Who said this?

''This is a difficult and challenging profession. No one should come to it lightly. As it should be. People have to be held accountable, professionally, and the public is looking at it in terms of private lives, as well. Everything is fair game."

Massachusetts’ Senior US Senator said this.

I didn’t believe it either.

But he did. Honest. Read it here.

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: That is Taranto's line, of course, but (honest) I hadn't read Taranto's post before I posted the above.

Kuttner Baloney

Bob Kuttner’s column today is wacko. He criticizes Bill Frist for obtaining “only” 54 votes to bring Bolton’s confirmation to a vote, noting 1 Republican defection.

So, Bob, how many of those 54 votes were Democrats, and how many of that fabulous group of 7 Democrats who recently agreed to end judicial filibusters are willing to extend their compromise to Bolton. Zero in both cases? So Bill Frist is a failure because he can't get the Dems to cross the aisle for him? Why stretch things. There is some good evidence that Frist is failing as a leader. No need to invent any.

But wait until Bolton gets a recess appointment and then makes a good speech at the UN.

After that, these same Senators will be queuing up to speak for his confirmation. It has happened before. They didn’t like the idea of Jeane Kirkpatrick as UN ambassador in the Senate, either. You know, “No diplomatic temperament”.

Heh.

Which party protects “the little people” today?

Much of the electorate in my home and very Blue state of Massachusetts regularly and reflexively vote for the Democratic party, siding with what they believe is the party more concerned with the welfare of the poor, the weak, the helpless, and those less powerful in our institutions of government and commerce.

After this week if these folks still feel that way they must be on some kind of drug.

The Supreme Court’s Kelo decision this week shows very clearly that those ideas identified as “conservative” by our popular media consistently give far more weight to the constitutional rights of individual citizens, be they rich or poor. Whereas liberal ideology (represented in this case by private developers, urban planners, local government, and the slight liberal majority of Supreme Court justices) are willing to dispense with even the constitutionally guaranteed property rights of a small number of un-influential people in order to implement a scheme which will repurpose a New London neighborhood, please a local Fortune 100 company, and no doubt make the developers a lot of money.

In view of this astounding decision, I have to ask my reflexively Democratic friends "Who to you think is protecting the rights of individuals and the powerless in the situation?". This case is far enough away from Boston that it will not likely register on our insular city. Had the Supreme Court decision instead evicted a group of cod fishermen from New Bedford, or some immigrants in Fall River, no doubt the righteous liberals on Morrissey Boulevard would be operating in full outrage mode. Instead the editorial pages are silent about Kelo, except for the Globe’s token conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby.

The Supreme Court’s Kelo decision has certainly touched a nerve. I think the decision is a particularly difficult one for liberals to defend. I cannot imagine how its does not make them uncomfortable to be aligned with the interests of large commercial real estate developers and a huge pharmaceutical company against a small group of ethnic Italian property owners. Perhaps the Kelo decision will mark some kind of watershed that opens the eyes of our nominally conservative Blue voters to see more clearly who is playing their tune and who is not.

The more controversial issue of abortion was focused in this manner by proposals to outlaw late term abortions. When the grisly details of these procedures became well-known, Democratic politicians and their party had to pay a price at the polls for their endless kowtowing to feminist extremists. In this case the process involved is less controversial and emotionally charged to bystanders, but the result is consistent. The party today that is more concerned to protect “the little people" is not the more liberal party.

I cannot improve on the words of Justice Thomas in his dissenting opinion, but I have taken the liberty of removing the legal references so that his argument reads clearly:

The Court has elsewhere recognized “the overriding respect for the sanctity of the home that has been embedded in our traditions since the origins of the Republic,” when the issue is only whether the government may search a home. Yet today the Court tells us that we are not to “second-guess the City’s considered judgments” when the issue is, instead, whether the government may take the infinitely more intrusive step of tearing down petitioners’ homes. Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not. Once one accepts, as the Court at least nominally does that the Public Use Clause is a limit on the eminent domain power of the Federal Government and the States, there is no justification for the almost complete deference it grants to legislatures as to what satisfies it.

Links on the Kelo case:
The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution
AP story run by the Boston Globe on June 23:
Peter Canellos’ Boston Globe story on June 24:
Jeff Jacoby’s Boston Globe column on the Kelo case published June 26:
SCOTUSblog’s discussion:
The Supreme Court ruling in Kelo v. New London:

Stonewalling the public

The latest story you will not find in the Globe is by Thomas Lipscomb and published in Editor and Publisher. Lipscomb questions the Globe’s refusal to make public the documents it obtained as a result of Kerry’s long awaited SF-180 form, or to make public the SF-180 form itself. These documents formed the basis of this June 7 Globe story by Mike Kranish.

Last summer CBS at least had the integrity to display its questionable “RatherGate” documents to the public. The haughty folks on Morrissey Boulevard apparently think Globe readers do not need to know the details of these documents.

“Trust us”, they imply.

I will trust as much as a good reporter does, I would say. Which means I would like to check for myself.

Really making his point

Senate Minority Leader Reid quoted in the Boston Globe:

"As all of you know, that there isn't a single person, whether it's any of us in this room or Governor Dean or [Republican National Committee chairman Ken] Mehlman, that haven't misspoken."

The Archbishop's Apprentice

This story is simply unbelievable. I am rendered mute.

Perhaps they figured that they should get all their bad publicity concentrated into one decade.

Maybe they had watched too many episodes of The Apprentice.

But citing fear of occupation by dissidents, the Archdiocese of Boston today closed a doomed elementary school in Boston’s Brighton section 2 days before the end of the school year, cancelled its graduation, and in a thoughtful touch worthy of The Donald himself, they had the locks changed.

"You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Is that a tin foil hat you're wearing, Bob?

Robert Kuttner is hallucinating again.

Kerry may well give it another shot, as the candidate who came up just one state short in 2004, perhaps due to deliberately contrived long lines that held down Democratic turnout in Ohio.

Karl, please check his meds.

He does look kinda cute in tin, though.

A real howler (no pun intended)

This article could be moved from the Guardian to the Onion without changing a word.

Note the assumption (very dogmatic, I would say) that all genetic variation in a species serves some specific evolutionary role.

The genetic control over [variable X] shows it is subject to evolutionary pressure, which means it must confer a biological advantage.

It does? I am no biologist. But that seems to be a leap of faith, not of logic.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

John Kerry: Mis-overestimated?

Perhaps the reason John Kerry took so many years to release his Naval records to the public was that he couldn’t stomach the thought of the Boston Globe’s gumshoes poking through the paper minutiae of his life, especially at a time when he was so on the make.

That is certainly understandable. As evidence, today’s Boston Globe dedicates front page ink to the startling fact that Kerry’s undergraduate grades at Yale were very slightly lower than those of the “Texas village idiot” who beat Kerry in the November election. No word yet from the Globe on the grade inflation-adjusted averages.

Bush has always admitted that he was a mediocre student, and has made good use of his undistinguished academic record in self-depreciating humor – to the criticism of some Kerry supporters. Kerry speaks incessantly of his time in Vietnam but has by contrast been quite mum about his academic record, and self-depreciation is a talent that he keeps well hidden. Now he has an occasion to show it.

The delicious part of this revelation will, of course, be hearing some Kerry die-hards excusing his mediocre grades and being certain in spite of such evidence that their man is far “smarter” and that his opponent remains an imbecile.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.

Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.

Younger readers should be aware that Kerry and Bush attended college in an era before students were treated as customers by colleges, and when many college professors believed that challenging their students’ sense of self-esteem was an important part of their education.

Close to home

Monday morning I read a front page story in the Boston Globe about a horrific family tragedy that occurred Sunday at the end of my own street, only a mile from here. The tragedy there is so deep that it is simply impossible to take it in. It is as sad a story as I have ever read, and just contemplating it has put people in our little town into shock.

While there is no way to truly take it in, one has to have some way to think about it. My own way is to think of the latter part of the 8th chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (Rom 8:18-39), which in much darker times of my own I committed to memory. My wife was already studying the book of Job this month for her women’s Bible study. But now Job lives just down the street from us.

One of my favorite books is situated around a story eerily similar to this event; the death of a young twin. In his concluding chapter the author writes:

It is a tragedy. But as the years pass, as the sun buries the moon and the moon the sun and the view by necessity widens, the tragedy dwindles, becomes one among millions, billions, for under the press of the ages tragedy is compacted and shelved like coal beneath our feet.

This is correct as far as he goes. But each of us builds every layer of that press; compacting, shelving and, we hope, transforming our tragedies from rot and ruin into something like coal that can give back warmth and light.

My resolution for this day is to build well.

I can think of one

"There has never been an administration, I don't believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," Mrs. Clinton told the audience at a "Women for Hillary" gathering in Midtown Manhattan this morning.

"I know it's frustrating for many of you; it's frustrating for me: Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause and cheers. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

No. She didn't really say these words, did she? This quote is more astounding than "a vast right-wing conspiracy".

I hope there is video of this speech!

Ignoring Buddy's Legacy

A front page story in Sunday’s Boston Globe contrasts the last 15 years of downtown development in Providence with the stagnation or decline experienced by downtown Worcester.

Two words: Buddy Cianci

The ex-mayor of Providence gets not a mention in the Globe article until near the end and then only this:

…the revitalization of Providence benefited from a strong mayor, in whom executive power is concentrated. That system, however, is not without problems: The city's last mayor, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci Jr., is serving a federal prison sentence on corruption charges.

Corrupt he may have been in a venial sense, and a class act he was certainly not, but fanatically dedicated to the development of Providence he was.

I once spent an evening with a real estate developer in Wilmington, Delaware who had small commercial projects underway in Providence. He recounted how Cianci told him that he personally wanted to hear of any difficulties that his project encountered with government at any level. Once you were in, the developer said, Providence was a superb place to do development projects. I’m sure this fellow had to make some campaign contributions, but he was getting some service and some value from them…and 15 years later so is Providence.

There is no indication that the Globe descended to the level of actually speaking with somebody from the lowly Providence Journal to do this story about their city. It might have been a better story had they done so.

Of course this Boston Globe story about Providence and Worcester reminds me of these Frostian lines:

…And everybody to the saddest
Laughed the loud laugh the big laugh at the little.
New York (five million) laughs at Manchester,
Manchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs
At Littleton (four thousand), Littleton
Laughs at Franconia (seven hundred), and
Franconia laughs, I fear—-did laugh that night­--
At Easton. What has Easton left to laugh at,
And like the actress exclaim "Oh, my God" at?

NCAA Trying to Purge Native American Mascots

The NCAA is going on another ideological pogrom to drive Native American team names and mascots out of major college sports. Sunday’s Globe has an Op-Ed piece by a Brookline lawyer who finds the effort a little over the top:

By eliminating even inoffensive and arguably positive names like Warrior and Chieftain solely because of their connection to Native Americans, while at the same time tolerating similar names that refer to other groups, schools send a message that Native Americans are sensitive in a way that other groups are not.

Native Americans are not so hyper-sensitive, but white liberals certainly are.

Chief Illiniwek’s days may be numbered. Even a fellow who bleeds Maize and Blue thinks that is too bad.

Poor Coverage

The Boston Globe printed editions had only an AP story by Arthur Max on the Dutch “nee” to the EU constitution. It was a pathetically poor article which has since been replaced on the Globe website. The original story’s 4th paragraph describes the constitution thus:

The charter was designed to provide such trappings of statehood as a flag, a president and an anthem on what has largely been an economic bloc while creating a more integrated political entity of 450 million people with a bigger economy than America's.

I don’t think the Dutch voters had a flag and an anthem in mind when they voted no. Of course if you read through to the end of the story (as is so often the case) the Globe’s “candor gap” diminishes. Here are the last few paragraphs of the story:

The ''no" campaign also played out against the backdrop of the November 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, a well-known Dutch filmmaker who was killed by a militant Muslim immigrant. [Note: This murder went unreported in the Boston Globe for 2 1/2 weeks]

The slaying stunned the nation, and for many Dutch it came to embody their fear that the Netherlands' liberal values were being undermined by a flood of immigrants from Muslim counties. Some Dutch are concerned that the expansion of the EU to include Turkey will further endanger their national identity; others suggest that too many rules from Brussels will have the same effect.

Laura DeJong, a retired Amsterdam schoolteacher, said she voted against the constitution ''because we want to stay Dutch."

Others who voted ''no" said they still support the idea of Europe but want to apply the brakes.

''It's all going too fast," said Rob Molveld, 39, an artist. ''I believe in Europe, but I don't trust what's happening in Brussels."

So, after all, it wasn’t just a poorly designed flag and a tacky anthem that had folks upset. Some of the original AP text remains at the Chicago Sun Times (registration required).

Why was the Globe’s coverage of this event so weak? Election day wasn’t a surprise, and neither was the result. Much timelier than today’s Globe story was a column filed 3 months ago by Mark Steyn, who predicted ratification but noted of the EU document:

The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage.

But, quibbles aside, President Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for a buck or two. Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

I guess if the Dutch really want to get press coverage in the Boston Globe, they’ll just have to do something that catches our fancy, like rehab an old-style bar in Southie.

Zamboni

Just yesterday the Boston Globe covered the filing of statutory rape charges by Norfolk County against 3 former Milton Academy hockey players. Hardly is the ink dry on the indictments and the next day (today) brings news of a settlement in the case which allows the lads to apologize, perform community service, get counseling (which most hockey players need in large doses to reach a therapeutic level ), and serve 2 years on probation.

Of course who else but Alan Dershowitz appears for a quote (as he did at the recent Larry Summers show trial). Says the nearly omnipresent prof:

"This represents the most senseless use of prosecutorial discretion I've seen in a long time," Dershowitz said.

Under state law, the girl also could have been charged with statutory rape for performing oral sex on the 15-year-old boy, said Dershowitz. It is unlawful in Massachusetts to have sex with anyone under 16, but state law lets prosecutors decide whether to press charges. ''The idea that these youngsters should be branded rapists and the girl should be labeled a victim is preposterous," he said.

Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating, whose office prosecuted the cases and agreed to yesterday's deal, lashed out at Dershowitz for commenting on a case in which he had not seen the evidence. ''That is a lack of professionalism," he said.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. The source of Dershowitz’s outrage is the prosecutor’s decision to file charges -- on the basis (IMHO) that it is never done in cases involving schoolmates and coercion consisting mostly of peer pressure. He is correct.

The D.A. performance on the other hand is evidence (also IMHO) that he had to keep some freaked and freaky parents from running off to give interviews with the local media testifying how this heartless and rotten D.A. had let these evil privileged spoiled brats walk after what they, uh, did. I bet the faster Keating can get this case behind him the better for his career. He just couldn’t find a way to file charges and settle all in a single news cycle. Now he has escaped without a fatal wound to his future in Massachusetts’ 1-party politics.

Period over. Bring in the Zamboni.

Dutch treat constitution with disdain

The Wall Street Journal (subscribers only) reports that the Dutch have voted "no" on the EU constitution by 63%/37%.

Mark Steyn as usual makes the point better than anyone else, especially the point that this document is not at all suitable as a constitution:

The American constitution begins with the words "We the people". The starting point for the EU constitution is: "We know better than the people."...

One of the most unattractive features of European politics is the way it insists certain subjects are out of bounds, and beyond politics. That's the most obvious flaw in Giscard's flaccid treaty: it's not a constitution, it's a perfectly fine party platform for a rather stodgy semi-obsolescent social democratic party. Its constitutional "rights" - the right to housing assistance, the right to preventive action on the environment - are not constitutional at all, but the sort of things parties ought to be arguing about at election time...

...clinging to the theory that if you merge enough weak economies they add up to one global superpower. The big story of the past three decades is that the more it's mired itself in the creation of a centralised pseudo-state, the more "Europe" has fallen behind America in every important long-term indicator, from economic growth to demographics. "Europe" is an indulgence the real Europe can't afford. The followers recognise that, even if the leaders don't.

I can't wait for the Boston Globe's crack analysts to get their arms around this story. Is the Netherlands, like France, another "bitterly divided country"? We shall see.