The Bush administration has made it official: Over the weekend, Secretary of Education Rod Paige defended bilingual education (as a valid choice for local school boards)and came out against  the anti-bilingual-ed, English-immersion ballot initiative in Colorado. Isn't there any dissatisfaction on the right with Bush's Rove-driven endorsement of a discredited Carter-era ethnic-porkbarrelling educational fad? Just asking! ... 11:30 A.M.

During the Flytrap scandal, didn't Bill Clinton's defenders argue that the U.S. should be more like Europe, where they allegedly have a more sophisticated and tolerant attitude toward things like extramarital affairs? How, then, to explain this story, of the Swiss ambassador to Germany driven from his job when a tabloid published an apparently erroneous report (for which it has now apologized) that he ... cheated on his wife! 10:45 A.M.

Good Sebastian Mallaby column on stock options and how they facilitate out-of control CEO pay, which he tellingly contrasts with movie star pay, which is not out of control but rather negotiated at arm's-length with shrewd producers and studio execs. Unlike Ken Lay, Tom Hanks really is worth all those millions. (He can "open" a grim picture  like Road to Perdition.) ... Mallaby's only solution, however, is a vague, ambitious restructuring of corporate rules to insure that "the chief selectors of company directors are not the bosses but the shareholders." Shareholders formally choose directors now, don't they? What would Mallaby do differently? ... Meanwhile, has anyone commented on the obvious perverse consequence of Sen. John McCain's signature proposal  that

Top executives should be precluded from selling their own holdings of company stock while serving in that company. Executives should be allowed to exercise their options, but their net gain after tax should be held in company stock until 90 days after they leave the company.

Doesn't this create a highly undesirable incentive for competent executives who've actually improved their companies, and hence their companies' stock prices, to immediately quit in order to exercise their options? ...Yes, we want to discourage greedy CEOs from cashing in on temporary upward blips -- but that can be accomplished by simply requiring that options be held for a long time. ...P.S.: Would all President McCain's policy proposals be as half-baked as this one? ... 1:35 A.M.

Those Pakistani madrassas are still in business, reports WaPo. ... And why do we think that encouraging the Islamic schools to "modernize" -- by offering "computer classes" and making "the Internet available" to students -- will produce fewer potential Islamic terrrorists as opposed to potentially more effective, modernized Islamic terrorists, at least in the short run? 11:15 A.M.

Miscegenation -- an official trend: The Atlanta Journal Constitution has a seemingly important taboo-busting story on the increase in black women dating white men. The evidence of this trend is not only anecdotal -- AJC's John Blake says

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of black female/white male marriages remained relatively static between 1960 and 1980, increasing from 26,000 to 27,000. But by 2000, the number had jumped to 80,000.

Why the shift? Blake emphasizes the large percentage of black men who are off the dating scene because they're "in jail, or are murder victims." But isn't there another possible factor, something that happened in, say, the mid-90s, something like ...(the suspense must be killing you) ... welfare reform? It's not only that the hundreds of thousands of black women who are now working rather than on welfare  come into contact with non-black men at work, It's also that when you're working the virtues of pooling your income with a male earner are now far more obvious than in the days when that could cost you your AFDC check. If there aren't enough "marriageable" black men around -- and if too many of those who are around "know the numbers favor them so they have less incentive to treat a black woman well." -- then women expand their "options," as one African-American Web designer puts it:

"I'm not going to sit on a porch in a rocking chair, all alone at 80 years old because of color," says Wanda Dunn, a 37-year-old Stone Mountain Web designer.

One reaction to that sentiment: It's about time! Black-white miscegenation may have been slow to get off the ground, but once it gets started it seems likely to transform the national culture. ... The AJC touches on all the other obvious themes -- the diminishing-but-still-evident social opprobrium, male insecurity in the face of the college degrees and earning power of many black women, male complaints that black women are too status conscious. ... Two issues go unaddressed: 1) How will black men react when black women start getting all sorts of favorable publicity (in newspaper stories like this one, and advertising imagery) for going out with non-black men? Anger seeems one short-run possibility. 2) Then there is the final taboo issue -- black male sexuality. Fear of black male sexuality was the psychological engine of Jim Crow, Nicholas Lemann has argued. And respect for it is the unwritten explanation for a lot of the resistance to cross-race dating (betwen 1960 and 1980, for example).  I once asked a multi-degreed, accomplished black woman friend of mine (who dated whites) why so many other black women restricted their "options" to black men. She paused thoughtfully, stroked her chin, and said:

"I guess it's the sex."

Blake's story leaves the reader with the impression the biggest obstacle white men-seeking-miscegenation face is that they might not know what "P-funk, nappy hair and playing the dozens" mean -- that they lack an understanding of the black "experience" and "heritage."  That's what newspaper editors would like to think! ... Even so, Blake's story ("Could Mr. Right be White?") seems like a big advance. ... 1:30 P.M.

Malcolm Gladwell e-mails:

i was waiting for someone to write that! okay, here's my answer:

kausfiles is quite right. i was wrong, and susan love ought to feel vindicated. this is the perilous--and, of course, fun--part of writing about medicine. every now and again, scientists discover something new that turns everything we all thought we understood upside down.

7:32 P.M.

As Slate's  Emily Yoffe notes, the dramatic recent finding on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for women -- it was thought to decrease heart disease and increase breast cancer, but it turns out to increase both   -- was a victory for the New Agey celebrity Dr. Susan Love, who's been questioning HRT for years. It was also a victory for the pandering pols who placated the feminist lobby by funding the massive Women's Health Initiative, which included one of the seemingly decisive HRT studies -- and for the politicized Food and Drug Administration, which overruled its own advisory panel and ordered more studies before HRT could be sold as a way to prevent heart trouble. ... But there were losers too, and not just Wyeth, the maker of Prempro, a hormone replacement. It also looks as if the estimable Malcolm Gladwell was wrong when he attacked Dr. Love in what seemed at the time a devastating 1997 New Yorker article (available on Gladwell's Web site) with the subtitle "How Wrong is Dr. Susan Love?". Here are some Gladwell passages that appear somewhat embarrassing today (emphasis added):

There is another possible complication: estrogen does such a good job of fighting heart disease that most women who are on H.R.T. live substantially longer than women who aren't. ....

Most experts agree that, in the end, H.R.T. is probably linked to some increased breast-cancer risk. What all the questions suggest, though, is that the effect is probably not huge and is certainly nowhere close to cancelling out the benefits of estrogen in fighting heart disease. ...It is, unfortunately, very hard to convince most women of this fact.

Love may still have overestimated the importance of breast cancer relative to heart disease, as Gladwell contends. That turned out not to matter, since the HRT drugs were bad on both counts (avoiding the need to balance the risk of one disease against the other). Gladwell pretty clearly erred in denouncing Love's belief that the studies suggesting HRT decreased heart disease were vitiated by "selection bias" -- that is, they showed that people who took HRT were healthier, but it turned out that this was only because healthier people were the ones who chose to take HRT. ... Maybe Gladwell has an answer to all this, or maybe he frankly admits error. I've emailed him and will print any response I get. ... P.S.: The new profession Gladwell popularized in 1997, coolhunting, didn't work out so well either. A year ago, Ruth Shalit.busted coolhunting as a flop in Salonand Details. The New York Times, characteristically, discovered the same thing last week. Though, come to think of it, if the NYT is saying coolhunting isn't cool maybe it's cool again. ...  2:30 A.M.

Harmonic convergence of scandal: Arthur Andersen plus the Catholic Church!  All that's missing is Dr. Waksal. ... 1:00 A.M.

Thursday, July 11, 2002

Give one example of MWO's a determinedly dumb style. And as for ad hominem rhetorical style, what do you call trashing MWO without providing any back-up of its iniquities?  ...  Is it possible that you have no response because you are the one making nonsensical ad hominem accusations?  And I don't know about determinedly dumb but your posts are typically clueless and moronic.  ... You really are a c--t of the first order. [Ugly word masked--ed.]

 

Aha! Here's the point of the H______d Security department: Deep in the bill to establish the new agency is a provision that would allow a "flexible," and "contemporary" personnel managment system, "grounded in the principles of merit and fitness." Translation: They want to be able to fire people. WaPo, which gives the issue  extended coverage (this is what's really important in D.C.!.) reprints the slippery explanations of Tom Ridge, and other Bush officials, who go on about how they want to keep the "best of the civil service" rules, which pointedly don't seem to include the rules that preclude firings. Nice try! The government employee unions will not be fooled. ...

The administration is of course right to want to be able to fire H______d Security employees -- the balance throughout government is tilted way too far in the employees' direction now, and if the hindsight-driven investigations of pre-9/11 dot-nonconnecting showed anything it was that some people need firing. But if the ability to hire and fire is good for the H______d Security agency, why isn't it equally good for the Department of Defense, or Health and Human Services? ...

This is the sort of crucial legislative detail that the real H______d Security fight will be about, while the press reports on all the grander rhetorical positioning. In particular, Democrats (and Republicans from Northern Virginia) can be expected to resist "flexible" and "contemporary" labor provisions as if they were defending the Alamo, while doing everything to avoid drawing too much attention to the issue. Some things are more important than the fight against terrorism! ...Majority Leader Tom Daschle -- who seems to be trying to strangle this baby in its crib -- gave the following patriotic statement to WaPo on behalf of his fellow Democrats:

 "I think it's safe to say that there is unanimous opposition to the administration's proposal to circumvent the civil service laws of the country .... We can't do that."

Bush might benefit by keeping a spotlight on this issue, and on the screw-ups that merit firings. But his strategy, at the moment, is apparently to sweet-talk the proposed department's 170,000 workers while he sneaks civil-service reform past them. It's hard to believe this approach will work. ... P.S.: WaPo's story does contain get one genuinely patriotic, un-slippery quote, worth reprinting here:

 "I'm a union man, no question about it," said customs inspector Bill Ball, NTEU chapter president in Kansas City, Mo. "But you've got to put your priorities in place. If we lose our union protections for national security, so be it."

Here's to you, Bill Ball. Is that NTEU headquarters on the line? ...[How do you know "the balance .. is tilted way too far in the employees' direction" in government?--ed. I worked there.] ... Update: The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is behind the "secretive" group that is running issue ads attacking Bush. Now we know a big reason why. If there's anything AFSCME cares about more than the rules for firing government employees, I don't know what it is. It's certainly not corporate accounting and insider trading (the "issue" in the ads). ... More: AFSCME gave a list-topping $5.9 million in soft money  to the Democrats in the 2000 election cycle. And another $3.4 million so far in the current cycle. ... 9:50 P.M.

Das Gloat: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is entitled to a bit of schadenfreude, but generalizing from the U.S. accounting scandals  to the general inferiority of U.S.-style shareholder-oriented corporate governance seems a leap. ("Now it has been revealed that egotism practiced at the top under the catchphrase 'shareholder value' is worth less in macroeconomic terms, but also as far as the companies themselves are concerned ....") What's Germany's unemployment rate again? Oh, yes  -- 9.5 percent. [Thanks to kf reader A.E.]  ... Update: As an anti-Eurogloat measure,  Instapundit links to  this study (which seems to show that the U.S. has relatively honest corporate reports compared with those in other countries) and to a (non-free) David Ignatius story on a hearteningly large  French corporate scandal involving accounts that concealed a "chain of fraud and bribery."  Meanwhile, the Hauser Report argues that only the unemployment rate in West Germany should count.  ...  9:00 P.M.

Tuesday, July 9, 2002

France's Islam Problem: Chris Caldwell delivers by far the best American article I've seen on France's Islam problem, which includes the growth of an American-style underclass of Muslim immigrants. ("Fifty percent of France's unemployed are Muslims.") Among other points--this isn't a Skipper^TM!--1) Caldwell makes it clear why it's not crazy or racist for French voters to conclude (as 63 percent concluded in one poll two years ago) that there are "too many Arabs" in the country. Islam, unlike Catholicism, Judaism, etc, has "confounded every governmental attempt to assimiliate it into Frances' sternly secular order;" 2) Caldwell offers yet more evidence of the connection between welfare and terrorism -- French welfare subsidizes a macho Arab ghetto culture that supplies Islamic fundamentalism with angry young men; 3) Saudi Arabia subsidizes the most important Muslim organization, extreme in its religious conservatism; 4) "Of the country's 230 major imams, none is French." 5) France is following America's steps in dealing with its underclass, as predicted by political scientist Larry Mead. The French have just discovered affirmative action, for example....Caldwell doesn't offer much of a solution, and seems to argue that France's secular order, in which religion is kicked out of the "public square," is vulnerable because it can't be defended with the same ardor as America's version of church/state separation, in which public life is permeated by religion. ... But what about welfare reform? Just a thought! ... 2:00 A.M.

A group of Scott Shuger's friends joined his widow and daughter Saturday evening to scatter his ashes in the Pacific Ocean, off his favorite diving spot. Those present included several of his friends from the women's self-defense center where he'd worked -- a whole part of Scott's life I hadn't known about. We watched in silence as the rose petals and Scott's remains floated away. Some dolphins jumped out of the sea. We drank some German beer in his honor, then headed home. 12:30 A.M.

Monday, July 8, 2002

Pssst: Kausfiles now haslinks --a traditional blogger feature! ... They're all the way at the bottom of this page, near the center of the earth. ... 8:00 P.M.

37 is a lot of percentage points. So why does Bush need to appease various interest groups and voting blocs as if he had only a 3 point lead? ... [Link via Drudge ] 3:45 P.M.

Violence, right or left? Kf friend J.R. emails with a not-atypical reaction to my earlier, incomplete discussion of left-wing violence:

    Seems to me the violence in American politics -- incipient and actual -- has been mainly on the right for most of the last three decades.

 

    Whatever else one says about the left -- if you can find them -- they aren't the ones with the guns.

 

Coulter: So for the Today show to be opening three days in a row, Ronald Reagan was an airhead, I'm sorry, that's dishonest.

Couric: It was one day. And also, just for your information it, was one day.

Coulter: No, you said it one day. Matt Lauer said it another day.

Couric: No, it was just one day, and we'll get the transcripts for you

Let's go to NEXIS! Answer: Two days, three times (plus once on "Later Today"). Couric said it on Sept. 27, 1999. The next day, as charged, Lauer opened the show by talking about "the author's assertion that Reagan was a great president but an airhead." NBC's Jamie Gangel repeated the "airhead" charge without the "apparent" later that day in a Today interview with ex-President George H.W. Bush.  The winner: Coulter on points. She was closer to the truth than Couric, who picked this particular fact fight and was wrong. ... The account in Coulter's book (which doesn't make the "three days" charge) appears to be completely accurate -- though whether Today was guilty of dishonest liberal bias or dishonest ratings-grubbing hype is a call you, the reader, can make. [Who fed this to you? Coulter?--ed. Senior officials in the Coulter camp. But it checked out.] 1:30 A.M.

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