One Reason to Drop the Name "Rodham"

A bankruptcy trial involving “loans” to Tony Rodham, Hillary [Rodham] Clinton’s brother, from persons who were later pardoned by Hillary [Rodham] Clinton’s husband is reported on the Boston Globe’s front page today in a story by reporter Michael Kranish:

President Clinton's pardons have been a political issue for Hillary Clinton because of her ties to a number of the cases. In addition to the people who paid her brothers, those receiving pardons included commodities trader Marc Rich, a fugitive who was prosecuted for tax evasion by then-US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani and fled to Switzerland. Rich was pardoned after his former wife, Denise Rich, contributed heavily to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign.

No doubt she contributed for the cause.

Controversy over the pardons was reignited last week after Hollywood mogul and former Clinton supporter David Geffen criticized the Clintons for the Rich pardon.

Sorry, Michael Kranish, but your liberal media slip is showing here.

Mention of these pardons by a billionaire Hollywood movie mogul and Democratic underwriter “reignited” the controversy only in liberal circles where it had fallen down their vast memory hole. Conservatives have always regarded these pardons as the most undeniable case in point of Bill Clinton’s personal and depraved use of the powers of his office. From such unhappy memories comes the stubbornly high "negative" perception of Hillary Rodham Clinton in polls of the electorate.

And if you’d like some more material to help you ponder David Geffen’s rhetorical question: “Who thinks that Bill Clinton has really changed?”, note Jeff Jacoby’s column also in today's Globe about the $40M in speaking fees (2/3^rds from overseas) that Bill Clinton has accumulated since he signed those presidential pardons literally on his way out the White House door (and as I recall perhaps with some White House silverware jingling in his pockets).

“It is a legitimate campaign issue,” said Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law. He said that Hillary Clinton should answer questions about her brothers' and her own involvement in the pardons because “the stench of the Marc Rich pardon still stinks and it has never been adequately explained.”

As explanation, I recommend a short book commonly known as Genesis to the baffled professor.

The Rich pardon received the most attention. Rich had been indicted in 1983 on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Rich fled to Switzerland and never stood trial. Before Rich received the pardon in January 2001, his former wife, Denise Rich, contributed $70,000 to a fund supporting Hillary Clinton's Senate bid, and also made a large contribution to the Clinton presidential library.

It is delicious irony that the original prosecutor to bring charges against Marc Rich was Rudolph Giuliani. While the early Clinton shenanigans were done in the pre-web era, news reports of the 170 pardons issued by Clinton only hours before he left office are still available on the web. See for example on the BBC website here and here.

Smug Alert in LA

The giant cloud of smug released into earth’s atmosphere Sunday night in Hollywood has brought a new vision of eco-salvation to IowaHawk. His promise:

You are born again in the sweet bathing fluorescent light of carbon neutrality!

Eco-sinners may seek repentance here.

Death by PowerPoint

On today’s Boston Globe front page and above the fold is a big non-news story that the ever-sharp Globe political reporters have received a 77-slide PowerPoint presentation created in mid-December for the Romney campaign.

The 77-slide PowerPoint presentation offers a revealing look at Romney's pursuit of the White House, outlining a plan for branding himself, framing his competitors, and allaying voter concerns about his record, his Mormon faith, and his shifts on key issues like abortion.

Actually, like all 77-slide PowerPoint presentations, it contains no surprises and little revelation. In fact it is accurately described by Romney campaign spokesman Kevin Madden as “a collection of political conventional wisdom”. A large collection, apparently. The story does not reveal who the file identifies as the author of the PowerPoint slides (perhaps due to a lack of computer savvy reporters?). Yawn.

The Globe remains on its regular regimen of anti-Romney stories, but this story is as un-newsworthy as the Globe’s front-page revelation that Romney’s lawn had been cut by undocumented workers.

Twisty Faster Was Right!

In Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal Op Ed page, Kimberly Strassel documented the post-election depravity of Senator Trent Lott (R- Mississippi). Lott’s Mississippi beachfront home was destroyed by hurricane Katrina. Since the election, Trent has been shaking down insurance companies that he feels have wronged him in what Kimberly calls

“a ferocious campaign of political revenge that would make even Henry Waxman envious”

Ouch. A Lott is said there.

Trent’s latest behavior has brought a whole new meaning to a 2005 post-Katrina cartoon (below) of left-wing uber-blogger and extraordinary talent Twisty Faster.

Lott is currently the Senate Minority Whip -- a fact that should cause conservatives to weep.

No Bra-burners Need Apply

One candidate for high office is throwing aspects of her feminism under a bus (or perhaps under a burkha) according to a story in today’s Boston Globe about the various names used during her career by the junior US senator from New York. From the story:

But now, as a presidential candidate, she’s Hillary Clinton – or just Hillary – and some analysts say it makes sense for her to streamline her name. Dropping “Rodham,” they contend, would erase feminist overtones and soften her image, taking the edge off one of the more sharply polarizing figures of the last two decades.

“Erase feminist overtones”? Why? Help me, I’m confused! Get me women’s studies! What do they say about this?

"We bring a lot of expectations with us [about Clinton] before she opens her mouth," said Susan Reverby, professor of women's studies at Wellesley College, Clinton's alma mater. In a presidential campaign, she'll have to get voters to look at her anew, to put away some of those preconceptions. If Clinton is consciously playing down her maiden name, Reverby said, it's probably to blunt the view of her as an advocate of women's rights. At the polls, feminist views -- telegraphed by a married woman's decision to use her maiden name -- rank with a candidate's religion as an emotional, hot-button issue, she said.

Who knew? Feminist views are such an emotional hot-button that candidates must hide their feminism? One would think from reading the Globe regularly that anyone today who dissents from the dogmas of modern feminism would be treated like a Holocaust denier, or perhaps even a Global Warming denier (by Ellen Goodman, at least). Certainly no such Neanderthal would have a chance to become even a local college president, much less president of the United States.

Another professor digs deeper:

But Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he sees a different motive at work. He thinks Clinton is using her first name more often to convey warmth, something lacking from her earlier persona. He pointed to her studiously informal "I'm running for president" webcast, in which Clinton -- seated on a couch, amid floral pillows -- cheerily asked voters to join her "conversation."

Indeed “warmth” is not the first word associated in most minds with the junior senator. But even though she has none of her husband’s overwhelming charm, I believe she is every bit as honest.

It's A Very Long Season

Ultra-lib Boston Globe columnist Robert Kuttner writes today on the 2008 presidential field:

With candidates of this caliber, the primary campaign will energize a resurgent Democratic base that will stay mobilized through the November election. Any of these three would also make a fine commander in chief, and not just because the president has so thoroughly lowered the bar.

It promises to be a revolutionary political year, and it's been a long time coming.

Kuttner sounds like a young Red Sox fan watching spring training.

Calling the Pot Black

Ever diligent in its quest to cause frequent discomfort to Mitt Romney, the Boston Globe today runs an AP story reporting that some of Romney’s ancestors were polygamists.

That is probably true of everyone alive on this planet.

What makes Romney’s case distinctive is that because his great grandfather and great-great grandfather were Mormons, some of his polygamous ancestors are relatively recent and well documented.

The story provides historical notes:

In 1862, while Utah was a territory, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, banning plural marriage. In 1882, Congress also passed the Edmunds Act, an anti-polygamy law. That was followed in 1887 by the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disincorporated the church and threatened to seize its nonreligious real estate as part of the crackdown on polygamy.

Imagine the impudence of Congress in those days! Confronted with a form of marriage that had existed legally for millennia, they declare it illegal by the passage of a few bills into law! What consideration did they give to the civil rights of those who wanted to freely enter into a legal marriage contract as polygamists? None.

The story notes of Romney:

…in serious moments he has called the practice "bizarre" and noted his church excommunicates those who engage in it.

Yet only 10 years ago the Globe itself editorialized against another form of marriage – one that historically has never been legally recognized, and today the Globe and its progressive followers no longer regard this form of marriage as bizarre, but rather as a constitutional civil right.

So who has a more consistent stand concerning the forms of marriage that should be legal? Mormons or the Boston Globe?

Shocked, Shocked at the Very Idea!

A Globe editorial from Friday entitled “Much ado about drapes” tut-tuts over the media frenzy about Deval Patrick’s lavish spending on his office amenities, saying:

The criticisms this past week of Patrick as a big spender on personal luxuries have ballooned beyond all rationality

Yet the Globe itself finds some of Patrick’s spending decisions indefensible:

…the argument for a $1,166-per-month Cadillac over a Ford Crown Victoria costing just over half as much is hard to fathom. Similarly…there is no need to establish a full-time chief of staff for [scheduling appearances by Patrick’s wife].

Then after this non-defensive defense, the logicians at the Globe editorial desk criticize Patrick’s unapologetic apology:

“I think it's very important to me,” [Patrick] said, “that you in the media help me get the message out about what it is we are concentrating on.” This reflects a faulty view of the role. It is the press's job to report developments, including significant policy initiatives, whether from the governor or elsewhere. It is not the press's job to “help” any official.

Why ever would Deval Patrick expect the media to help him? Perhaps (just perhaps!) his expectation results from his experience with the Boston media over the last 16 months.

Patrick’s expectation reminds me of an incident just before the 2004 Democratic Convention that was reported at the time only by Globe columnist Joan Vennochi:

At a media walk-through at the Fleet Center on Tuesday, Alice Huffman, co-chair of the Democratic National Committee, bluntly told the gathered press they have “as much to do with the success of this convention as anyone else. Your role is so critical” Huffman went on to link “objectivity,” “what is best for America” and the Democratic Party agenda.

Hmmm. Why do these Democrats keep expecting the media to help them? Wherever could they have gotten such a preposterous notion?

The Globe’s editors are shocked, shocked at the very idea!

A Better Thrashing

Mark Steyn also was appalled by the Boston Globe’s highly euphemistic description of the Edwards bloggers, but delivered a much better thrashing to the folks on Morrissey Boulevard than I:

“Allegedly insensitive”? You’re referring to two foul-mouthed gals who call Christians “Godbags” and do semen gags about the Virgin Mary and sneer at stillbirths, and all you can say about it is “came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements”? That’s not the story, that’s the sound of the genteel Victorian matron discreetly draping chintz over the provocative piano legs of the story…

True, but the Globe does that most every day, Mark.

Much Ado About Blogs

Today’s Boston Globe has 3 items concerning blogs.

First a front page story about attempts of traditional public relations firms to influence political blogs. The story reports that:

With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers to plant favorable opinions of the businesses online, many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens expressing views.

Second is an Op Ed column by liberal worrier Ellen Goodman, who is today concerned about the surprising permanence and easy access to historical information on the Internet. Goodman notes the dismissal of 2 bloggers from the Edwards presidential campaign organization after their posting history turned up “allegedly insensitive statements”, or so they are called in today’s front page blogger story. Goodman’s column provides readers with 2 actual quotes:

There was McEwan's description of President Bush's “wingnut Christofascist base.” There was Marcotte's slam on the Roman Catholic Church's prohibition on birth control as a way to force women to “bear more tithing Catholics.”

Thanks for illustrating the news value of Op Ed columns, Ellen! Your column quoted 2 terms that the squeamish Globe newsroom editors, on the same day, decided not to print. Thus Ellen’s readers could gauge for themselves if these terms are insensitive. The same news value is even more characteristic of blogs.

The 3^rd Globe blog story is about Paul Levy, the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who has a blog about running a hospital and publishes information that includes performance metrics such as infection rates.

For all the ink the media wastes denigrating blogs, its funny to see 3 stories about them in a single Globe!

The common thread in these stories is our wrestling with the far greater transparency of Internet information. This has increasing importance as more and more of our individual daily activities are documented with Internet-based information.

I’m not terribly worried about this.

PR firms and politically oriented groups and foundations have always tried to be hidden influencers. That is the nature of their business. Their energies have traditionally been directed at the mainstream media. The classic example of such media manipulation is the funding of the media frenzy over “campaign finance reform” that resulted in the McCain-Feingold law. It turned out that the overwhelming majority of funding underwriting the so-called reformers came from a just a handful of deep-pocketed foundations.

Having many, many voices in the public sphere, rather than just a chosen few, makes such tasks of PR fakery more difficult. Permitting many voices a great concept. We should thank our founders for it. They called it “freedom of speech” and protected it in the 1^st Amendment to our Constitution. It’s still a concept that can make us all squirm at times – with freedom comes responsibility. But it’s definitely a keeper.

Deval Wows the Interior Design Community

There is a little puff piece appearing in today’s Boston Globe concerning Deval’s expensive tastes. Here’s how it begins. I’m not making this up. I couldn’t:

Taxpayers might not appreciate his expensive taste in decor and cars, but so far Deval Patrick seems to have the interior design community gushing over the updated look of the corner office, which they say gives it the feel of a fresh start.

Take that, Republicans! Another key constituency is lost to you as Deval wows the interior design “community”. The reporter did get some of them to gush, though. Here one rises to ecstasy:

In particular, the new $12,306 damask draperies set the tone for an office that is physically and perhaps emotionally more relaxed and welcoming, designers said yesterday. “These are definitely more modern, more graceful, and not nearly as uptight” as the faded blue draperies that Patrick's predecessor, Mitt Romney, had in the corner office, according to interior designer Dennis Duffy of Duffy Design Group, which is based in Boston.

That damnable Mitt Romney – even his office drapes were uptight!

“I like them. They're elegant. They have a bell pleat at the top.” Duffy said that although he has not met the governor, the draperies seem to match Patrick's public image. “He seems more, not relaxed, but more personally engaging,” Duffy added. “He's very charismatic, whereas, his method of delivery is much less formal. And these [draperies] speak of that to me.”

Apparently, then, the Globe has shown before-and-after photos of Deval’s new office furnishings to interior decorators. Is there some reason why Globe readers are unworthy to see the same pictures? Then readers could decide for themselves what Deval’s new drapes “speak of”.

CORRECTION: The printed Globe does have 2 B&W pictures on page B9. They weren't in the Globe's web version, so I didn't see them. Yesterday's Globe story also carries one "after" picture in its web version, which is one of the photos they ran today.

Patrick Ponies Up

In a reversal, Deval Patrick announced this evening that he will pay the difference between the lease expense for his new Cadillac and the old Ford Crown Vic that Mitt Romney used as an official car. Patrick will also pay the Commonwealth $27,000 for new office furnishings.

New office furnishings? Hmmm. A cynic might suspect that this payment represents a preemptive strike by Deval against a pending story in the Boston Herald. The Globe, on the other hand, seems suddenly very tame toward the Governor’s office and instead directs its venom at a particular Republican presidential candidate. (CORRECTION: Tuesday's cynicism about Patrick's motive proved correct, but not my cynicism about the Globe. On Wednesday the redecorating story emerged, but it was the Globe with the story on Patrick's new $10,000 drapes for the Governor's office. Well done.)

The Boston Globe quotes Deval concerning his DeVille:

“There are tough [budget] choices to make. I realize I cannot in good conscience ask the agencies to make those choices without being willing to make them myself.”

That’s a DUH, sir. As Squaring the Globe noted 4 weeks ago, this behavior is called ‘leadership’.

Your good conscience be damned, sir! Without some act of contrition your personal spending choices would leave you with no credibility among the executive branch, not to mention among the folks who don’t work for you (or even root for you) over on Beacon Hill.

Better to learn leadership now, Deval, than not at all. BTW, please forget anything you learned about personal choices from your mentor, Bill Clinton. Those lessons won’t help you either.

Deval can at least be relieved that the only broadsheet newspaper in Boston is entirely in the tank for him – so far in the tank that they never questioned Patrick’s predicate-challenged campaign slogan.

Deval doesn’t face the biased coverage caused by the deep loathing the Globe newsroom still feels for his predecessor. At least this man of the people need not worry about bogus Globe front page exposés sourced from interviews with the groundskeepers at his 2 multi-million dollar Massachusetts homes.

Zero Credibility on This Topic

Sunday’s Boston Globe carried a negative story about the John Edwards presidential campaign. The story by Globe reporter Rick Klein dredged up the Swift Boat Veterans from the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign. The gist of Klein’s story is the claim that Edwards refused orders in 2004 to press negative attacks on George Bush during the Swift Boat crisis and after. In the story he notes:

Indeed, Edwards responded to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth political advertisements only after Kerry delivered the first blow…On Aug. 19, at the John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center in Boston, Kerry delivered a blistering attack, calling the Swift Boat group "a front for the Bush campaign" and issuing a blunt challenge to the president. "If he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: Bring it on!" Kerry said.

Edwards didn't weigh in until Aug. 21, with a more measured response demanding that Bush call for the ads to be taken off the air, deeming it "a moment of truth for George W. Bush."

Klein’s story notes that the Kerry campaign initially decided not to respond to the charges. But he accuses Edwards of backing away from this fight when Kerry joined it. But Klein is being very disingenuous. The Swift Boat charges were personal and pertained only to Kerry, not Edwards.

On August 5, 2004 the vets charged that Kerry had told 2 different stories about his 1968 Christmas. They also charged that Kerry received one of his 3 Purple Hearts for a paper-cut sized wound that required only a band-aid. Clearly these claims were Kerry’s to refute, and Edwards was hardly in a position to discuss them authoritatively.

The fundamental problem faced by the Kerry campaign was that Kerry’s 4 months is Vietnam had been chosen as the theme of his campaign. There were in fact 2 different and incompatible stories concerning Kerry’s 1968 “Christmas in Cambodia” and both were on the record. One story was that he was resting in Vietnam (as told in one of his biographies) and the other was that he was being shot at in Cambodia (as told on the Senate floor, where he reported on the record that this event was ‘seared” in his memory). There was no way that Kerry’s campaign could claim that both of stories were true or even accurate. Instead, they decided (I believe) to maintain silence and hope that the story would simply pass away.

Actually, Kerry’s campaign undoubtedly did more than just hope the story would go away. They tried to manage it away as well. The Boston Globe, the New York Times and many other mainstream media organs chose not to report the swift boat stories during the 2 weeks following August 5. Like the Kerry campaign, these newspapers also kept silent. Was their neglect just a happy coincidence? Not likely. It was more likely a case of editorial politics or liberal bias taking precedence over journalism.

With help from Newsbank, (see the results below) I have queried to find the Boston Globe content that contained the terms “Kerry” and “swift boat” from Aug 5 through August 18, 2004. There were 7 items. They are:

1) August 6, a story alleging that one Swift Boat vet disavowed his statements to the group.
2) August 9, letter to the editor saying Bush should disavow the ads.
3) August 15, letter to the editor in support of Kerry.
4) August 15, letter to the editor in support of Kerry.
5) August 15, letter to the editor in support of Kerry.
6) August 17, an Op Ed column by Joan Vennochi advocating Kerry address the charges.
7) August 18, a story buried on page A10 that discussed a days-old Kerry campaign press release on the Cambodia charges.

You can review the posts to this blog during August, 2004 to see my own growing incredulity about this mainstream media silence.

On August 19, Kerry and his campaign counterattacked, and from that point on, the Boston Globe began extensive coverage of the Swift Boat charges. Yet another fortunate media coincidence for the Kerry campaign! The 2-week-old Swift Boat charges were suddenly newsworthy!

The non-coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans by the Boston Globe was the Globe’s most incredible demonstration of liberal bias during the entire 2004 campaign. If this organization possessed measurable journalistic integrity, they would have apologized, explained the reasons for their lack of coverage, and taken steps to avoid a repetition. They didn’t bother.

Today they needn’t bother guessing why so many doubt their credibility.

Larry Summers Was Right (New Report)

Here is the abstract of NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) Working Paper No. 12691, Issued in November 2006 by authors Donna K. Ginther (Assoc. Professor of Economics, University of Kansas) and Shulamit Kahn (Associate Professor, Boston University School of Management). Emphasis mine:

Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.

Here are remarks of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, early in his January 2005 speech (also at an NBER event). This speech prompted votes of no confidence by the faculty and precipitated his resignation (again emphasis mine):

Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the issue, beyond science and engineering. I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.

Hat tip: Atlantic Monthly March 2007 Primary Sources column (subscription required)

Light Blogging Notice

I will be out of circulation all this week, so blogging will be very light.

Thanks for visiting. In honor of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, enjoy an oldie but a goodie instead of a fresh post.

"Tax Freedom" = Freedom to Tax

One must suspect that Boston Globe headline writers have a peculiar outlook when a proposal to facilitate new taxes is headlined as “Tax Freedom”. It make you wonder how a Globe headline would have described the Boston Tea Party.

The Globe story begins:

Governor Deval Patrick's administration is preparing a push to give Massachusetts cities and towns more freedom to raise taxes and fees…

OK. But the root cause of the problem is identified towards the end of the article:

Every other city looked at in the [nationwide] study also collected at least a portion of the sales tax generated in the city. But sales taxes from Boston and other Massachusetts cities go into a statewide pot, and the funds are distributed through local aid that varies from year to year – removing some local incentives to increase economic activity, according to the study.

In Massachusetts legislators have considerable latitude to redistribute local tax revenue. Local taxes (except for property taxes) are assessed by cities and towns but paid through the state. These funds are then redistributed by the state legislature as they see fit. The legislature calls their redistribution “local aid”. In such a context that term is Orwellian.

I’m not trying to knock Patrick’s proposal. This Globe story doesn’t carry enough specifics to make a case either way.

But one can’t allow the one-party regime controlling the legislature to act as redistributors of local taxes without creating a culture of patronage, as we have done in spades. On the other had, if this redistribution is restricted and communities are allowed to keep more of their “own” local taxes, the resulting benefits will likely accrue to wealthier communities, and I doubt that Patrick will stand for that.

Off Topic

“No prophet is without honor…”

Tunku Varadarajan, the editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, is a transplant to American culture, and so can describe it more precisely than many natives. I shudder to recommend that anyone spend a moment reading about the late Anna Nicole Smith, but Tunku is always worth reading. On Anna Nicole he writes:

Arthur Miller, who married [Marilyn] Monroe, would have had little time for Ms. Smith beyond the obvious dictates of chivalry. It would be hard to imagine Ms. Smith courted by contemporary playwrights either, and not just because so many of them do not, as it were, handle women well.

Priceless. And this is Tunku just warming up.

Read the whole thing.

Making the Job Fit the Crime

Wizbang blog hammers Deval Patrick for a proposal reported in the Boston Globe, but which has not yet been made public by our remarkably secretive new administration. The proposal would restrict access to CORI data (Criminal Offender Record Information) by Massachusetts employers. Under the Governor’s proposal, employers will only be allowed to see CORI information that is “relevant” to the context of their potential employment.

Nanny State will prescribe which CORI information is relevant to you, Mr. Employer. Of course if you are sued on account of your employee’s misconduct, Nanny State will probably not help you out, but instead will be asking why you weren’t’ more careful about who you hired.

Wizbang notes that even the stalwartly liberal Globe seems to search desperately for the merits of this proposal, not to mention the Massachusetts district attorneys (very few of whom are Republican).

It boils down to a policy of helping Massachusetts ex-cons obtain employment through state-sponsored deception. Maintaining unfiltered access to information and providing financial incentives to employers who hire ex-cons would be an honest way to pursue the same policy. But such incentives would result in lost state revenue, so in the end perhaps it's just cheaper to decieve.

"There is a lot of talk about how this affects people's ability to enter back into society," said [Plymouth County DA Timothy] Cruz. "There should be reentry programs. But why should we change someone's history to get them a job?"

Maybe because it doesn't require much state revenue to hide a criminal record.

Lite Brites, Small City

Yesterday’s Boston Globe editorial cartoon by Dan Wasserman perfectly captures the foolishness turned quickly to greed that was City Hall's response to the Lite-Brites of Turner broadcasting’s viral marketing campaign.

The cartoon shows a Lite-Brite that is truly frightening – hizzonnah the Mayor waving a still wet $2M settlement check. A quick megabuck or two will go a long way toward erasing any outrage felt by City Hall (especially in our city).

Turner, for its part, received huge value for its money. The $2M price represents a bargain better than any ever found in Filene's basement. Thanks to the sang froid of the 2 perpetrators during their press conference, Turner received so much free publicity that they probably regret only that the campaign was used for something as frivolous as a niche cartoon show. Such a huge bonanza of publicity is the kind of media event that could have launched another “Oprah” or another “Simple Life”.

That it did not is perhaps the one Brite side of the whole episode for the rest of us.

The Demographics of Lottery Players: Whose Idea of Enlightened Social Policy is This?

Inspired by Derrick Jackson’s Boston Globe column on expanded gambling, I did some research yesterday into the demographics of gamblers. The text and figures below document the demographics of state lottery players. These are taken from a 1999 study entitled “State Lotteries at the Turn of the Century: Report to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission” authored by four professors at Duke University. Every visit I have made to casinos in Atlantic City and Connecticut adds good (but anecdotal) evidence that the demographics of slot machine players are similar.

(Click on the picture to see the gory details).

Except for dogmatic libertarians, I don’t see how one can justify a public policy that exacerbates this situation through expanded legal gambling gaming. It’s safe to say that Deval Patrick has no libertarian leanings. These charts would nauseate any liberal worthy of the label. Even libertarians object to a state monopoly on gambling. So exactly who is in favor of funding our last 5-10% of incremental state government spending ($1-2B per year) through this form of taxation and/or malignant social policy? Who now wants the Commonwealth to do even more of this? Stand up and be counted, folks. I’m listening for good reasons why this practice represents an enlightened social policy.

From the report:

For the race/ethnicity category, participation rates are nearly identical across groups. However, average spending by blacks who play is much larger than for other categories, and hence per capita spending by blacks is higher than for other categories. …spending by players drops sharply as we move up through the education categories. The result is that the education category with the highest per capita spending is those who did not complete high school, and the college graduates have the lowest. With respect to household income, we see that participation rates increase up to $100,000. But players with incomes less than $50,000 spend more than others, and the lower income categories have the highest per capita spending….Hence lottery expenditures represent a much larger burden on the household budget for those with low incomes than for those with high incomes.

By the way, this study is from national survey data taken from states with lotteries. The most recent study exclusively concerned with Massachusetts lottery players dates from 1994 -- 12 years ago. You can see the entire 1999 report here.

UPDATE: The second of Derrick's 2 columns on casino gambling is here. He spoke with some researchers about delayed effects of casinos. I would not be surprised if these exist, but they are certainly more difficult to measure than the blunt demographics that clearly show that the heavy Lottery players are far more likely to be poor, uneducated, and from minority groups. The column ends with an insightful quote from one researcher:

"It is harder to put numbers on family breakups, depression, and divorce. Many of those negatives take much longer to manifest themselves than the benefits. It takes problem gamblers a while to run through their finances and relationships."

No Jackpot and No Hard Data Either

Dear Derrick Jackson,

I’m a blogger who usually dislikes your Boston Globe columns, but I’m delighted to see you devoting more than one to the question of new forms of legalized gambling in Massachusetts.

Your February 3 column ‘No jackpot with casino gambling’ correctly noted that Massachusetts spending on the lottery was $682 – about $13 per citizen per week. Later you noted concerning casinos that “They are not my preferred way to raise revenues, especially seeing how the lottery fleeces the poor.”

I agree there is little doubt that the Massachusetts lottery is, in effect, a regressive tax. The $682 per capita figure probably does not represent the Lottery spending in towns like Newton or Concord. But I believe it is surprisingly difficult to find hard data about who actually spends to fund the Massachusetts lottery.

I did some searching on this topic recently and really came up quite empty handed. The question in my mind is this: The Massachusetts State Lottery handles over $4 billion per year, yet there is not any study I can find that details the income distribution of Massachusetts lottery players. Questions such as: What fraction of that $4B spent annually for Mass lottery tickets is spent by people in the lowest 10% or 20% of Massachusetts family incomes?

It would be relatively inexpensive to capture this information. You could reach a rough estimate by simply correlating city and town per-capita incomes with the Mass Lottery’s own revenue by town. But I have not seen this done anywhere, even though it would be a very simple project. A more rigorous study would require capturing income data from a representative sample of lottery players.

Am I missing something? Here is a source of revenue that provides over $1B to the state budget, but nowhere do I see any hard data about how much of that money is coming from the poor versus the wealthy.

This lack of data makes me suspect that our leaders on Beacon Hill are the biggest Lottery addicts in Massachusetts, and simply prefer not to know who is paying.

If you find any good answers to these questions, I would be grateful to hear about them, and perhaps your other readers would, too.

Sincerely,

Harry

Your Cassock is Showing

Today’s Boston Globe has a follow-up story on the new regime at All Saints Episcopal Church in Attleboro, which recently experienced a schism discussed in an earlier post. The article ends with this quote from a volunteer at the Attleboro church:

Armada Surgens , 27, who headed the All Saints youth group until 2005, when she left the church, said she was happy to return, and would try to revive youth activities. The people who left “say it is not all about the gay issue, but none of this started until a gay man was ordained a bishop,” Surgens said, referring to the ordination of V. Gene Robinson as bishop of new Hampshire in 2003 . “My view is that God loves us whoever we are . . . How can someone decide the word of God, to love one another, does not extend to Gene Robinson?”

That quote may represent the young lady’s viewpoint. It may also speak correctly about the events triggering this schism. But it paints those on other side of the schism in caricature.

By closing a newspaper article this way reporter Charles Radin and the Globe smell of liberal media bias at the least and more likely of advocacy journalism.

UPDATE: It’s interesting that the tiny local newspaper, the Attleboro Sun Chronicle has 2 stories today about this topic, one report from each of the churches. That’s not surprising since this story is in their own town, but note that a single Sun Chronicle reporter, Gloria LaBounty, managed to write two stories and report on both churches while the Globe’s reporter managed to cover only one. LaBounty writes reports on both the 9AM service at All Saints Anglican and the 10AM service at All Saints Episcopal. The Globe’s reporter apparently only attended the latter service.

Heh. The early bird catches the story.

LaBounty’s story is not any softer on the breakaway group than the Globe’s story, but the quotes she uses are more factual. Take away points from her for one humorous spelling error of the type that gets past automated spell checkers.

Feeding on Leftovers

I am posting early today, and today's Boston Globe is not yet on the web. So let’s glean some tasty scraps from Globe papers earlier this week.

In a Thursday story noting the withdrawal of a leading candidate to succeed Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard, the Globe notes in perspective:

Some alumni said they also are worried that Harvard's presidency has become less of a plum job, because candidates might not be eager to take charge of a faculty whose revolt led the last president, Lawrence H. Summers , to step down.

Hmmm.

Perhaps (just perhaps) the reticence of some candidates relates to the substance of the events that incited this faculty revolt. That is that Summers wandered outside the bounds of permissible thought on the litmus topic of gender. Some casual (and supposedly off the record) remarks was all it took to set the faculty lynch mob loose. Perhaps some scholars do not wish to spend the rest of their career carefully weighing the political correctness of every word they utter.

Globe corrections are sometimes an amusing read. Let's taste a few:

Here a Globe reporter is fooled:

February 1

Correction: A story in yesterday's Sports section quoted an e-mail by Theo Epstein's father, Leslie, as saying the Red Sox general manager and his fiancée, Marie Whitney, had gotten married at Nathan's hot dog stand at Coney Island, N.Y. Leslie Epstein said yesterday he had been joking about where the wedding took place. Details of the ceremony have remained secret at the request of Theo Epstein.

Here page 1 headlines in the Globe require correction 2 days in a row:

January 31, 2007

Correction: Because of an editing error, a Page One headline yesterday incorrectly said that the state's new health insurance law has set higher minimum standards for insurance coverage. The Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector board is considering higher minimums but has not voted on them.

Correction: Because of an editing error, a Page One headline Monday [January 29] incorrectly said All Saints Anglican Church of Attleboro is closing. The congregation has been ordered to vacate the church building but will continue meeting elsewhere.

Even Squaring the Globe noted the latter error.

And here is a correction that probably originated from John Kerry’s dutiful staff:

January 30, 2007

Correction: Because of an editing error, the obituary of the Rev. Robert F. Drinan on Page One yesterday wrongly said John Kerry had been campaign manager for Drinan's run for Congress in 1970. Kerry was chairman of that campaign.

Phew! Thanks for getting that critical mistake corrected! If Kerry had a staff like that when he was in the Navy, he would know for certain whether he spent that Christmas in Cambodia or in Vietnam!

And finally the nightmare scenario in newspaper screw-ups:

January 29, 2007

Correction: Because of a reporting error, the Friday Mass Cash lottery number listed in Sunday's City & Region section was incorrect. The correct number is 1-5-16-33-34.

I bet that error really disappointed a few readers.

Have a good weekend, reader.

Jack Welch Was Right

NY Times "A" Share Price vs. S&P 500 Index - 2 year Trend (Source:Yahoo!)

Yesterday in announcing its quarterly and year-end results the New York Times Corporation said it would take an $814 write-off against the book value of its New England Media Group (which includes the Boston Globe and 2 smaller papers). The write-off validates Jack Welch’s "low" valuation of $500-600M for the Globe. The Bloomberg story is here. For a deeper dive, you will find the source material here at NY Times Corporation Investor Relations.

In current operations, the other NY Times units performed well, but not New England Media. An earlier version of the same Bloomberg story (no longer on the web) reported:

Weekday circulation at the Boston Globe fell 6.7 percent to 386,415 in the six months ended Sept. 30, according to the most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Advertising revenue at New England Media Group fell 12 percent to $97.4 million in the third quarter. New York Times said in November that it might reduce the value of the assets; sparking speculation the company may be willing to sell the New England unit. Former General Electric Co. Chairman Jack Welch said in November that he is interested in buying the Boston Globe.

Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson cited lower circulation, increased advertising competition from the Internet and a weak New England economy as the major reasons for the writedown. “That regional economy has been especially hard hit, exacerbated by some of the challenging trends that have affected all of our industry,” Robinson said.

I don’t believe that overall the New England economy is weak, but it undoubtedly feels that way if you make your living by selling broadsheet advertising to New England retailers.