Market-based Economy? No Thanks!

Market-based auto insurance rates for Massachusetts? No thank you! The Boston Globe prefers to have us live in a nanny state.

In Massachusetts the government mandates auto insurance coverage for all vehicles. That is fine with me, but in order to guarantee that coverage will be available to all citizens at ‘affordable’ rates the state has over time increased its role from regulation to dictatorship. Nanny state also wants to control the price of insurance. Today the state sets the rates that insurers charge, and also determines which factors are used in rate calculations. Massachusetts present policies concerning rates result in a subsidy for younger and urban Massachusetts drivers.

There have been 2 major long term impacts of state control. First, all major national insurance companies have stopped writing auto insurance in Massachusetts.

GEICO, Allstate, State Farm, Progressive? They aren’t here.

They have all abandoned the auto insurance business in Massachusetts. Only a few local firms share the business. That leads to the second result; consumers pay through the nose for auto insurance (‘fairness’ has costs, you know, and one cost is affordability).

This sad state of affairs is staunchly defended in a Globe editorial today entitled “Dirty auto rates? No thanks”. The Romney administration wanted to take the radical step of moving to a more market-based system. The political problem with a market-based system is that high-risk drivers will find that a competitive market price of their insurance makes it unaffordable.

The Patrick administration stopped Romney’s reform plans and created a study team to review the state’s policy. From the Globe editorial:

…the study group unequivocally defends the current system that limits rating factors to driving experience, at-fault accidents, location, and traffic violations. Massachusetts needs no part of national insurers who use credit scores, occupation, home ownership, and other extraneous factors to dump drivers into assigned risk pools where they are forced to pay outlandish "dirty rates."

Which is to say that government is more competent than private companies to judge which factors are extraneous and which factors should be used to estimate the risks of insurance coverage. Laughable! Government is able to only to oil the squeaky wheel and make sure that the overall policy is ‘fair’, as is illustrated further down in the editorial:

…roughly three-quarters of the state's drivers pay about $100 more each year for auto insurance so that mostly urban drivers living in areas with more theft and accidents can pay about $400 less. Everyone on the road benefits when all drivers can afford insurance.

Thanks for the benefits, nanny! The Globe (and the state’s) policy is that it makes sense for older and rural drivers to pay more and thus subsidize younger, urban drivers so that everybody can afford insurance. Why is this better? Is it because otherwise those high-risk drivers might have to carpool or take public transportation? But I thought the Globe wants more people to carpool and use public transportation!

It does. But it just wants them to have subsidized auto insurance at the same time.

Here is collectivist illogic in its purest form. But at least we are all being fair!

Do you suppose that is also why we have so many good drivers in Massachusetts?

The Cost

This photo from a soldier’s funeral appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s Boston Globe and is one of the finest the Globe has published. I am transfixed by it. It is eloquent beyond words, so I will add no more.

Unlawful (and Lawful) Taking of Human Life

Tuesday’s Boston Globe front page reports on the first degree murder conviction of two Boston men:

2 guilty in shooting of mother-to-be
Face life terms in baby's death

After 10 days of deliberation , a Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted two men yesterday of first-degree murder in a brazen 2003 shooting of a pregnant woman on a crowded Orange Line train that resulted in the death of her child. Chimezie Akara, 23, and Andre Green, 22, were each charged with firing an errant hollow point bullet that struck Hawa Barry in the abdomen on Feb. 5, 2003. Barry, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant at the time, survived, but her son died 45 minutes after being delivered by Cesarean section…The two were also found guilty of three counts of armed assault with intent to murder, three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and one count each of unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition. They face mandatory life in prison without parole at sentencing today.

A life prison term without parole is mandatory under Massachusetts law (I believe) for persons convicted of first degree murder.

The Boston Globe news story is accurate and unbiased. The term murder can be defined as the unlawful taking of a human life. These men committed that crime. Neither is there ambiguity as to the “birth status” of their murder victim, since the murdered boy had a Caesarian birth 45 minutes before his tragic death.

Yet it is inescapable to ponder that it is perfectly legal (though uncommon) for a physician to terminate the pregnancy of a woman who is in her 2nd or even 3^rd trimester, via the procedure known as IDX to the medical establishment and Partial Birth Abortion to Pro-Lifers. The procedure was used in 0.17% of all abortions in 2000 according to the staunchly pro abortion-rights Alan Guttmacher Institute. There are more than 1 million abortions performed in the US each year, so the number of IDX abortions performed in the US is at least 1700 per year, if the Guttmacher study data reflects current practice. Wikipedia gives the number at 2500-3000 per year.

Today these 2 men are headed for a life sentence not because they shot the mother-to-be. That crime was assault with intent to murder. The mother is still very much alive. They will receive the mandatory life sentence because in shooting her they took the life of her unborn child. What they did was certainly unlawful, but was what they did any less the “taking of a human life” than are these horrid medical procedures?

If you disagree, I invite you to surf over to Google, enter the term “partial birth abortion” and then select an “Images” search.

Don’t do so casually. Some of the images are haunting, and will probably stay with you. I will not create such a link for you to simply click. If you need to see the images, then go do it yourself. What you will see there is the lawful taking of human life, not murder as defined in our law. However, such a state of law is madness. It could only be created and defended by what one must call mad extremists.

Please Mind Your Own Crumbling Business

A Boston Globe editorial assures readers the Hillary Clinton 1984 ad
“is airing too early in the campaign to have a significant impact”

Last Friday’s Boston Globe featured an editorial on the Hillary Clinton “1984” video recently posted on YouTube. The editorial ended with a fine example of the “but paragraph”, an expository style that may be fine for editorials, though I find it very irritating when news stories resort to it. For those readers not familiar with the term let me offer a definition:

But paragraph -noun 1. the point near the end of a news or analysis story in a liberal journal when, after opposing arguments have been briefly mentioned in pursuit of ‘fairness’, the author dismisses the merits of such arguments and concludes by proposing the conventional wisdom of the left as the sole responsible position. So named because this is often done in a paragraph that begins with the word “but”.

The Globe’s own Peter Canellos provides a superb example of this poor style here.

Getting back to Friday’s editorial, the Globe opines that the Hillary 1984 ad was “within the boundary of acceptability” and was “airing too early in the campaign to have a significant impact”. I doubt the latter. The Clinton campaign is not likely to agree with either assertion. The Globe admits that "Free speech has generated more speech to enhance the debate over who would make the best Democratic nominee for president."

Then comes the “but paragraph”

But suppose it was two or three days before a close election, and a scurrilous, deceitful, anonymous clip was posted on YouTube and the other sites that specialize in homemade videos. Candidates should, of course, monitor all these sites and flag the offending videos. But doesn't YouTube have an obligation to make sure these ads are swept from its site before they can do harm? YouTube today doesn't have a policy against attack ads late in the campaign, but it should.

Goodness! Let’s sweep that awful excrement away from the web before it does harm to the electorate! In railing against harmful Internet filth infecting the electorate, the Globe editors are sounding more extreme than James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, aren’t they?

I hate to break this news to the foolish virgins of the Globe editorial board, but effective political advertising tends toward the scurrilous and deceitful by its very nature.

Political ads are not constructed by the John Kerrys or the William F. Buckleys of politics. They are created by the Karl Roves and the Bill Moyers of politics (I’m referring to the old-style sharp-edged Bill Moyers, for readers old enough to remember him from his work with LBJ’s campaign in1964 rather than for his later obsequious PBS interviews of Joseph Campbell and the like).

Political ads are designed as product promotions for products that face only a single competitor. Therefore harshly denigrating that solitary competitor is a frequent and an effective competitive promotional strategy. Furthermore these ads are aimed at swing segments of the electorate, not at college professors, newspaper editors, or right-wing bloggers.

But why did the Globe editors resort to a hypothetical case when there is a fine actual case in recent election history?

During the 2004 presidential campaign a controversial ad appeared in the Internet and on TV in early August. It was not anonymous. Though the ad was discussed non-stop for weeks on talk radio and on blogs, the Boston Globe did not once mention it, and refused to do so until the candidate who was attacked in the ad broke his own similar (and highly coincidental) silence on the matter and attacked the advertisers without discussing their specific charges.

To this day the Globe editors have never formally explained their decision to engage in 2-week period of silence about the Swift Boat Veterans ad. Columnist Tom Oliphant said on August 22, 2004 that it was because:

“…more reputable organs of the national press have not cast doubt on Kerry's Vietnam service. That is because political attacks on it don't pass the smell test. We are influenced by eyewitnesses, not by people whose stories keep changing or are contradicted by official records. We are used to arguments over things like war records, but the burden of proof is with the accuser and Kerry's accusers cannot shoulder it with the credible evidence required of credible stories.”

Give Oliphant credit for showing his readers common courtesy and explaining exactly where he stood on the matter and why. By contrast, the Globe newsroom itself has never explained its lack of coverage in August 2004, and apparently never felt a need to explain why for 2 weeks it failed report a story that in retrospect was widely agreed by all sides as the most important turning point of the 2004 campaign.

That the Globe has never explained its actions reeks of an arrogance and a lack of accountability far more pervasive than does YouTube’s efforts at community policing of its web content.

Perhaps the Globe editors should explain the content policies of their own newsroom and their own newspaper to their own paying customers before instructing YouTube on how to manage its exploding business.

The Joyless Pursuit of Excellence

From the Boston Globe's website:

Hat Tip: Dave Copeland

Therese Murray – Process Liberal

Therese Murray, the new president of the Massachusetts Senate, has taken the side of the “process liberals” in announcing her position on the marriage amendment. According to an AP story in the Boston Globe:

“My vote is going to be just what it was the last time,” Murray said on her way into her first formal Senate session as president. “But I'm not going to move to adjourn. I will call for a vote and I will try to help the advocates get the votes that they need.”

Spoken like a leader, Ms. President.

Note that Murray’s stand is in stark contrast to the position of outcome über alles taken this past January by Deval Patrick who urged defiance of the Supreme Judicial Court’s explicit ruling issued only days earlier, when he wrote:

I favor ending this petition initiative promptly. If adjournment can accomplish that, so be it.

UPDATE: The AP story has been suceeded by a front page article.

Video Killed the Speech Police

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as the McCain-Feingold law) was designed to regulate the financing of political campaigns, especially presidential campaigns. Conservatives have viewed the law as an affront to the free speech provision of the 1^st Amendment as it prohibits broadcast advertising by many incorporated entities when such ads refer to a candidate for federal election within 60 days of a that election.

Apparently we foolish voters are too easily persuaded by sophisticated corporate or union advertising, so in order to assure a “fair” election such groups need to be silenced for a few weeks beforehand.

The law has failed spectacularly, of course. The 2004 election was dominated on both sides by “527” organizations whose advertising was exempted by the legislation. George Soros and other wealthy individuals on the political left each invested tens of millions in MoveOn.org and other 527s, while conservatives also invested in their own 527 groups such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The net effect of McCain-Feingold has been only to make the legal practices for campaign financing and advertising more arcane, more difficult to follow, and more difficult to enforce.

One of the fundamental arrogances of McCain-Feingold is that it presumes that the creation and distribution of video political advertising requires large resources, and thus is restricted to large corporate entities and lobbying organizations. The framers of this bill assumed that by regulating the behavior of these organizations, they could control the distribution and public consumption of video political advertising. They also assumed that this advertising was a substantially different form of political speech than the kind you and I might have over coffee on a Saturday morning. In 2007, just 5 years after the bill became law, both these assumptions have become laughable.

This month the 2 most talked-about political ads were both created by anonymous individuals and uploaded to YouTube. They will be seen millions of times in their first month online. These are attack ads (one an attack on Senator Hillary Clinton, the other a retaliation against Senator Barack Obama). Both are mash-ups of Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial. These ads would be now illegal to broadcast on television near an election, but they’ll undoubtedly be seen and talked about ad nauseum by TV’s many nodding heads.

As for video being a separate form of political speech, that assumption held true only when video meant the broadcast television market, with its multi-million dollar cost of entry and 7-figure legal expenses for FCC licensing. In the era of YouTube and other video sharing web sites, anyone with a camcorder and a computer (and talent, of course) can produce an ad that could be seen by millions. To obtain that reach the ad needs the approval not of the bureaucrats at the Federal Election Commission, but of the viral market of YouTube reviewers.

How ironic that McCain-Feingold has been thwarted by its original exemptions (demanded by powerful organizations who didn’t want their own political speech restricted) and by improved technology, but not by our democratically elected officials or our courts.

Both our representatives and our courts would keep this monstrous blot on the first amendment in force if they could. Where, when this law was passed, were the advocates of free speech and the libertarians? The law was co-sponsored in the Senate by a Republican Senator from Arizona (Barry Goldwater must have turned over in his grave). The Congress passed the law in 2002, when the House was controlled by Republicans, and it was signed into law by a Republican president whose credentials as a conservative seem limited to his social views. The Supreme Court, perhaps in a nostalgic tribute to Dred Scott, voted 5-4 to find the law constitutional on its first legal challenge.

But the rise of YouTube has shown clearly that video political advertising, like blogging, is fundamentally a form of individual speech, and no Federal Election Commission or court is likely to step in during the height of election season and demand that home-made videos be taken down from YouTube. Despite the best efforts of our increasingly insular elected officials in Washington, the communications of individual citizens today enjoy unprecedented access to wide distribution.

Our Congressmen, Senators, and presidential candidates may chafe at the prospect, but despite their best efforts to silence “irresponsible” critics, their constituents are still able to criticize them freely in writing or on video, even within 60 days of an election.

(UPDATE: One creator has now been identified as Philip de Vellis, an ad-firm worker. See this.)

Giant Sucking Sound on Morrissey Blvd.

New tales of woe at the New York Times Company and the Boston Globe. First Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal has a front page story (by subscription) about Hassan Elmasry, the Morgan Stanley portfolio manager and unhappy shareholder who owns 7% of the New York Times’ Jim Crow-class shares (that is, Class A non-voting shares). Elmasry and other investors finally had their first chance to present to the NYT Company board last month, after years of effort. It’s a fascinating story. An excerpt:

In a second letter dated Nov. 1, 2005, Mr. Elmasry told Mr. Sulzberger he was "baffled" by his inability to get a meeting. "In over 20 years of investing we have not yet encountered a chairman of a public company who has declined to meet with us as long-standing and substantial institutional shareholders, particularly after such a lengthy period of poor business and stock market performance," the letter said.

He raised for the first time his concern about the company's dual-class share structure, suggesting Mr. Sulzberger would have had a different attitude "if we held seven million voting shares instead of non-voting shares." Hoping to get the board's attention, Mr. Elmasry sent the letter to every director.

Globe editor Martin Baron's memo on the newsroom buyout was posted Wednesday along with a story on the buyout at Boston.com. The Globe had its own newsroom woes reported elsewhere earlier in the week as the New York Observer broke the news that the most recent buyout offer in the Globe newsroom was well oversubscribed:

A Globe staffer said that reporters and editors are losing confidence in the newspaper’s future under the Times Company, and that they feel this might be the last chance to take a buyout for several more years.

The sense of encroachment grew stronger on March 14, when a story from the West Bank appeared in The Globe with a New York Times Wire Service tagline. The article was by Times reporter Steven Erlanger, himself a former Globe reporter.

The web version of today's Globe is late in arriving today (coincidence?), so I can't link to whatever story is in today's Globe.

UPDATE: Here it is.

An Incredible Letter

In so old-fashioned Massachusetts many small towns manage their own town pension funds, which are overseen by a board of local citizens. These board members are most often also active town employees with no experience or expertise in investment management. It’s a situation which screams “Outsource me!”, and the Patrick administration is taking some steps to do that.

A recent Boston Globe story reporting that 2 members of the Newton pension board (a firefighter and a police officer) will be traveling to Hawaii for a 6-day convention at board expense, brought this unintentionally humorous letter from the executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems:

March 20, 2007

RE THE March 14 editorial "When investing, bigger is better," about public pension representatives traveling to Hawaii for the annual conference of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, I would like to make a couple of points.

NCPERS, a nonprofit membership organization dedicated to advocacy, research, and education, represents the nation's 2,659 public sector retirement systems, which collectively oversee more than $3 trillion.

Plan trustees, administrators, and other public officials who act as stewards of public pension plans will be traveling to Hawaii to participate in educational sessions related to their duties. In addition to sessions on investing, we have panels and speakers on such diverse subjects as fiduciary responsibility, tax qualifications and Pension Protection Act issues, the cost of healthcare for retirees, and bringing retirees back into the workforce. Sessions at our conferences are an integral part of education for our members.

Trustees of public pension plans put in an extraordinary amount of work on behalf of plan participants -- work for which they are not paid. Suggesting that attendees to our annual conference are going only for the location is condescending and dishonors their years of service as dedicated public employees.

HANK H. KIM

I believe you, Mr. Kim, and I’d write the Globe a letter myself except that I broke my arm yesterday when I fell off a turnip truck.

The original Globe article on the Newtonian junket to Hawaii is here.

Crittenden Resilient

Jules Crittenden delivers a fisting of the AP story on Iraq that the Boston Globe carries on page 1 today.

Bad Joke

Whatever makes our local political hacks believe they are natural masters at the art of stand-up comedy?

Globe Now Outsourcing to 43rd Street

Adding insult to the injury of Indian outsourcing, Wednesday marked the first time in history that a New York Times News Service news story has appeared in the Boston Globe. Since the Globe has been owned for 14 years by the New York Times Corporation, one might ask why management chose this moment to begin propagating Times content via the Globe.

Here is one possible reason.

A Wall Street Journal story published this past Monday (subscription required) revealed that the Times Corporation Board held meetings in February with disgruntled institutional investors from Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, and Private Capital Management. Together these investors own over 30% of the Times’ “A” class shares. The Times Corporation refused to allow a vote this year on shareholder proposals submitted by Morgan Stanley. This refusal was only possible because the Times maintains a Jim Crow-like dual class stock structure (with the “white” shares owned by the Sulzberger family and the “colored” shares owned by outsiders).

Here is the first and last paragraph of Monday’s WSJ story on the meetings (emphasis mine):

In a sign that the New York Times Co. may be trying to appease investors who have criticized it, the newspaper publisher invited Morgan Stanley money manager Hassan Elmasry and another large shareholder, T. Rowe Price Group Inc., to make presentations to its board of directors late last month...

"Their antennae have been raised to investor concerns and issues of company performance," [T. Rowe Price Chairman] Mr. Rogers added, referring to the company's board. "If I were the board and I were trying to signal that I'm listening, I would make some type of gesture to simply show [the February meetings] were not a waste of everybody's time."

One such gesture might be to overturn the very costly but deeply historic practice of not using Times stories in the Globe, and instead begin to effectively leverage the Times company’s flagship content in its other papers. This could be a big cost saver for the Globe as the paper could quickly source all but local news content from the Times, wires, or other outside sources.

I suspect that before long circulation and advertising will not be the only Globe functions that will be outsourced, but in this case the outsourcing is not to India but to another Times organ. This outsourcing threat to jobs on Morrissey Boulevard does not come from Bangalore but from 43^rd Street in Manhattan.

Hat Tip: Boston Phoenix

CJR Daily Hoses the Boston Globe

Edward B. Colby at Columbia Journalism Review Daily skewers the Boston Globe for its biased coverage of a speech by Lawrence Summers at Tufts University. The story criticized is written by Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri, who originally reported Summers’ off-the-record remarks that led to his removal in a feminist-led faculty putsch:

Is a public figure with a lot of baggage in his past doomed to be haunted by "controversy" wherever he goes? That was certainly the case with the Boston Globe's coverage of a warmly received talk former Harvard president Larry Summers gave at nearby Tufts University this week, as the paper tried its darnedest to imbue Summers' appearance with as much controversy as possible.

Colby sounds very much like a cranky right-wing blogger (he even sounds a bit like Squaring the Globe!). Conservative credentials for Colby are probably impossible though, since finding a conservative at CJR would be as surprising as finding life on Mars. Colby goes on to cut up the Globe story with professional journalistic skill:

While an early Web headline proclaimed "Former Harvard president still dogged by controversy -- even at Tufts," the Globe toned that down for its Thursday print edition -- "Despite controversy, Summers welcomed at Tufts" -- but even that went too far.
While the Tufts Daily carried the placid headline "Summers speaks on higher ed to positive student response," and the Harvard Crimson highlighted the Tufts president's comment that boycotts by some of his professors were "much ado about nothing," the Globe took another tack.

… the Globe wouldn't let Summers escape those "past controversies," so the paper turned to a lone negative voice, that of boycotting professor Gary R. Goldstein, who considered Summers' appearance "particularly damaging" because it followed two other divisive Tufts events involving attacks on affirmative action. According to Goldstein, the university's invite sends the message "that it's alright to make statements that are offensive to half the student body," yet confoundingly he also wished Summers would address women in science or African-American studies so (as the Globe said) "the audience could hash out those topics instead of politely ignoring them" -- did that mean he wanted more offensive statements, too?

Read the whole thing. It delightful to find a liberal organ like CJR also taking the Globe to task for printing stories that purport to describe controversies that are entirely bogus, such as who cuts Mitt Romney’s lawn. The Globe newsroom is far too arrogant, insular, and ideologically uniform. But if some of their own fellow travellers tell them that their own prejudices come through so clearly in their stories, they might at least hear the message.

The Bengaluru Globe

The Boston Globe’s Newspaper Guild (their labor union) has published an ad in the Boston Herald (pdf) protesting the outsourcing of advertising and circulation functions to India. The message concludes with the remark:

It’s the Boston Globe, NOT the Bangalore Globe!

This claim is disputed by an Indian blog named Ultrabrown which humorously entitles its post It’s the Bengaluru Globe, actually. Blogger Manish at Ultrabrown notes:

What’s funny about this is that the same people protesting globalization also protest poverty. Yet at the same time they oppose building economically efficient orgs which help U.S. workers and the economy. And they oppose helping Bangaloreans who are objectively less wealthy. So for many, it’s really an anti-modernity-if-it-takes-money-from-me movement.

Well said. In Bengaluru you could say that mouthful, but in American English we would say it’s simply a another case of the universal human fault -- hypocrisy. Like the fully carbon offset (and therefore righteous) energy binge at Al Gore's home.

Which reminds me of the old Bert and I story entitled “Down East Socialism”

Eben Robey went down to the Tremont Temple in Boston to hear Norman Thomas speak. When he come back he was out preachin’ socialism ‘cross the back fence to Enoch Turner.

“You know, Enoch,” Eben was sayin’, “under socialism everybody shares everythin’”.

“Is that so?”

“Ayuup.”

“You mean to tell me, Eben, that if you had 2 fahms and I had none, you’d give me one of ‘em?”

“Ayup. Under socialism I’d give you one of ‘em.”

“And if you had 2 hay rigs?”

“Under socialism, if I had 2 hay rigs and you had none, I’d give you one of ‘em.”

“Well, Eben, suppose you had 2 hogs?”

“DAMN you, Enoch! You know I got 2 hogs.”

Orthodox Jews Don't "Relent" Either

There are 2 articles in today’s Boston Globe on religion, and both show the Globe’s enthusiastic evangelism for secular humanist forms of organized religion. First an AP story covers a document written by Pope Benedict XVI to catholic bishops that in part urges them to uphold Catholic teaching concerning the indissolubility of sacramental marriage. The story’s headline is:

Pope doesn't relent on remarried Catholics

The second is a Globe a story by reporter Charles Radin covering the election of a female lesbian rabbi from West Newton as head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Assembly, which represents about 3% of American Jews. This story gets the headline:

A new voice among Jewish leaders

Yet in Radin’s story (albeit very near the end) a spokesman for Orthodox Jewry weighs in:

"If a movement says that gay or homosexual behavior is normative Judaism, we would say that is not a correct and proper understanding of what Judaism is and stands for," said Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of the New York-based Rabbinical Council of America, the largest Orthodox rabbinical group in the world.

Asked about Spitzer's assertion that one day the Orthodox would have women rabbis, he said: "If one defines a rabbi as one who officiates as a judge and officiates at weddings and divorces, it is beyond the pale of Orthodoxy to say women can fulfill those functions."

How very unprogressive of them! Like Pope Benedict, the Orthodox Jews also seem most unwilling to “relent” from their archaic teachings and accept the modern conventional wisdom concerning marriage and gender. They choose to follow their tradition in the face of today’s increasingly gender-blind laws. But that fact doesn’t make the same headlines in the Globe. You’ll not see a Globe headline reporting:

Jews Don’t Relent on Women Rabbis

Bushwacked

In a Wall Street Journal/OpinionJournal piece entitled “The Conservative Case Against Bush”, Joseph Bottum of First Things makes the case that US conservatism has been Bushwacked.

I would say yes, but for a second time. I’d count as the first time GHW Bush’s renege on his “no new taxes” pledge and his utter obliviousness to the huge political cost carried by that single decision.

The fateful decision of Bush 43 is either the invasion of Iraq or the (thus far) failed occupation. Regardless of which proves to be the ultimate blunder, again the costs are huge and mostly still unpaid.

The next president elected, regardless of party, will be effectively campaigning and elected on an platform of “no new wars”. That message will be heard clearly in Pyongyang, Tehran, and Taipei, among other places. Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick has devolved to “Speak politely and promise not to fight.” The winner of the next election must govern under that slogan for years – like playing bridge with an open hand.

Wednesday OpinionJournal will have a column by Michael Novak defending Bush. I doubt that Novak will land punches equal to these:

So why were conservatives supposed to cheer the president's State of the Union address this January? If we haven't yet demonstrated to the world that we can successfully oppose the jihadists, if we haven't yet brought government spending under control, if we haven't yet established any permanent advances on the life issues--if all that Republican government has successfully managed over the past six years is to inspire a rabid opposition at home and abroad--then many opportunities have been squandered. Every conservative I know is depressed these days, and they are right to be. Under President Bush, conservatism has won only in the sense of not losing as quickly as it would have under a President Gore or a President Kerry.

That is being too kind. Perhaps a president Gore or Kerry would have caused conservatives to rally. The Clinton administration of 1993-94 certainly did.

The Republicans’ lack of political savvy abandoned an astonishing number of unconfirmed judicial nominees—and now we have a Democratic Senate unlikely to confirm any conservative judges at all.

Just unlikely?

Conservatives voted for George W. Bush in 2000 because they expected him to be the opposite of Bill Clinton--and so, unfortunately, he has proved. Where Mr. Clinton seemed a man of enormous political competence and no principle, Mr. Bush has been a man of principle and very little political competence.

Political or administrative, I’d say. Again Bottum is being a little too kind.

The Current Fashion in Newsrooms

Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine comments and has video of the new newsroom at the Telegraph (and also comments on the new newsroom at the Guardian). Both newsrooms are similar with the main meeting table open and in the center of the newsroom. Interestingly the two newspapers are on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. Notes Jeff:

They set the conference table — every newsroom has a big one for its big meetings — in the middle of the room. So now the news meetings are open and anyone can come and hover and listen. The same is true at the Guardian; I sat in on one of their meetings last year as people came by to talk about the news and the paper. This is not something I’ve ever experienced in the papers I’ve worked at in America; openness there was defined as enclosing that big conference table in soundproof glass.

That spirit hasn’t reached the Boston Globe as of yet. The Globe’s two-a-day editorial meetings are held in one of the glassed-in conference room Jeff describes above, which is named in honor of former Globe editor Tom Winship. I attended and reported on one such meeting courtesy of Richard Chacon, the Globe’s former Ombudsman. The Globe’s daily meeting was as liturgically formal as a recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours.

Which coming from me is not criticism.

Hiding Apostasy Under A Bushel Basket

Sunday the Boston Globe Magazine published a column by an anti-catholic psychologist, which would be all right with me except in the column she doesn’t identify herself as such and instead comes across as prescriptive for the Church. The author, Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, has a new book on the Church’s sexual abuse scandal being published (surprise!) this week. The press release for her book reports as its fundamental conclusion:

“It is my contention that Catholic theological renderings . . . about bodies, gender, desire, sex, mandatory celibacy, and sexual orientation . . . are stultifying to human psychological and spiritual growth and are even unethical.”

Anyone is free to believe that. But wouldn't it be more honest to state that up front in your Globe column? Isn’t it rather dishonest to leave it unsaid? Keeping quiet about your stance just might sell a few more books, though. Predictably, she demands that the Church abandon its historic teachings and instead conform itself to the currently fashionable ideas in psychology regarding bodies, gender, desire, sex, mandatory celibacy, and sexual orientation, etc. No matter that these fashions change as rapidly as those on Paris runways.

Anyway, she is free to loathe Catholic teaching any way she wishes, but it is hypocritical both of her and of the Boston Globe to hide her fundamental contention under a bushel basket. By the two of them I am reminded of what St. Paul wrote to Timothy:

I give you this charge: Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

Itching ears are found not only in chanceries.

Though she doesn’t address the question in her column, I suspect that the author believes her expression is not anti-catholic but rather authentically catholic. Note she is not directly attacking church doctrine, only “theological renderings” (renderings which in this case have persisted in the Church for millennia). I rather suspect her of the view that if the Church were authentic it would be Unitarian, or very much like present-day Unitarians.

If you wish more evidence of the bitterness of her anti-Catholic vitriol, Dom has posted a letter she wrote to Cardinal O’Malley in 2005 and copied to all the priests in the Archdiocese of Boston.

But rather than end this post with a bitter taste, let us end it with the small smile caused by a snippet from Robert Frost’s Revelation:

But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

Hat Tip: Miss Kelly

UPDATE: Dom has more on this topic here.

Disdain for Laws That Are "ad hoc"

Reaction in the Boston Globe to the immigration raid in New Bedford is quite predictable. An Op Ed piece dismisses the rule of law and advocates “reform”. The executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition writes:

These families are victims of unscrupulous employers and an ad hoc set of laws.

What law is not ad hoc? Isn’t the Roe v. Wade decision equally ad hoc? Yet millions who remain appalled by that ruling have tolerated it for decades out of respect for the process of law. We needn’t observe laws that are "ad hoc"? Should we govern our republic by the Natural Law only?

The Globe editorial of the day opines:

There's little value, however, in a dispute between local and federal officials, because all of them are only victims of a vast policy vacuum.

There is not a policy vacuum. Congress has enacted “immigration reform” numerous times before. There is an unwillingness to even begin to enforce our current laws. This reflects problems within the Executive branch. Our Administration refuses even to take the first step and adequately guard our country’s southern border, much to the dismay of Congress, which last session appropriated funds to erect a physical barrier. The administration’s fecklessness seems characteristic, whether seen in Texas or in Iraq.

Also in today’s Globe on the Deval Patrick front, Scott Lehigh merits a “Covering Your Tracks Award” for his column on Deval’s tin ear for the qualities of leadership:

Since his stunning election landslide, close observers have picked up hints of a Patrick very different from the usually likable candidate of the campaign trail. Possessed of a surpassing sense of self, that alter ego is a thin-skinned micromanager who grows peevish when pressed, takes critical stories personally, blames the press for problems of his own creation, and admits mistakes only grudgingly.

“Close observers”?

Scott, even those who are not “close observers” picked up this scent long before the election. The thinness of Patrick’s skin was noted explicitly in this blog in September (see Deval Patrick’s Skin – it’s very thin) when a letter writer to the Globe complained about Deval’s threats to play the race card during his Democratic primary campaign.

Maybe rather than close observers, Scott, you should have said unbiased observers.

By the way, Scott, your description is a perfect fit not only for Deval, but also for Bill Clinton, his mentor!

Sort of Off Topic

George Will may be insufferable, but he can also be remarkably articulate. Writing in Newsweek on Longfellow’s 200^th birthday he notes:

[Longfellow's accessibility] angers today's academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who "interrogate" authors' "texts" to illuminate the authors' psyches, ideologies and social situations— the "power relations" of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today's professoriate, rather than yesterday's writers, the center of attention.

Gone Fishing

I am out of town and too busy to blog much this week. I'm on a fishing trip, but fishing for information. I'll be back this Friday.

Outsourcing Strikes at Morrissey Boulevard

This news of events at Boston Globe headquarters is reported first by the Boston Herald and the Boston Phoenix.

Acceptable Forms of Bigotry

A letter writer to the Boston Globe makes a fine point:

February 28, 2007

Regarding the cartoon on today's editorial page: Would any of the following labels on the wild-eyed man have passed muster? "Jews"? "Muslims"? "Gay-rights groups"? Of course not. But "Christian right" is an acceptable form of bigotry? Dan Wasserman is entitled to his paranoia, but publishing this one was a bad call on the Globe's part.

As I observe the practice of Op Ed journalism today in the mainstream media, white males and the Christian Right can be treated in any kind of derogatory manner. On the other hand certain religions are shown overwhelming sensitivity. These are religions that are both powerful and violently intolerant (such as one world religion whose followers might, for example, become violent over editorial cartoons) and also those that while ersatz are ethnically homogeneous and composed largely of minority groups, such as Kwanzaa.

The same is true in public education, except that rather than outright bigotry, “privileged” religions (meaning, in our culture, Christianity) are systematically excluded from any serious place in curriculums covering religion.

And here is a Democratic letter writer who has much in common with many Republicans:

March 1, 2007

RE: The Elephant in the Clintons' room (Scot Lehigh, Op-ed, Feb. 23):

What David Geffen said to Maureen Dowd about Bill Clinton may have been a secret somewhere, but not out here where many of us Democrats live and breathe.

From the moment Hillary Clinton's name came up as a possible candidate for president, millions of us cringed, and we continue to fear her nomination. Aside from her own shortcomings (she's every inch a product), many of us are still deeply angry over the responsibility her husband bears for the anti-Democratic hatred that made the 2000 presidential election even remotely close against the likes of George W. Bush.

We cannot stomach the very idea of putting either of the Clintons anywhere near another presidential race, and have watched in abject disbelief as she has been talked about as the presumptive first choice for 2008.

Bill Clinton was in many ways a brilliant president, intellectually gifted and a natural political leader. But he squandered our trust and revealed the extent to which his own self-indulgence trumped any sense of responsibility to us and the rest of the world.

Forgiving him within her marriage is Hillary's business; for her to suggest that it's irrelevant, when it paved the way for the worst presidential administration in US history by making 2000's vote about getting rid of all traces of the Clintons, is ours to reject.

UPDATE: I've been a bit harsh here, but the point is that the charge of bigotry can be made from either side of many disputes, though it seems to come fairly regularly from certain quarters. It is not a word that advances the exchange of ideas.

State Spending and Gender Reassignment Processes

No big hits today in the Boston Globe, so here is a collection of favorites:

Where is Al the Gore?
Certainly the most delicious story of the whole week is the revelation that Al Gore’s Tennessee home uses 13-15 times as much electricity as the typical home in the area, as well as significantly more natural gas (no analysis was given of Gore's private air travel or motorcades ). This revelation came less than 1 day after Gore received max celebrity treatment at the Academy Awards and an Oscar for his film claiming that mankind’s carbon emissions are causing global warming.

This is hypocrisy of such high quality that it delights any connoisseur! Too bad the Globe doesn’t seem to want to enjoy it. Why not? Is hypocrisy only fun for the Globe when yammering TV evangelists are caught with male hookers? Forget the Globe on this story. Begin here for a better start. Don’t miss this tidbit either.

A lot today about Deval Patrick’s budget, needless to say.

From the Globe’s main budget story:

To balance his budget, the new governor also tapped $225 million in one-time revenue by eliminating the state's annual $100 million payment to its rainy-day fund, drawing $75 million in interest from that fund, and taking $50 million from the state's tobacco fund.

Tobacco money proves to be fungible, just like the lottery revenue that was supossedly "dedicated" to higher education and local aid. What a surprise! The gullible have again been gulled.

Patrick had pledged to make the budget simple to understand, but several observers found the document more difficult to navigate than previous ones. The budget was available online, and in some spending categories, year-to-year comparisons were easy to see. But other spending categories were blended together, making comparisons difficult.

"This clearly is not a transparent budget," said Senate minority leader Richard R. Tisei of Wakefield. "What he did was just roll a whole bunch of line items into each other. There's no way to find out what happened to a particular program. If you're concerned about human services programs, for example, I guess you're supposed to take his word for it that within a big lump of money the funds will be directed to the populations that need it.

"It is a much less detailed budget than I've ever seen in the 22 years I've been in the building. Rather than providing more information, it provides less. That runs contrary to what the governor has pledged about opening up the process and letting people see what's inside."

From the Globe Editorial:

The elimination of special-interest line items is long overdue, especially in the courts, where practically every clerk and doorman has his own earmark. But it strikes directly at the heart of legislative prerogative -- a tradition House and Senate members are likely to feel strongly about relinquishing.

Which says to me that maintaining a 1-party state is the root cause of much of our woe.

And from Joan Vennochi’s column:

The new governor is still trying to charm and cajole his audience, whether he is addressing average voters or the Boston power elite. In Melrose, he could have framed his proposal crisply as us-vs.-them, reformer-vs.-status-quo, and challenged the audience to let Beacon Hill power brokers know where the people stand -- behind Deval Patrick. He could have gone to the chamber with a fresh speech, making the controversial tax policy the one and only issue of the morning, and challenging the business community to put aside its selfish interests for the good of the Commonwealth. Instead, he stuck with a warm and fuzzy campaign approach.

It makes you wonder. Does Patrick understand the entrenched power of the political and corporate establishment and what it takes to shake it?

The land of the status quo is cold, stubborn, and treacherous. It is inhabited by business executives who don't want to give up tax breaks and legislators who don't want to give up anything. They understand political hardball, not the politics of hope.

Don’t forget though, Joan, Deval will have the Globe Editorial Board behind him 100%, as always. What more could a Governor need?

Euphemism of the Day
Finally, here is an odd euphemism in a story concerning a transsexual government official in Florida:

Stanton, 48, confirmed last week that he is a transsexual. With a solid reputation as a forceful and energetic leader, he had hoped to keep his $140,000-a-year job as he underwent the gender reassignment process.

Gender reassignment process? Is our gender now assigned to us by physicians? Or has some PC nanny over at the Associated Press decided that using words like "surgery" is unfair to transsexuals?