Best of the Web Today - January 26, 2007
By JAMES TARANTO
Best of the Tube This Weekend: James Taranto joins the panel on "The Journal Editorial Report," discussing Iraq and health care with Paul Gigot, Dan Henninger, Bret Stephens and Kim Strassel. Fox News Channel, Saturday 11 p.m. EST and Sunday 6 a.m. EST.
'Eventually, However . . .'
Good news from Iraq: Parliament has approved Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's plan for securing Baghdad, which means that President Bush's new strategy has the legal approval of the Iraqi government.
Bad news from Iraq, according to the New York Times:
Iraq's Shiite prime minister and Sunni lawmakers hurled insults at one another during a raucous session of Parliament on Thursday, with the prime minister threatening a Sunni lawmaker with arrest and the Sunni speaker of Parliament threatening to quit.
That's the lead paragraph. The 27th paragraph--yes, the twenty-seventh--finally informs us of the outcome:
Eventually, though, the tensions eased and Parliament approved the security plan.
If Parliament had rejected the plan, do you think the Times would have waited until the 27th paragraph to tell us?
What Would We Do Without Pragmatists?
The New York Times reports on a judicial kerfuffle in Phnom Penh, Cambodia:
The Cambodian judges were on one side and the foreign judges on the other this week in a dispute that captures a decade of difficulties in bringing to trial the last surviving leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge.
If they cannot agree on procedural rules soon, analysts and officials at the tribunal say, some foreign judges may walk out. That would cast a deeper shadow over a process that some critics say is already so compromised as to be of doubtful value.
Seventeen Cambodians and 12 foreigners took office as judges and prosecutors in July, inaugurating a United Nations-sponsored process that mixes Cambodian law with international standards of justice. It is an awkward formula made more questionable by the meager qualifications of the Cambodian judges, who are seen as poorly trained and subject to political manipulation.
Pragmatists say that a flawed trial is better than none and that there is no choice but to proceed with the tribunal you have rather than the tribunal you may wish to have.
Pragmatists said the same thing about Saddam Hussein's trial and execution, only we don't think the New York Times called them "pragmatists."
Classic Maureen Dowd--IV
Over the past couple of weeks, we've done three items (last Tuesday and Friday and this Monday) analyzing and making fun of a recent New York Times story claiming that a majority of American women are unmarried, and celebrating the fancy-free feminine lifestyle. We'd missed Michael Medved's column on the same topic, which adds some hard data showing that, as he put it, "it's not true."
As we did, Medved faults the Times for the age range it chooses:
It's all based on a fundamentally dishonest decision that [reporter Sam] Roberts never acknowledges in the entire course of his lengthy article. It turns out that in his analysis he chose to count some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 as "women." It should come as no surprise that this vast group of teenagers (yes, teenagers, most of whom live at home) are officially classified as "single." In fact, 97% of the 15 to 19 year olds identify themselves as "never married." The Census Bureau, by the way, doesn't call these youngsters "women"--it labels them "females" (a far more appropriate designation).
This isn't quite right; Roberts actually does say in the story that the stats cover "women over 15" (which would seem to mean 16 and over), though of course he doesn't concede that this is "fundamentally dishonest."
Medved notes that even among "women over 15," 51% are married. The Times finesses this, as we noted Friday (but without citing numbers), by omitting the 2% of women who are classified as "married/spouse absent," including military wives (and the headline reflects this; it says 51% are "Living Without Spouse," not single).
Medved offers these figures for postteen women:
According to the most recent available figures (from 2005), a clear majority (56%) of all women over the age of 20 are currently married.
Moreover, nearly all women in this country will get married at one time or another. Among those above the age of 50 (a group that includes the celebrated Baby Boomers of the famously revolutionary '60's generation), an astonishing 94% have been married at one time or another and some 79% are either currently married or widowed.
Even including the younger, supposedly "post-marriage" generation, and considering all women above the age of 30, some 61% are currently married and another 12% are widowed. In other words, nearly three-fourths (73%, a crushing majority) of all women who have reached the tender age of 30 now occupy a traditional female role as either current wives or widows--avoiding the supposedly trendy status of divorced, separated, co-habiting or single.
Medved himself skews the figures by omitting 18- and 19-year-old women, who after all are legal adults. If only a tiny proportion of them are married, this probably does reflect a trend, albeit toward later marriage rather than away from marriage altogether. The Census Bureau does not collect statistics on the percentage of single women who aspire to be married, but we'd bet that number is well north of zero, so that the women the Times highlighted, who revel in singlehood (or at least claim they do), are still highly idiosyncratic.
Paper Cuts
We counted our blessings when we read this headline on a United Press International dispatch: "U.S. Media Jobs Slashed 88 Percent." We must be either really lucky or really talented* in order to be one of just 12% in the media not to have lost their jobs!
But actually, the story doesn't say what the headline does:
U.S. media job cuts surged 88 percent in 2006 from the previous year, a downsizing trend expected to continue this year, a survey said Thursday.
The media industry slashed 17,809 jobs last year, a nearly two-fold increase from the 9,453 cuts in 2005, outplacement consultancy Challenger Gray & Christmas said.
In other words, the number of media jobs cut in 2006 was 88% higher than the previous year.
Still, we wondered what the overall figure was, so we called Challenger Grey & Christmas, which kindly emailed us a copy of the study and gave us permission to post it, here. It turns out CG&C counts only the gross number of jobs cut. It counts neither total jobs nor jobs added, which means that for all we know the media sector could be growing as some employers make layoffs and others hire new employees.
Besides, if 88% of media people had lost their jobs, how likely is that that UPI headline writer would still be employed?
* OK, it's true, we're both.
Zero-Tolerance Watch
"Six girls at a rural high school were charged with homicide conspiracy after their principal found a list of 300 names and officials discovered online postings suggesting they kill people," the Associated Press reports from Chattanooga, Tenn.:
School officials said the list, discovered in a classroom trash can, mostly named students and faculty members but also included Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey and the Energizer bunny.
Sequatchie County High School Principal Tommy Layne said that he initially considered it a joke, but that authorities then found the ninth-graders' online MySpace pages and postings that included the word "kill."
"In general terms, it was like, 'Let's kill these people,' " Dunlap Police Chief Clint Huth said. He declined to provide the specific wording on the posting, which has been removed.
"I am not saying we thwarted a shooting incident or an act of violence," Huth said. "On the other hand, had this gone unchecked, down the road it could have grown into something a whole lot more serious than a list of names."
There was no evidence that the girls had weapons or that an attack had been imminent, Huth said.
The girls, ages 14 and 15, were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal homicide late Wednesday and taken to a juvenile facility. A juvenile court detention hearing was set Friday in Dunlap, about 40 miles northwest of Chattanooga.
So let's see if we have this straight: There was no evidence that the defendants had weapons or that an attack was imminent, and the list of "targets" included a battery-powered bunny. We'd have to say Principal Layne's initial suspicion that it was a joke sounds pretty convincing.
The Affirmative Action Quagmire
"With Michigan's new ban on affirmative action going into effect, and similar ballot initiatives looming in other states, many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics," the New York Times reports. Racial preferences are illegal at public universities in California, Florida and Washington state, and were barred in Texas under a federal appeals court order until 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the constitutionality of some racial preferences.
Within the Times article appears this astonishing admission:
Nationwide, after 30 years of debate, and litigation, over affirmative action, universities have made strikingly little progress toward racially representative student bodies.
Doesn't this show that affirmative action has failed? Perhaps if universities could employ outright quotas--declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in University of California v. Bakke (1978) and again in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003)--they could achieve "racially representative student bodies," albeit at the cost of wide disparities between the races among their students. But the court is unlikely to revisit its antiquota precedents, and even the Grutter-permitted preferences expire in another 21 1/2 years, if Justice O'Connor's obiter dicta can be believed.
If affirmative action as now practiced in 46 states does such a poor job of meeting its own goals, why do universities cling to it so tenaciously?
We Get Results
Yesterday we noted that the Web site of Discount-Mats.com--source of a coarse antiwar email to a would-be customer stationed in the Army in Iraq--was down. It was replaced by a cryptic message attributing the outage to "technical difficulties" and inviting customers with outstanding orders to phone or email, but without giving a number or electronic address.
Soon after, the company updated its site to include both phone number and email address, and acknowledging, "Due to the recent actions of a member within our company, we have been experiencing many difficulties."
When Quakers Attack
"Three football players at Guilford College, a school with a Quaker background, face assault and ethnic intimidation charges after an attack on three Palestinian students," the Associated Press reports from Raleigh, N.C.:
The victims were beaten with fists, feet and brass knuckles early Saturday by attackers who called them "terrorists" and used racial slurs, the News & Record of Greensboro reported Tuesday.
Good heavens. Didn't Chuck Schumer once say he wasn't sure he would support a Quaker nominee for defense secretary because Quakers are pacifists?
Speaking of Schumer, New York's Daily News reports that he described president Bush's health-care proposal as "a dagger at the heart of New York's fiscal budget."
Strange Bedfellows
Here's an amusing anecdote about Virginia's Sen. Jim Webb, recounted in The New Yorker in October:
According to Robert Timberg's book "The Nightingale's Song," Webb was recruited into the Reagan Administration by a Republican official who had once heard him being interviewed on the radio. The interviewer, talking to Webb about "Fields of Fire," mentioned that Jane Fonda was in town and asked Webb whether he might wish to meet her. "Jane Fonda can kiss my ass," Webb replied. "I wouldn't go across the street to watch her slit her wrist."
Even though Webb and Fonda are on the same side vis-à-vis Iraq, we're guessing he won't show up for the Women Say Pull Out! event in Washington tomorrow.
Incidentally, we got some odd responses to our item on the event, from people who seemed to think "pull out" was some sort of sexual double entendre. Sorry, but we don't see it. We're pretty sure the ladies are just using it as a synonym for "withdraw."
Kerry in '12!
The Boston Globe interviews John Kerry**, fresh from his announcement that he will seek re-election to the Senate next year:
Speaking with the Globe, Kerry said he still intends to use his influence in presidential politics. He said he wouldn't rule out a run five years from now or beyond. He noted that he considers himself "a very young man" at age 63; by 2012, he'll still be younger than Senator John McCain of Arizona, a GOP presidential contender who is 71.
Just in case you thought there was nothing left to look forward to.
** Look, if we knew who he was, we'd tell you!
It Might Help Him With the Black Vote
"Obama's Choice: Vice President Lincoln?"--headline, BlogCritics.org, Jan. 25
Earmark Reform Update
"Largest Pork Processor to Phase Out Crates"--headline, Washington Post, Jan. 26
How Not to Make a Majority
"One man with courage makes a majority," Andrew Jackson observed. Or did he? Historian Daniel Feller, who oversees the Jackson papers at the University of Tennessee, says the quote is mythical:
We have nothing to corroborate his authorship of this line. Although it is impossible to prove that someone did not say something, there is no evidence of any kind to show that Jackson did say the line. So how did Jackson's paternity work itself into our minds? The answer is a classic case of how historical errors arise. In 1860, author James Parton published a three-volume "Life of Andrew Jackson." Thoroughly researched and vividly written, Parton's book became the standard biography for his generation. Historians consult it to this day.
On the title page of each volume, Parton placed the epigraph "Desperate Courage Makes One a Majority." He framed it within quotation marks but not in any way to suggest that Jackson himself had said it. In fact, Parton did not mean it as a compliment, and Jackson, were he alive to see it, certainly would not have taken it as such. Parton did not admire Jackson. He thought him a headstrong ignoramus whose desperate courage overrode other men's good sense.
Great Orators of the Democratic Party
o "One man with courage makes a majority."--attributed to Andrew Jackson
o "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin D. Roosevelt
o "The buck stops here."--Harry S. Truman
o "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."--John F. Kennedy
o "You know how they say, Don't ever ask how laws or sausages are made? Well, I can attest to the wisdom of that with the exception of kielbasa made with tofu."--Dennis Kucinich
There Goes Andrew Sullivan Yammering On Again
"Water Board Cited as Ineffective"--headline, Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), Jan. 26
Bad News for William Jennings Bryan
"Silver Dealt a Setback in Albany"--headline, New York Sun, Jan. 26
But Do the Russians Love Their Children Too?
"Sting in former Soviet republic illustrates how accessible nuclear material is"--subheadline, MSNBC.com, Jan. 25
Lactobacillus Acidophilus Is One of the Best
"Some Cultures Are Better"--headline, Alicia Colon column, New York Sun, Jan. 26
Maybe Flowers Would Calm Them Down?
"Women Upset at Penn State"--headline, Green & White (Michigan State University), Jan. 26
News You Can Use
o "Keep Pets From Paper Shredders"--headline, Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), Jan. 22
o "Brain Damage Seems to Ease Smoking Cravings, Study Says"--headline, FoxNews.com, Jan. 26
Bottom Stories of the Day
o "Rosie Calls for Impeachment of President Bush"--headline, WTLV-TV/WJXX-TV Web site (Jacksonville, Fla.), Jan. 25
o "Liz Taylor Backs Hillary Clinton in Presidential Race"--headline, Reuters, Jan. 25
o "Sharpton Sizes Up 2008 Contenders"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 25
No Guns Please, We're British
Have you ever noticed that journalists sometimes just make stuff up? If you don't believe us, consider this story from the Press Association, a British wire service:
Labour has been accused of losing control of gun crime as new figures show a sharp rise in armed robberies.
Guns were used in 4,120 robberies last year--a 10% jump--including a 9% rise to 1,439 in the number of street robberies where guns were used.
There was also a rapid and unexplained increase in the number of times householders were confronted in their own homes by armed criminals. Residential firearms robberies show a 46% leap, a record 645 cases in England and Wales--up 204 on the previous year and four times the level recorded in 2000-01.
This can't possibly be true. After all, guns are illegal in Britain! |
