Best of the Web Today - May 27, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Best of the Tube This Weekend
We'll be joining Dan Henninger (filling in as moderator for Paul Gigot), Melanie Kirkpatrick and John Fund to discuss judges and the filibuster compromise for a segment of this week's edition of "The Journal Editorial Report" on PBS. Tune in early, as ours is the first segment.
Air times are determined by local stations, so check the schedule here. Among the stations airing the program tonight are New York's WNET (13) at 9 p.m. and Washington's WETA (26) at 10:30 p.m.
Ambassador Phil Connors
It happened again. The Democrats managed to delay a vote on John Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the U.N. for, by our rough estimate, the 452nd time. It's almost enough to make us regret our support of Monday's filibuster compromise--not because that wasn't a good deal, but because we're starting to wish the Democrats had shut down the Senate.
The vote for cloture--that is, to cut off debate and give Bolton a floor vote--was 56-42, four short of the 60 required. All Republicans--including Ohio's George "Musky" Voinovich--voted for cloture except Arlen Specter, who missed the vote, and Majority Leader Bill Frist, who voted "no," which, under some obscure Senate rule (possibly a redundancy) gives him the right to invoke cloture again. Democrats Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor voted yes, so two more Democratic defections would be sufficient to bring Bolton's nomination to the floor.
At issue are Democratic demands that the White House turn over classified documents in which the Dems hope to find dirt to use against Bolton. Our guess is that this stalemate will not go on for long; either the administration will cough up the info or two Democrats will relent and vote for cloture. The Democrats gain little by keeping this going; this is a tactical delay, not a strategy like the filibustering of judges in the last Congress, when Democrats aimed to hold judicial seats open for President Kerry* to fill. If the Senate fails to vote on Bolton, President Bush can simply install him via recess appointment.
Still, the Senate has time to kill before Bolton's nomination comes to the floor, and some serious questions have been raised about his fitness for the job. So why doesn't the Foreign Relations Committee subpoena Voinovich's grandchildren?
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way could not be reached for comment.
Inconsistencies of Our Times
An editorial in the New York Times denounces President Bush's somewhat restrictive views on federal funding of stem-cell research:
Mr. Bush threatened this week to veto a modest research-expansion bill that was approved by the House and is likely to be passed by the Senate. The reason, he said, is that the measure would "take us across a critical ethical line" by encouraging the destruction of embryos from which the stem cells are extracted. Never mind that this particular ethical line looms large only for a narrow segment of the population. It is not deemed all that critical by most Americans or by most religious perspectives. Rather, the president's intransigence provided powerful proof of the dangers of letting one group's religious views dictate national policy.
But another American newspaper disagrees with the Times' majoritarian view. It praises the compromise on judicial filibusters, which frustrated "the overbearing Republican majority":
The pact they forged will preserve the minority's right to filibuster--block a bill or nomination unless a supermajority of 60 senators votes to proceed. . . . There is absolutely nothing unfair about allowing a minority that actually represents more American people to veto lifetime appointments of judges who are far outside the mainstream of American thinking.
That antimajoritarian paper, of course, is . . . the New York Times!
The same Times editorial (the pro-minority one, that is) denounces appeals-court nominee Janice Rogers Brown, a justice of the California Supreme Court, because, among other things, "she once wrote a dissent in which she claimed that ordering a rental car company supervisor to stop calling Hispanic employees by racial epithets was a violation of the company's free speech rights."
This is supposed to establish that Brown (who is black) favors racial discrimination, or likes companies better than employees, or something else that would no doubt be obvious to us if we were an Upper West Side liberal instead of an Upper East Side moderate. Yet a look at her opinion in Aguilar v. Avis (PDF) makes clear that the Times is engaged in demagogy.
A group of Hispanic Avis employees successfully sued alleging racial harassment by an employee named John Lawrence. The trial court awarded the plaintiffs damages, which were not challenged. It also issued an injunction ordering defendant John Lawrence to "cease and desist from using any derogatory racial or ethnic epithets directed at, or descriptive of, Hispanic/Latino employees of Avis Rent A Car System, Inc."
This order was the issue in the case before the Supreme Court. By a 4-3 vote, the court held that the injunction--which an appeals court had narrowed so that it applied only to the workplace--was constitutionally sound. The dissenters, including Brown, viewed it as an unconstitutional prior restraint. As one of them wrote:
According to the Chief Justice, the injunction passes constitutional muster because it simply precludes defendants from continuing their unlawful activity. It does more than that. It directly targets otherwise protected speech, forbidding any future use of a list of offensive words in the workplace--even outside the presence of plaintiffs and even if welcome or overtly permitted. Although the lead opinion insists that it would prohibit an illegal course of conduct, in fact it regulates speech on the basis of expressive content.
There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of this case, and we're not going to argue that it was wrongly decided. But it's very unusual for courts to approve prior restraint of speech, as the New York Times, as a party to the Pentagon Papers case, should know quite well. Obviously Aguilar isn't the Pentagon Papers, but the Times isn't defending the former on its merits; it is suggesting that disagreement is intolerable.
The Aguilar dissent quoted above, by the way, is not from Brown but from the late Justice Stanley Mosk, who was the most liberal member of the California Supreme Court. If a Democratic president appointed someone like Mosk, would the Times attack him as "out of the mainstream"? Of course not. It would either praise him for standing up for unpopular speech or say that while he came up with the wrong result, these are difficult and complex issues and we should see the whole thing in context. To attack Brown for taking a perfectly plausible dissenting position, a position with which her most liberal colleague agreed, is pure demagogy.
Tom Friedman's Allies
The New York Times' Thomas Friedman wants to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention center because it is the subject of anti-American propaganda. This passage in particular got our attention:
If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantánamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press.
Friedman apparently is unclear on the concept of a free press. Britain and Australia may be "our closest allies" (Canada and Germany are considerably less close), but much of their press is virulently anti-American. Besides, why does Friedman have to go all the way to London to make this point? There's plenty of anti-American propaganda right here in America. But we suppose if Friedman wrote, "Just see what Michael Moore is saying about Gitmo," the silliness of his argument would be obvious even to him.
Help Wanted
From a job posting on JournalismJobs.com:
Newsweek Magazine seeks a PUBLICIST. You will be responsible for pitching stories to TV and radio producers, securing TV and radio appearances for reporters, drafting trade and editorial press releases, managing the communications department on weekends and supervising weekend writers and assistants. You will also interact with top editors and counsel reporters for interviews, promote breaking news on the internet, place photos from Newsweek events in trade publications, promote special issues, assist with awards entries, and update and monitor biographies and headshots.
Does that "counsel reporters for interviews" include instructing them on sourcing of their stories?
What a Sicko!
"Disabled Children Appeal to Putin"--headline, Associated Press, May 26
This Stinks
"A former top-ranked radio host, who claims she was sickened by a colleague's use of a perfume described as 'romantic, sensual, emotional,' won $10.6 million in a federal court lawsuit Monday," the Detroit News reports:
Erin Weber, who was on the air at WYCD-FM (99.5), contends in her suit that she was fired in 2001 after she complained about being exposed to Tresor perfume, which sells for $45.50 a bottle and is described by Lancome as a combination of ingredients such as rose and lilac. She said she was sickened by the fumes. . . .
The verdict awarded her $7 million in punitive damages, $2 million in mental anguish and emotional distress and $1.6 million for past and future compensation after a six-woman jury in U.S. District Court in Detroit spent eight days deliberating.
One morning some years back we were boarding a New York subway car were astonished to find that it was half empty during rush hour. An optimist would say it was half full, but only if he had a clothespin over his nose, for it turned out the reason the car was depopulated was that a sleeping bum was sprawled out across several seats sleeping. Without going into any detail, suffice it to say that his body odor was one of the worst smells we have ever encountered.
Worse yet, there were two cops riding on the car. We approached them and asked them to do something about the problem, and they replied that there was nothing they could do: The bum wasn't violating any laws, and he had the "right" to be on the subway. If only he'd been wearing perfume, we'd be a millionaire today. (Hat tip: Overlawyered.com.)
What'll They Control Next?
It's a long-running joke, only now it's serious: The BBC reports that a British Medical Journal article argues "for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing":
A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase--and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.
They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.
One could argue that banning knives doesn't go far enough, for the world is filled with other dangerous items. Consider this report, from the Bellingham (Wash.) Herald:
Two Bellingham residents were killed when a tree fell on and crushed their SUV as they drove southbound on Lake Whatcom Boulevard Sunday.
Didn't Reagan warn us about trees? If we're going to control guns and knives, doesn't log-ic demand that we do something about these wooden weapons of mass destruction? Though of course the tree-huggers will object. We can just hear them now: "You can have my tree when you pry it from my cold, dead arms." |
