Best of the Web Today - August 5, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
'Initial Inquiries'
The New York Times has confirmed Matt Drudge's report, which we noted yesterday, that it was "looking into" the adoption records of Judge John Roberts's two children. A Times spokesman tells Fox News's Brit Hume that, in Hume's words, "the paper was simply asking questions, and that only initial inquiries had been made."
PoliPundit.com reprints an e-mail that the office of Times public editor Barney Calame (previously a colleague of ours at The Wall Street Journal) has been sending in response to inquiries about the matter:
Dear Reader,
Thanks for writing to us.
While the public editor does not usually get involved in pre-publication matters, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the paper, told us that he would not stand for any gratuitous reporting about the Roberts's children. He said that as an adoptive parent he is particularly sensitive about this issue.
In addition, a senior editor at the paper wrote, "In the case of Judge Roberts's family, our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue. We did not order up an investigation of the adoptions. We have not pursued the issue after the initial inquiries, which detected nothing irregular about the adoptions."
Sincerely,
Joe Plambeck
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times
According to Hume, the Times' "initial inquiries" consisted of "asking lawyers who specialize in adoption cases for advice on how to get into the sealed court records" about Roberts's children. "At least one lawyer turned the Times down flat, saying that any effort to pry into adoption case records, which are always sealed, would be reprehensible."
At one level, the Times did nothing wrong here. Certainly it isn't illegal to ask a lawyer if you can do something, if you follow his advice when he says no. And we'd be hard put to argue that these inquiries constituted any sort of formal ethical violation. Yet the story still rankles, for two reasons.
First, it just seems obviously inappropriate to include something as intimate as adoption records in a journalistic fishing expedition. Granted, the Times seems to have backed off, but even the initial pursuit of this line of inquiry seems indecent.
Second, it inevitably raises suspicions of political bias. Drudge reports a "Times insider" told him that "the look into the adoption papers [is] part of the paper's 'standard background check.' " Is this so? As far as we are aware, Roberts is the only adoptive parent to be nominated to the Supreme Court in recent times, but did the Times make intrusive inquiries about the children of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 or Stephen Breyer in 1994?
We don't know the answer to this question, and we won't unless the Times is prepared to publicly detail its internal activities in reporting the Ginsburg and Breyer nominations, which is not likely.
This whole episode is another reminder that the media today are subject to much more scrutiny than in the past. The last time a Supreme Court seat came open, the World Wide Web was the province of a few nerds, and there was no Drudge Report, no blogs, no Fox News Channel. If the Times did overreach in investigating Stephen Breyer, who would have known about it?
Exit, Stage Right
"CNN suspended commentator Robert Novak indefinitely after he swore and walked off the set Thursday during a debate with Democratic operative James Carville," the Associated Press reports from New York:
Carville and Novak were both trying to speak while they were handicapping the GOP candidacy of Katherine Harris. Novak said the opposition of the Republican establishment in Florida might not be fatal for her.
"Let me just finish, James, please," Novak continued. "I know you hate to hear me, but you have to."
Carville, addressing the camera, said: "He's got to show these right wingers that he's got a backbone, you know. It's why the Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you. Show 'em that you're tough."
"Well, I think that's bull---- and I hate that," Novak replied. "Just let it go."
As moderator Henry stepped in to ask Carville a question, Novak walked off the set.
Blogger Ian Schwartz has unexpurgated video.
Novak and Carville were both co-hosts of the recently canceled "Crossfire," a show with a long history of people walking off the set. We remember watching Tom Braden, the original liberal co-host, leave the stage years ago, though our recollection is that he came back after the commercial break. John Podhoretz says he "once stormed off 'Crossfire' myself when Michael Kinsley became intolerably rude and changed subject topics on me to attack my place of work." And in January Steve Roberts described his "Crossfire" experience on CNN's "Reliable Sources":
It was awful. Everyone was yelling at me the whole time. I walked off the set and I said, don't call me again. And they said, you were great! And I said, hey, this is demeaning, this is not what I do. And I worked 25 years at the New York Times. I was an analyst, not an advocate.
Novak apparently is the only one of these four to utter a barnyard vulgarity on the air, but we must point out in his defense that what he said was accurate. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is entirely staffed by people who have jobs and thus are unlikely to be watching television at 4:50 p.m., the East Coast time of the Carville-Novak exchange. Even this columnist was not tuned in, though we were working at home. Thus Carville's claim that "The Wall Street Journal editorial page is watching you" was, in fact, "bull---" (though not literally). If only Novak had said "nonsense" or "poppycock" instead, he would probably still be on CNN today.
No Exit
Oh no, they're still here! "It seems Americans unhappy about the result of last November's presidential election have decided to stay at home after all," Reuters reports from Ottawa, noting, "Canadians can put away those extra welcome mats":
In the days after President Bush won a second term, the number of U.S. citizens visiting Canada's main immigration Web site shot up sixfold, prompting speculation that unhappy Democrats would flock north.
But official statistics show the number of Americans actually applying to live permanently in Canada fell in the six months after the election.
One reason may be simple laziness. Also, perhaps anti-Americanism is really nothing more than a pose--like the teenager who "hates" his parents but would never actually give up his dependence on them. One expat suggests another possibility:
Toby Condliffe, who heads the Canadian chapter of Democrats Abroad, did have an explanation of sorts.
"I can only assume the Americans who checked out the Web site subsequently checked out our winter temperatures . . . and had second thoughts," he told Reuters.
The winter temperatures? How about the summer temps? According to the Globe and Mail, the expected high today in Toronto is a bone-chilling 28 degrees. This almost sounds appealing when you're in sweltering New York City (current temperature: 97), but then if we wanted subfreezing temperatures in the middle of August, we'd move to the Southern Hemisphere.
Of course, it turns out it isn't really that cold in Toronto. Weather.com gives today's high as 82, not 28. The trick is that Canada is on the metric system, in which temperatures are read backwards. What a clever way those Canucks have found of keeping undesirable immigrants out.
A Terror Reversal
"Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued a statement calling the attack 'a criminal act of a bloodthirsty terrorist targeting innocent Israeli civilians,' " the Jerusalem Post reports about a violent incident in the Israeli town of Shfaram yesterday. What makes this unusual is that the perpetrator was Jewish and his victims Arab. Agence France-Presse has the story:
A teenage Israeli soldier shot dead four people in a blazing row over the country's imminent withdrawal from Gaza before being lynched by furious residents of an Arab-Israeli town. . . .
The 19-year-old religiously observant Jew, dressed in army fatigues, unleashed a volley of fire inside a bus in the northern Galilee town of Shfaram in an argument over the pullout, police said.
Actually, as the Boston Globe notes, the attacker, Eden Natan-Zada, was a military deserter. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a statement that makes clear Sharon isn't just paying lip service to the victims:
The prime minister on Friday, 5 August 2005, instructed the National Insurance Institute and all related bodies to treat yesterday's murders in Shfaram as an act of terrorism in every respect and to grant all assistance as provided for by law to the bereaved families and the wounded.
Arutz Sheva reports that "the killer's parents, worried over their son's radical change, said they had asked the army to take away their son's weapon."
In the typical terrorist attack by Palestinian Arabs, Palestinian officials, if they criticize it at all, do so only on the ground that it's counterproductive, and the parents usually hail their child's "martyrdom." So, while Jewish terrorists are every bit as despicable as Arab ones, Israel's response to this atrocity shows that Jewish civilization is vastly superior to its Arab counterpart.
What Would London Visitors Do Without Studies?
"Study: Bombs Deter London Visitors"--headline, CNN.com, Aug. 5
Out of Control
"The New York Times has trouble admitting it is wrong, and it's been wrong for 50 years about rent control," opines the New York Post's Page Six gossip column:
Its front-page story yesterday, "Housing Boom Echoes in All Corners of the City," listed a number of reasons for the boom but failed to mention the gradual phasing out of rent control and rent stabilization. Landlords had argued for decades that the regulations prevented new housing development and reasoned that their removal would lead to a boom in construction. That is exactly what's slowly happening, but the Times, unable to concede its folly, credits instead "the city's decade-long population boom, low interest rates, government programs and a slide in crime."
The Times is frequently guilty of folly, but rent control is one area in which it has not been. Back when the late Roger Starr was on the editorial board (1977-92), the Times strongly opposed rent control, and in December 1996 the paper editorialized:
Rent regulation has not served New York City well. It has discouraged investment in the upkeep of old properties and the construction of new ones. The laws hurt the entire city by reducing the tax base. An expensive and extremely cumbersome state bureaucracy is required to implement them. Especially galling, the laws create an irrational system in which some well-to-do tenants pay very little rent for large apartments while less-prosperous newcomers are forced to pay rates that are artificially inflated by the shortage of market-rate housing.
By this point the Times was urging a gradual phase-out rather than immediate expiration (precisely what the Post notes is happening), and the paper's editorialists don't seem to have weighed in on the issue at all since 1997--though it did publish an op-ed column in July 2000 that argued rent control is "a textbook case in economic stupidity." The author of that column? Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who back then was still interested in economics.
What Would We Do Without Studies?
"Study Says Giant Waves Common in Hurricane"--headline, Boston Globe, Aug. 5
Hey, Thanks for the Tip!
"Health Tip: Avoid Botulism"--headline, HealthDayNews, Aug. 4
Best of the Web's European Vacation
We were in Europe the last two weeks of July, and although, as we said Monday, it wasn't a busman's holiday, we did do a few things that bordered on work. At a party our first night in Brussels, we gave interviews to a pair of Flemish bloggers, Paul Belien (on U.S. politics) and Luc Van Braekel (on blogging and the future of journalism). We did get supper for our singing, though as Belien and his wife, Belgian parliamentarian Alexandra Colen, gave us tours of the charming Flemish cities Bruges and Gent. Belien and Colen have an interesting blog called Brussels Journal, which focuses on various Euro-silliness.
A week ago today was the bicentennial of Alexis de Tocqueville's birth (see the editorial from The Wall Street Journal's Taste page), and we were lucky enough to be invited to a small dinner party at the Chateau de Toqueville, in the village of Toqueville, which is in the French province of Lower Normandy. The sponsor was the Alexis de Toqueville Institute, the organizer Greg Fossedal, a Wall Street Journal editorial page veteran. Also in attendance from America were our old friend Dan Mahony and former senator Mike Gravel, the Alaska Democrat who in 1971 (last item) read the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor when the Nixon administration was trying to suppress them.
Along with dinner we got a tour of the chateau, including the study where Toqueville wrote "Democracy in America" and where his collection of books still lines the shelves, and the upstairs room where Tocqueville's original papers are stored. The latter was the site of both the most poignant and the most amusing moments of the evening. The former was when Comte Jean Guillame de Tocqueville d'Hérouville, the chateau's heir, showed us a notebook a friend had purchased at an auction and given him as a wedding gift when he married into the family (his wife, Stephanie, and her father, Guy d'Hérouville, were also on hand). The notebook had belonged to Alexis de Tocqueville's wife, and in it she recorded the moment when she learned of his death.
The most amusing moment was when we noticed a contemporary book sitting on a desk amid the vintage volumes that made up Tocqueville's collection. It was a paperback copy of the European Constitution, on its cover the visage of former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who wrote the constitution--which of course the French people voted down in May. We wondered what Tocqueville would have made of that. |
