The wrong man for the Court of Appeals

Judicial Activist

In 2005, serial murderer and rapist Michael Ross found an unlikely sympathizer -- federal judge Robert Chatigny, who called Ross's sexual sadism a mitigating factor in his case. He threatened and berated Ross's lawyer into further postponing his death sentence against this client's own wishes. Judge Chatigny sits before the Senate Judiciary Committee today as President Obama's nominee to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

(HT: Power Line)

Cross-cultural studies: Non-citizens in Mexico

Open borders for thee but not for me.

Michelle Malkin:

– The Mexican government will bar foreigners if they upset “the equilibrium of the national demographics.” How’s that for racial and ethnic profiling?

– If outsiders do not enhance the country’s “economic or national interests” or are “not found to be physically or mentally healthy,” they are not welcome. Neither are those who show “contempt against national sovereignty or security.” They must not be economic burdens on society and must have clean criminal histories. Those seeking to obtain Mexican citizenship must show a birth certificate, provide a bank statement proving economic independence, pass an exam and prove they can provide their own health care.

Ace of Spades has some interesting observations.

Follow the discussion on Memeorandum.

UPDATE: Jammie Wearing Fool shows why Arizona should ignore the posturing of the Mexican government:

'Migrants in Mexico are Facing a Major Human Rights Crisis'

Where reporters get their stories

First Discredit, Then Sue

This is the best reporting the Times has done so far in its coverage of the pope's "scandal." They are revealing the fact that they uncritically passed along a report straight from the most interested party imaginable, Anderson. In doing so, they created the perfect political atmosphere for him to proceed with his case against the Vatican and his various other lawsuits against the Church.

In case there's any doubt about how much Anderson stands to gain from discrediting the Church, the article provides some detail about how much he's personally benefited from suing the Church in the past:

He will not say how much he has made from his pursuit of the church (he says he does not know). But he insists that the cases, which number more than a thousand (he says he has not counted), have never been about the money.

Yet in 2002, he estimated that he had at that point won more than $60 million in settlements from Catholic dioceses, and he acknowledges that in the most complicated cases, he may receive as much as 40 percent of a settlement or judgment.

Clinton, politics, and the exploitation of death

Byron York reminds us of the political calculation that guided Bill Clinton's response to the OKC terror attack:

How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain

It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted. In the months after the bombing, Clinton regained the upper hand over Republicans, eventually winning battles over issues far removed from the attack. The next year, 1996, he went on to re-election. None of that might have happened had Clinton, along with Morris, not found a way to wring as much political advantage as possible out of the deaths in Oklahoma City. And that is the story you're not hearing in all the anniversary discussions.

The cynical exploitation of tragedy was one of the defining characteristics of the Clinton style. It was not just OKC.

The White House blamed Vince Foster's suicide on those who demanded answers to Travelgate and Waco. Normal politics and vigorous journalism became a "bloodsport" that drove good men to their graves.

Later, Clinton happily poured fuel on the fire when the press created a hysteria over racially-motivated church burnings. (Michael Fumento's great work demonstrated that the MSM got almost everything wrong on this story.)


Clinton's sank to his lowest when he dragged out his dead mother to explain away the Lincoln Bedroom fundraising scandal:

We've had a lot of work going on in Washington and we've had, both of us had lost a parent, and we just hadn't kept in touch with people like we should have.

As Ann Coulter put it:

Classic Clinton. He needed to start selling the Lincoln Bedroom because both he and Hillary had 'lost a parent" that year.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

An interesting sidelight-- Howard Kurtz takes time out from his press critic gig to spin for Clinton. He wrote this as part of his "reporting" in York's piece:

Okay, but the fact that a political adviser offered political advice doesn't mean the president was thinking just about his poll numbers. Keep in mind that 168 people had just died. Was George W. Bush thinking only about his poll numbers with his aggressive response to 9/11?

I like how he dismisses the evidence that York presents and equates it to the hypothetical calculations of Bush after 9/11. York cites the memo Dick Morris wrote for Clinton. Where is the Rove memo explaining how Republicans could tie Democrats to bin Laden? Until Kurtz produces said document, he looks like nothing more than a dishonest partisan.

I've Seen Worse---But Not Lately!

by The Last Hollywood Star

It's not much comfort to me as a lifelong Pirate fan to recall that I have seen worse major league baseball than the current edition of the Buccos.

I lived in Seattle during the Mariners' first years 1977-1986 and the team was more painful to watch. During that ten year period the M's average winning percentage was about .400

The M's had some good players like Leon Roberts and Richie Zisk. In 1982, Hall of Famer Gaylor Perry had a cup of coffee with the Mariners. Perry's stop over was long enough for him to record his 300th career victory. I still have my ticket stub.

Most Mariner players however were rejects with limited skills. A good example is one-time Bucco Mario Mendoza whose batting ineptitude created the term "Mendoza Line," a reference to hitting at least .200

The M's bumbling play drove another Hall of Famer, manager Dick Williams, out of baseball. After managing the team in 1986, 1987 and half a season in 1988, Williams left baseball for good.

A more insurmountable problem for Seattle baseball fans than the Mariners' poor play was the team's venue, the awful Kingdom.

On beautiful Pacific Northwest summer evenings, when the sun didn't set until 10:00 PM, a fan's choice was to enjoy the magnificence of Puget Sound, the view of Mt. Rainer or pay to enter the gloomy, empty Kingdom to watch the M's lose again.

For most of the Mariners' first 18 years, their poor play (they didn't have a winning season until 1991) combined with the Kingdome's design, led to poor attendance. Most games I saw had less than 5,000 people.

At one point the Mariners covered "the Tombs" right-center field seats in the upper decks in to make the stadium feel "less empty". Additionally, the Kingdome's acoustics created problems for stadium announcers who had to deal with significant echo issues.

At least Pirate fans don't have to worry about ambiance when they go to PNC Park. While the Kingdom was the dreariest place I have ever watched baseball (with Three Rivers Stadium not far behind), PNC is at the other end of spectrum. Despite the Pirates' struggles, a game at PNC is always a good way to spend time.

Of floppy disks and Dead Sea scrolls

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

A decade later in the 1980s I was in high school making backups of the hard drive of my PC onto 5-¼-inch floppy disks. I thought that because digital copies were “perfect,” and I could make perfect copies of perfect copies, I couldn’t lose my data, except by accident. I continued to believe that until years later in college, when I tried to restore my backup of 70 floppy disks onto a new PC. To my dismay, I discovered that I had lost the floppy disk containing the backup program itself, and thus could not restore my data. Some investigation revealed that the company that made the software had long since gone out of business. Requests on electronic bulletin board systems and searches on Usenet turned up nothing useful. Although all of the data on them may have survived, my disks were useless because of the proprietary encoding scheme used by my backup program.

The Dead Sea scrolls, made out of still-readable parchment and papyrus, are believed to have been created more than 2,000 years ago. Yet my barely 10-year-old digital floppy disks were essentially lost. I was furious! How had the shiny new world of digital data, which I had been taught was so superior to the old “analog” world, failed me? I wondered: Had I had simply misplaced my faith, or was I missing something?

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Many (most?) of us have given up writing messages on paper, instead adopting electronic formats, and have exchanged film-based photographic cameras for digital ones. Will those precious family photographs and letters—that is, email messages—created today survive for future generations, or will they suffer a sad fate like my backup floppy disks? It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

Daryl Gates , RIP

The L. A. Times does its usual sloppy and biased job. Patterico, as he often does, helps us out by setiing them straight.

L.A. Times Editors Spit on Gates’s Memory and Botch the Facts in the Process

The LAPD officer who writes as Jack Dunphy offers a view from inside the force.

The Los Angeles Times Smears Memory of Former LAPD Chief Gates

A couple of old posts are relevent here.

LAPD

Worse than Jayson Blair

A classic and well-deserved putdown of FNC's biggest on-going embarrassment

Tea Party Leader Blasts Geraldo Rivera For Airing Anti-Tea Party ‘Hit Pieces’

“You seem to be attacking me,” Rivera finally astutely noted. That prompted Williams to actually attack Rivera, personally: “you’re Geraldo Rivera; William Randolph Hearst winces at some of the work you do.”

Not to be missed

A Long Reply to the Epistemic Closureites

God bless Texas

It's San Jacinto Day

Reading the tea leaves at CIA

Powerline gets an assessment from a former case officer:

On the departure of Stephen Kappes

The retirement of Steve Kappes, the CIA's number two, is significant because he represented the status quo at the CIA. He was a fierce defender of CIA bureaucracy.

Kappes apparently had some responsibility for the operation which resulted in the suicide bomb attack at Khost. That catastrophe "helped push Kappes out the door." If this is true, then the disaster Khost may have been preventable.

According to this Newsweek story from 2006, one of the issues between Porter Goss and Kappes was the bureaucracy's refusal to hold officers accountable for grievous failures in operational security. Goss won the battle but the bureaucrats won the war when the director resigned and Kappes came back as Hayden's #2.

Tea parties: not so fringy after all

Gee, even the NY Times is catching on:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll .

(HT:JWF)


The Times has a way to go, though. Don Surber looks at some of the poll results that The Paper of Record skipped over:

NYT hides who the Tea Partiers really are

Media junk food

ESPN and other sports outlets spend hours discussing the NFL draft. Mel Kiper and Todd McShay are on the air year round discussing which team will draft this player, which team should take that one.

The only problem is that these draft gurus are not very accurate.

Kiper the klown: our annual mock-draft scorecard!

Generally speaking, the most well known mock drafters get just 1 in 4 first round selections correct! They generally get one or two picks correct in the second half of the first round, and zero picks correct in any round beyond the first.

Tea parties and the MSM: Bob Dylan nailed it decades ago

In the movie Don't Look Back, the cameras catch Bob Dylan taunting a reporter from Time magazine:

Do you really care about what you say? I know more about what you do than you'll ever know about me.

Much the same could be said about the people who attend the Tea Parties. They baffle the carefully cocooned reporters who venture out to cover them. But they are neither baffled nor impressed by the "elite" journalists from Time or CNN. Internet-fueled press criticism and fact-checking have stripped away the mystique of the MSM. It has rebalanced the information flow.

Actually, it may tilted the advantage toward Tea Parties and other political insurgents.

Dylan again:

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Scott Shane of the New York Times on CSPAN2 September 27, 2007:

"I'm a jounalist whose job it is to explain to others things he doesn't understand himself."

"A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day."

Cathy Seipp from 2004:

One of the election lessons for Democrats is that while the Left doesn't understand the Right, the Right can't help but understand the Left, because the Left is in charge of pop culture. Urban blue staters can go their entire lives happily innocent of the world of church socials and duck hunting and Boy Scout meetings, but small-town red staters are exposed to big-city blue-state values every time they turn on the TV.

This strikes me as odd

What Crisis?
Pulitzers pass over financial reporting

If you had to pick a single story that has shaped our recent times, it would be the financial crisis and the economic collapse that was its result. Once-august brokerages and banks have shuttered, unemployment and foreclosure rates are sky high, and debt-ridden states and nation states threaten further disruption.

This year, no Pulitzer winner explored these topics. And last year it was the same.

Understanding the electorate

Steve Sailer has a couple of interesting discussions that look at the voting public in new ways:

Politics of Cable Network Audiences

The Politics of Sports Fans

Good read

The Five-Pound Butterfly Revisited

Several years ago, the WSJ wrote about the tendency of many companies to do hiring based on a long string of highly-specific (and excessively-specific) requirements. One person interviewed remarked that “Companies are looking for a five-pound butterfly. Not finding them doesn’t mean there is a shortage of butterflies.”

Since that article was written, the five-pound butterfly effect has probably gotten worse rather than better in the business world. But hunting for five-pound butterflies also seems to be increasingly affecting other areas of life, including college admissions and the search for love and marriage.

An almost unbearable tragedy

President of Poland Killed in Plane Crash in Russia

I agree wholeheartedly with Michelle Malkin:

Prayers for Poland

As Cynthia Yockey reminds us the Polish national anthem is “Poland Is Not Yet Lost”. Fitting for a redoubtable people.

Vern Law: Cy Young Award Winner, 1960

by The Last Hollywood Star


On Thursday, I went to PNC Park to watch the Pirate-Los Angeles Dodger game but also to get Vern Law’s autograph.

Yesterday was one of the regularly scheduled Alumni Autograph Days at PNC. Law, Rich Reuschel and Manny Sanguillen were all there chatting with a long line of fans and signing away.

Law is the last Major Leaguer to pitch 18 innings in a game. One evening way back in 1955 Law, on two days rest, not only pitched the equivalent of two full games against the Milwaukee Braves, he allowed only nine hits while striking out 12. Bob Friend picked up the win in the 19th.

Four days later, Law pitched 13 more innings against the Cincinnati Reds, this time picking up the win. The Reds game brought Law’s four day total to 31 innings or three and a half full games.

When I approached Law, I reminded him of his famous game against the Braves and suggested that 18 innings is more than most pitchers today register in any three consecutive starts. Or, for that matter, any three straight starts by three different pitchers from the same team.

And by the end of the afternoon that was the case with the Pirates.

During the Bucs three game series with the Dodgers, Zach Duke threw five innings; Ross Olendorf, five and Paul Maholm, six.

Combined line for the three days: 16IP, 17H-8ER, 6SO, 5BB, ERA 4.50

Even in this era of watered down standards, that’s sub-par. And if it’s representative of what Pirate pitching will be for the season, it will be a long year.

The (conservative) case for financial reform

Matthew Continetti:

Because the Republicans have paid no cost for opposing this president, they may be tempted to stand athwart any financial reform bill that comes up for a vote, no matter how sensible some of its ideas may be. That would be misguided. The public may not like the solutions the Democrats have put forward to address America's problems, but that does not mean it suddenly has fallen in love with Vikram Pandit, Jamie Dimon, and Lloyd Blankfein.

When Joe Six Pack reads the paper, he learns about a group of insiders at one end of the DC-NYC megalopolis bailing out insiders at the other end. He has little affection for both. If the GOP is serious about becoming the party of the people, serious about shifting power from Washington and New York, serious about unleashing competition and favoring the innovator over the incumbent, why not back free-market measures against an entrenched financial elite?

Arnold Kling:

Big banks are bad for free markets. Far from being engines of free enterprise, they are conducive to what might be called “crony capitalism,” “corporatism,” or, in Jonah Goldberg’s provocative phrase, “liberal fascism.” There is a free-market case for breaking up large financial institutions: that our big banks are the product, not of economics, but of politics.

Saving CNN

Politico took a look at the ratings and thought the guys at the most trusted name in news could use a little help:

How to fix CNN

The future of CNN, never exactly bright the past couple of years, suddenly looked dire this week when ratings came out showing a 40 percent decline in prime-time viewers since 2009.

Jon Klein, the network's president, has consistently defended its down-the-middle news strategy, despite the increasingly large ratings leads opened up by MSNBC and particularly Fox, with their ideological slants and big personalities.

So is it time for a radical rethinking of “the most trusted name in news,” the network of Larry King Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown and Wolf Blitzer? We asked a dozen or so prominent media watchers, former industry executives and CNN personalities for their recommendations.

Both Jay Rosen and Michael Hirschorn posted longer discussions of the question on their websites.

What CNN Should Do With Itself in Prime-Time
A media beat reporter asked me if I had any advice for CNN about what to do in prime-time. Just so happens I do. Ditch the View from Nowhere but don't go aping your rivals. Here's my alt line-up for CNN from 7 to 11 pm.


Don't Cry for CNN
Thirty years ago, CNN, now in decline, was as revolutionary as Google. It had a pretty good run.

The blogger Spook86 at In from the Cold also had an astute post that raised a couple of relevant points not made by Calderone’s panel.


Like most formerly great organizations, CNN’s Big Problem grows out of a bunch of smaller problems.

1. It has rejected or forgotten some of the things that made it great in the first place.

2. At the same time, it clings to useless artifacts of its glory days.

3. It has been slow to cope with changes in the external environment (technology, competitors, demographics). This may be the inevitable consequence of being the market leader: there is no where to go but down. As I’ve argued before, outside changes occur more rapidly than organizations can transform themselves or even understand what is happening outside their office walls.


4. The people who lead CNN are woefully out of touch with their customers (current, former, and potential) and how those customers perceive their product.

Hirschorn reminds us of what CNN once represented:

it was, in terms of cultural impact, the Google of its day. Its gonzo “fluid news” style, low-cost methods, and disdain for the woolly orthodoxies of traditional TV news- gathering terrified the big three, and attracted their most forward-thinking journos.

Spook86 makes the important point that this broadcast style grew out of a new business model and it was driven by the personnel strategy of that business model.

When the cable network made its debut 30 years ago, it offered extended newscasts in prime time and even late night. If there was breaking news, CNN was inevitably on top of it, and stayed with the story for hours (or days) on end.

And more importantly, the network generally played it straight. Back in those days, most of the anchors and producers were graduates of local stations, more concerned about getting the story on the air than providing a particular a particular slant or perspective. The network also recognized that some outlets could do a better job in covering a story and occasionally carried newscasts or special reports from its local affiliates.

Now CNN uses the same obsolete model that has failed at CBS, ABC, and NBC. The anchor as star attraction just does not seem to work for anybody any more. Not for CBS with Katie Couric and not for CNN with Anderson Cooper, Rick Sanchez, et. al.

Spook86 thinks the problem started with the first Gulf War (usually seen as the start of CNN’s glory days):

But all of that changed with the first Gulf War, when CNN's round-the-clock coverage was a media sensation. With critical acclaim (and a bigger audience), the cable news outlet began acting like the rest of the MSM. Many of the original anchors and reporters were replaced by talent that previously worked for the broadcast networks. And the long slide began.

The Gulf War had another deleterious effect on CNN’s mindset. They fell in love with and then became addicted to “LIVE--Breaking News” and real time on-the-scene reporting. They tried to cover everything the way they “covered” Baghdad the first night the bombs fell.

Unfortunately for CNN, most stories do not demand that sort of treatment and in many cases it is counterproductive. The technology is expensive (driving up the CNN’s costs) while the resulting stories are often disjointed, devoid of background and context, and plagued by technical glitches that annoy any sentient creature who actually cares about the matter under discussion.

(The addiction to “Live!” Real Time Reporting left CNN vulnerable to opportunistic infections such as Twitter Fever. Why does the “most trusted name in news” waste its viewer’s time with Fabgrl98’s 140 character effusions on the economic consequences of cap-and-trade?)

Worst of all, the audience is unimpressed. The more CNN strove for immediacy and spotlighted their commitment to journalism, the more viewers fled to its talk radio competition (FNC and MSNBC) with their canned talking points.

CNN probably blames the audience for rejecting quality journalism. Hirschorn explains why CNN is wrong:

In an era when news flows like water--available everywhere, all the time, instantly--a network devoted to providing headlines topped with a touch of analysis no longer seems quite so useful. If anything, sitting down for 22 minutes to watch a middlebrow mix of politics and weather that’s too proud to dabble more than passingly in the latest Hollywood crack-whoredom seems … inefficient. What was very urgent in 1980 or on 9/11 no longer seems crucial when we’re drowning in news. CNN’s decline may be, in Wall Street analyst-speak, secular as opposed to cyclical.

The Web makes CNN look foolish as it covers a breaking story. By the time a story is an hour old, a reader can learn more by clicking her mouse than she can from the breathless irriatated gushing droning snarky ignorant knowing monologues of CampbellAndersonWolfRickJohn.

On a normal newsday, the audience already knows what CNN strives to tell them. They’ve been reading about it since noon. At least Fox and MSNBC offer more than an abbreviated recapitulation; amid the flood of partisan talking points there is a dollop of smart commentary. CNN seems constitutionally afraid of smart partisans so their commentators tend toward the Brooksianglib, boring, and ill-informed or the Carvillianclownish, irritating, and unthinking.

I actually think CNN could rise again. There is a substantial audience for non-fiction television that currently ignores the news channels. Networks like National Geographic, The History Channel, The Military Channel, A&E, manage to attract an audience interested in factual stories and biographies. CNN could try to become their television news source.

CNN’s biggest millstone lies within their corporate headquarters. As with most companies, the men who must solve the problems are the same ones who created them. No surprise that success is rare.

Hirschorn:

But it’s always easy to pontificate when you’re not weighed down by decades of process, staff, relationships, and cash flow. Would you want to tell Larry King it’s time to retire?

Exactly.

Add to that the problem of convincing a skeptical, information saturated audience that CNN really is worthy of their time and trust.


Small changes are not going to help CNN. Big, sweeping changes cause too much pain.

Sounds like a recipe for "catastrophic failure" as described by Cohen and Gooch.

Catastrophic failure produces an eerie calm at the highest levels of an organization-- a calm which grows out of disbelief, helplessness, and cognitive overload. Because of this, the end is no fiery Gotterdammerung. Instead, there is resignation and surrender to the inevitable.

The Times and the Pope

The End of History and the Last Pope

For an elite drunk on its own enlightenment, the ends will always justify the means against religion. So what, Keller figured, if my reporters could only come up with straining, half-baked pieces that cast fragments of information about Benedict in the worst possible light? Let's run them anyways, so that the forces of tolerance can triumph over the forces of absolutism!

And if it turns out that the forces of tolerance are largely responsible for mishandling these abuse cases (the ousted homosexual Archbishop Rembert Weakland, the subject of flattering profiles over the years in the New Yorker and New York Times, is the person most responsible for dereliction in the Milwaukee case the Times claims to find so outrageous), well, let's blame it on Benedict anyways. He could have done more!

Too big to fail means big enough to bully

Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan on the Dole

How the bank puts politicians and taxpayers over a barrel

It's a must read.

What a difference a -D makes

Red States has an almost unbelievable post:

The Left-Wing World is Upside Down

Tim Russo was charged with and convicted of being a felony sex offender, charged with importuning (a fancy way of soliciting sex with a minor), attempted disseminating matter harmful to a juvenile, and possessing criminal tools.

Yeah one little detail — how could they ever have forgotten to put that in. But it’s okay. Russo wants everyone to know he did not have to register as a child predator. Seriously.

So because he did not have to register as a child predator, it is okay now? It is okay to serve in elected office?

Funny thing, Arianna was not nearly this forgiving when she had Mark Foley in her sights.

UPDATE: [4-8-10] Excitable Andy actually gave this guy Quote of the Day honors for a piece Pope-bashing blather.

News flash: The Times gets sloppy and shows its bias

The Pope, the Scandal, and the Crib Notes for Journalism 101

But in trying to undercut the moral witness of the pope by suggesting that as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he was too forgiving of the monstrous Fr. Murphy, Goodstein committed errors of fact, interpretation, context, and journalistic procedure that together make nonsense of any claim to objectivity on the part of the New York Times.

Here (for the benefit of Maureen Dowd and others who have forgotten Journalism 101) are some of the ways that Goodstein and her editors botched the "Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys" story

He is Risen

This passage is from Martin Bell's remarkable little book The Way of the Wolf: The Gospel in New Images.

God raised Jesus from the dead to the end that we should be clear-once and for all-that there is nothing more important than being human. Our lives have eternal significance. And no one-absolutely no one-is expendable.

Colored Eggs

Some human beings are fortunate enough to be able to color eggs on Easter. If you have a pair of hands to hold the eggs, or if you are fortunate enough to be able to see the brilliant colors, then you are twice blessed.

This Easter some of us cannot hold the eggs, others of us cannot see the colors, many of us are unable to move at all and so it will be necessary to color the eggs in our hearts.

This Easter there is a hydrocephalic child lying very still in a hospital bed nearby with a head the size of his pillow and vacant, unmoving eyes, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs in his heart, and so God will have to color eggs for him.

And God will color eggs for him. You can bet your life and the life of the created universe on that.

At the cross of Calvary God reconsecrated and sanctified wood and nails and absurdity and helplessness to be continuing vehicles of his love. And then he simply raised Jesus from the dead. And they both went home and colored eggs.

Another victory for justice

Pressler Lawsuit Settled

Duke has settled its lawsuit with former lacrosse coach Mike Pressler. Having tried (and failed) to get the case thrown out before discovery, the University had little choice--I can't imagine the discovery in this case would have been pleasant.

More Frum Fall-out

Odious Conservatives

A major proposition that I advance in a book that will be published later this month, After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery, is that there exists an odious subgroup of conservatives who since the beginning of the conservative movement have made their way to prominence in the mainstream media by a cheap act. They disparage with great melodrama other conservatives. Liberals love it -- and for a while love the disparagers. In the late 1990s Arianna Huffington exploited this instrument of self-promotion brazenly. For several years David Frum has been doing it haltingly, even timorously. However, in the last two weeks he has been pulling a Huffington with unusual boldness.

First he smeared Sean Hannity. Then he reproached conservative opponents of the Democrats' healthcare monstrosity. Now he is claiming martyrdom at the hands of Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that housed him as a resident fellow for seven years, reportedly at a salary of $100,000 a year. Brooks was willing to let him stay on at AEI but without a salary. Very theatrically Frum(p) quit, and the Liberals pronounced him a great man. My thesis is again vindicated, and you will understand my satisfaction in reporting that in Hangover I have embalmed Frum(p) as a perfect example of the conservative hustler, manipulating Liberal approval. I call his type the Reformed Conservatives (RCs).

Frum’s Firing


By now, many Chronicles readers have no doubt heard that David Frum was fired from his cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute, following an online column claiming that the passage of Obamacare was the GOP’s “Waterloo,” which could have been avoided if the GOP had been more willing to negotiate with Obama. Frum is now charging that AEI tossed him because it was responding to pressure from its donors, a charge eminent AEI scholar Charles Murray has denounced at National Review Online as “despicable,” since it is unsupported by evidence and is calculated to appeal to the leftist media. But if Murray is only now discovering the nature of Frum, he has not been paying attention.

From the beginning, the Canadian carpetbagger has sought to climb the greasy pole by attacking those on his right, in ways designed to curry favor with the left. As an undergraduate at Yale, he joined leftists at Yale in urging the university to take control of the Yale Literary Magazine, then run by future Chronicles editor Andrei Navrozov.