, either. We've always thought that the explanation is that that cohort came of age during the conservative Reagan years, and more of them, in Tapped's experience, tend to be neocons or neolibs.) This particular member of the Tapped Brain Trust has bones to pick with the Roving Protesters who descend on Washington every couple of weeks -- formerly to protest the World Bank, then to protest the U.S.'s so-called "racist war" in Afghanistan, and most recently to criticize Israel. But we will observe that most of them are, in fact, too young to be guilty of youthful infatuation with Stalin. Something else seems to be at work. [posted 11:45 am]
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WHAT'S IN A NAME, PART II. A knowledgeable individual has responded to Tapped's query about why some papers refer to "Burma" and others to "Myanmar." Here, in brief, is the explanation:
The name was changed by the SPDC government (State Peace and Development Committee), formerly SLORC (State Law and Order Committee) to "Myanmar." Some have made the case that this is more appropriate, since "Burma" refers specifically to Burmans -- the majority population. So "Myanmar," one ancient political-geographic term, is more inclusive of the ethnic minorities. (As in many countries, ethnicity and religion often go together -- the Burmans are Buddhist, many of the ethnic groups are Christian).But (as is also often the case) this is all more complicated. For example, there is evidence that the traditional national name was intended to include all of Burma's people. And, "Myanmar" originally referred to only a portion of what today is the country and -- guess what -- it was the section of the country composed of the Burman ethnic group.
Another argument is that "Burma" is a British gift. And "Myanmar" more indigenous. This is also disputed.
Most of us who do not use the name "Myanmar" do not because Aung San Suu Kyi does not. It is political.
One of the longest holdouts was The New York Times. The day they switched was very sad for me. They do still (I believe) say "Myanmar (formerly Burma)."
Thanks. We feel smarter. [posted 10:35 am]
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SANE AS COBAIN? Hoosier Review links to the rock band of Luke Helder, who has admitted to planting pipe bombs in mailboxes in several Midwestern states. He apparently "digs" Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. The band's name, not particularly surprisingly, is Apathy. Hoosier Review's Joshua Claybourn actually likes one of Helder's songs, but writes, "You'll also notice his email address at the bottom of the page. You might want to drop him a line and let him know what you think about blowing up innocent people." [posted 8:55 am]
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WHITE WATCH. We can't quite figure out why Thomas White, Secretary of the Army (as of this writing), is still there. He undercuts Secretary Rumsfeld's policy on the Hill, is under investigation for use of airplanes for personal business, is subject to an FBI investigation on insider trading, and is a general liability to the Bush administration on Enron. Yet he still "retains the confidence" of the administration. So permit us, if you will, to indulge in a bit of speculation. Is it possible that White knows the names of the secret partners of Enron's off balance sheet partnerships? In any case, something keeps this guy in office. It is time for Congress to find out what it is. [posted 8:35 am]
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POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY. On Spinsanity, Ben Fritz takes apart a Victor Davis Hanson article in National Review Online that puts all Palestinian sympathizers on the couch, as if there are no rational reasons for their positions. A Hanson quote:
Partly Marxist, partly ignorant, and mostly naive, these insufferable and affluent European and American leftists see their solidarity with Palestinians as inseparable from their own embarrassed personas.
As Fritz rightly points out, this is armchair pop psychologizing of the worst sort. [posted 8:20 am]
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A FOX IN THE HENHOUSE. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt doesn't seem to understand that he's now a public servant. He denied that there was any impropriety to his private meeting with Eugene O'Kelly, the new chief executive of KPMG, a firm being investigated by the SEC for questionable audits of the Xerox Corporation. O'Kelly tells a different story, though, claiming they discussed the pending matter. We don't have a lot of confidence that the two chief lawmakers on this case -- Reps Bill Tauzin and John Dingell -- are going to get the bottom of things here. Chairman Pitt isn't the first administration appointee we've reported on here who can't seem to remember that he's got the public as his boss now. [posted 8:07 am]
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UH-OH. Late Wednesday, a conservative seniors group apparently backed by the pharmaceutical industry -- the United Seniors Association -- announced a $3 million TV broadcast campaign in favor of the Republicans' prescription drug proposal (a measure that has been denounced by the Democrats as election year posturing). This big an air campaign this early in the season is raising eyebrows. Luckily, we hear the Democrats are ready to come out swinging on this issue. [posted 8:05 am]
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BRING BACK THE FIFTIES. Doesn't Brent Bozell ever get sick of being a scold? There's nothing new to this column -- it's been written in various incarnations, by various conservatives, a hundred times. And that's precisely what made it so striking to Tapped this time around. There are too many sitcom plots devoted to sex, says Bozell; he wants old-style TV:
Yes, the world has changed, and yes, some of the old content restrictions were silly, but if the choice is between slightly stuffy then and almost-anything-goes now, I'll take Rob and Laura Petrie, twin beds and all, over "Will and Grace," and just about everything else on the idiot box today.
This is pure nostalgia, not an argument. Besides being backwards and redundant, it's also pointless. And a little sad. [posted 7:55 am]
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FARMED OUT. The Bull Moose has some pretty unpleasant things to say about the Bush administration's giving in to the farm bill (which just passed the Senate). Indeed, the Moose sounds pretty liberal:
The farm bill is a model for the new conservatism. Like steel tarriffs, it represents federal intervention in the marketplace in the service of large corporate interests. Big government is kosher as long as it comforts the comfortable. Even better if it assists the billing efforts of the K Street Crowd.
Hey, isn't this guy a McCain supporter? [posted 7:40 am]
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WHITE OUT. The case against Thomas White, Secretary of the Army, is building. Public Citizen reveals that it was his Enron division -- Enron Energy Services -- that lied to officials in California, thereby enabling the company to fix prices for electricity. How can Don Rumsfeld continue to stand by this guy? It's time for White to go. [posted 5:30 pm]
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MUST BE ALL THE SQUAT THRUSTS AND TESTOSTERONE. How else to explain the vast leaps of logic of which Andrew Sullivan is capable? Here's the latest. Most of us thought that Pim Fortuyn was murdered by a homicidal Dutchman with eccentric far-left views. But Sullivan has entered the liberal hive mind to bring us the real story -- and lived to tell about it! Journeying all the way to the BBC website, Sullivan ventured onto a discussion board. There, our intrepid reporter uncovered the center of the vast left-wing conspiracy -- a man known only as "Matt, a libertarian socialist, UK," and who opines that "It's good to see people taking direct action against the far right." Lazy sheep like Tapped would probably be content to dismiss "Matt" as the kind of guy who posts rants on public web boards. How naive! As Sullivan points out, "Matt, a libertarian socialist, UK," actually represents "what many leftist activists actually believe." Huh. Tapped didn't get the memo. But wait, there's more! Did you know that "the vicious rhetoric spouted against him by leftist, liberal and even moderate politicians and journalists no doubt contributed" to Fortuyn's murder? Did you know that the "far left...does everything they can to shut down the views of others, marginalize, blacklist or simply intimidate them?" That explains why the conservative Sullivan is forced to slum at the New York Times Magazine and the Times of London while liberal Tapped gets to write for the TAP website. [posted 4:15 pm]
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PALESTINE AND PEACE MOVEMENTS. Tapped has thought some more about our earlier post about why the Palestinians have failed to produce a robust nonviolence movement. Our answer? Tapped doesn't know. (Yeah, yeah -- we were surprised, too!) So we're going to take advantage of this wonderful Internet to solicit your thoughts on the matter. Email Tapped your considered opinion -- political, cultural, geohistorical, religious -- and we'll excerpt some of the best ones here, along with our thoughts. Unless otherwise instructed, we will identify all contributors by their initials. [posted 3:25 pm]
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SHADES OF GRAY. Alert Tapped reader W.P. points out that the Field Poll we cited in an earlier post on Gray Davis -- in which we point out that Republican candidate and conservative darling Bill Simon was way trailing significantly -- is not the end of the story. This story in the American Prowler (a successor to Bob Tyrrell's American Spectator) points out that Simon leads in most of the other polls. Hey, we said Davis was "one of the least inspiring big-name Democrats in the country," didn't we? [posted 3:15 pm]
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WHY THE RIGHT DOMINATES TALK RADIO. Today is the debut of Bill O'Reilly's new talk show, presumably aimed at the vast untapped audience for angry, right-wing talk radio shows. But seriously, folks, today's Washington Post story has a perceptive quote from O'Reilly about why liberals don't succeed on the radio. To wit:
"Conservative people tend to see the world in black and white terms, good and evil," says O'Reilly in an interview. "Liberals see grays. In any talk format, you have to pound home a strong point of view. If you're not providing controversy and excitement, people won't listen, or watch."Tapped thinks this observation contains a grain of truth. There's probably more to be said on this matter in the future. Incidentally, TAP printed a great article on this general topic a few years ago. Here's the link. [posted 2:20 pm]
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FIGHT! In the New Republic Online, Gregg Easterbrook responds at length to an article by TAP's Natasha Hunter that was itself a response to a recent New Republic editorial. Tapped gets the feeling that Hunter will have more to say about all this in the near future. [posted 1:30 pm]
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DUCK DUCK GOOSE. Some of our readers were upset by our wanton disregard for the life of rats and mice yesterday. So, as true friends to all fluffy and furry creatures, we want to bring to our readers' attention that a fourth suspect has been arrested in the apparently wanton murder of two ducklings in Salem, Oregon. Aggravated animal abuse is a class C felony, punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years. We hope they get the max. [posted 1:25 pm]
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PLAYING THE ODDS. The Post also reports today that Bush's top pick to head EPA's environmental enforcement officehas caused some consternation in the Senate -- not enough experience, say lawmakers. Tapped contends, however, that the fact that John Suarez has absolutely no background in environmental law is perfectly balanced by hisformer position as commissioner for New Jersey's Division of Gambling Enforcement. Considering the administration's reckless behavior in theenvironmental arena, we could use someone who knows a bit about gambling. [posted 12:10 pm]
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FREUDIAN SLIP? The Post reports today that the administration is setting up a visa panel to evaluate the trustworthiness of international students whose coursework might involve learning sensitive information about U.S technology or security. Whatever you may think about making sure certain students don't study certain topics, the comments of James Griffin from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy sounded a little more generalized and xenophobic than was perhaps warranted. "The goal is to make sure international students or scholars don't get training that could be used against the U.S. in a terrorist attack," he told the Post. Isn't there a difference between deciding which international students can study certain topics, and deciding which topics are off-limits for all international students? [posted 12:05 pm]
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AXIS OF INCOMPETENCE, TAKE TWO. Tapped marvels at the way that it has become an objective fact, and not an opinion, that the Bush administration is bungling the Middle East. To quote at length from a story today by the Post's Alan Sipress:
But absent an administration consensus over basic Middle East policy, the bombing threatens to deflect the U.S. bid to restore calm and restart political talks, again leaving the administration struggling to keep up with events.[posted 9:45 am]Even before the attack on the pool hall in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Letzion, the administration approach was buffeted by competing pressures from Israel, Arab governments and European allies. It also has been riven by fundamental philosophical differences, notably between the State Department and Pentagon, over whether to aggressively pursue a negotiated settlement or give Sharon greater latitude to eliminate Palestinian militants.
The result is that the administration has been unable to settle on an underlying Middle East policy in which to ground daily diplomacy.
"When you don't know how to get from A to B, which is certainly the case with this administration, you are subject to the winds of the day," said Ivo H. Daalder of the Brookings Institution. "You're seeing a president and an administration that is not able at this point to make a decision to go one way or another. So you have a policy that is all over the place."
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LET THE (LEGAL) GAMES BEGIN. Yesterday marked the end of open season on the new campaign finance law. It seems like everyone -- and their brothers and sisters -- has signed up to challenge one or another aspect of the McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan legislation. A three judge federal panel will hear a single consolidated case. (Tapped is just imagining the courtroom scene when Democrats, Republicans, the NRA, voting rights groups, the ACLU and the like try to present a single case). Most of the plantiffs, like Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the NRA, and the ACLU, are bringing a First Amendment challenge to the new rules on banning soft money and on issue advertising (a challenge Tapped sees as protecting the free speech rights of the wealthy).
But yesterday, in what may turn out to be the most significant challenge, the National Voting Rights Institute took on the new law on equal protection grounds, saying that raising individual contribution limits from $1,000 to $2,000 would unconstitutionally favor wealthy contributors and discriminate against nonwealthy ones. Some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit spoke compellingly at a press briefing about how the current campaign finance system had become a new poll tax -- a de facto requirement for participation in politics -- and reminded us that even $1,000 contribution limits already disenfranchise the more than 99 percent of Americans who don't make contributions at that level. Oral arguments are to come in December. [posted 9:35 am]
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BLINDED BY THE RIGHT WATCH. Tapped keeps its eye on right wing doings, and today we found a good review by David Broder of two bastions of conservative thought -- the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. They were both born 25 years ago and their impact on Republican White Houses, and Congress, has been extraordinary by anyone's estimation. What we zeroed in on was the comment that these two think tanks' intellectual honesty and willingness leads them, as Broder says, "to question conventional wisdom, even when their friends are in power." This is something that those on the other side, including Tapped, need to try to keep in mind. We're delighted that John Samples of Cato will join us in the next American Prospect debate. [posted 9:25 am]
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IS IT EVER GOING TO CHANGE? After another horrific suicide bombing, Ariel Sharon has reacted the same way he always does. Here's how the Post reports it:
In a hastily called news conference only hours after a White House meeting with President Bush, Sharon made clear that he considers Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat responsible for the bombing. "All those who believe that they can make gains through the use of terror will cease to exist," Sharon said.
So it seems that now we can expect more retaliation, to be followed by more suicide attacks. Later in the same Post story, we learn that the peace plan Sharon proposed to Bush is pretty much the same one as before: "an end to terror and a cease fire, to be followed by an 'interim period' of unspecified duration during which the parameters of peace would be discussed." This would, of course, allow suicide terrorists to derail peace whenever they feel like it (as they seem to have done with yesterday's bombing). For more on this, read Robert Wright's