by JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, April 7, 2005 4:00 P.M. EDT

The Fat Lady Warms Up
It's almost over. "The special prosecutor investigating whether Bush administration officials illegally revealed the identity of a covert CIA operative says he finished his investigation months ago, except for questioning two reporters who have refused to testify," reports the Washington Post, citing a March 22 court filing by the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald:

Legal experts and sources close to the case also speculated yesterday that Fitzgerald is not likely to seek an indictment for the crime he originally set out to investigate: whether a government official knowingly exposed a covert officer.

So where's the outrage from Josh Marshall, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, David Corn and the others who on Joe Wilson's say-so worked themselves up into such a lather a year and a half ago, over the "unpatriotic" administration officials who had "jeopardized national security" by "outing" a "secret agent"? These guys have all gone silent--though sadly, only on this subject.

News organizations, meanwhile, are outraged about Fitzgerald's efforts to compel testimony from reporters Judith Miller and Matt Cooper. Reports the Post:

That special prosecutor's characterization of his efforts led to indignation among press advocates who learned of the filing yesterday. They said it bolsters their suspicion that Fitzgerald has put two journalists in jeopardy of incarceration though he may not have sufficient evidence to indict someone for the felony he was appointed to investigate.

We share that indignation, but then we've been arguing from the start that there probably wasn't a crime here. In contrast, many news organizations are culpable for hyping this story, whether out of partisanship or lust for a scandal story.

The Post notes that Fitzgerald may "seek to charge a government official with committing perjury by giving conflicting information to prosecutors." News organizations, however, won't be charged. It isn't illegal to give conflicting information to the public.

Saddam Hussein, Couch Potato
The New York Times notes the most wonderful detail of the naming of Jalal Talabani as the new president of Iraq:

Bekhtiyar Amin, the human rights minister and a Kurd, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Hussein and 11 of his top aides watched Wednesday's proceedings, held in the fortified Green Zone, on a television in their detention center near the Baghdad airport. The idea to provide Mr. Hussein with a television for the occasion was taken to Mr. Amin by Kosrat Rasoul, a top official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish party that Mr. Talabani founded, Mr. Amin said.

"We want them to know that they are not presidents or ministers or anything other than prisoners," Mr. Amin said. "Their time is over."

Those Middle Easterners are certainly experts in the art of humiliation. Meanwhile, Voice of America reports that Talabani and his vice presidents have named Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, as prime minister, as expected.

Incredibly, there are still people who insist that the liberation of Iraq is a failure.

Giving Bush the Business
Yoshi Tsurumi, a professor of international business at New York's Baruch College, taught at Harvard business school back in the 1970s, and one of his students was a young man named George W. Bush. Now Tsurumi has penned a hilarious rant for the Harvard Crimson in which he blasts his former student:

In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America's business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.

Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master's of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America's business education. . . .

Business education has also produced former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and other MBAs behind the malfeasances of Tyco, HealthSouth, Haliburton, AIG, and WorldCom. Many executives of corporate America who hold MBAs have also been engaged in the unethical acts of raiding their corporate treasuries at the expense of employees and stockholders.

Sounds as though Tsurumi didn't do a very good job of teaching ethics. Even more hilarious is Tsurumi's conclusion:

To justify the robber baron culture, America's business educators and economists falsely cite their demigod of laissez-faire market economics, Adam Smith. Little do they know that Adam Smith in fact scathingly castigated Bush's type of government: business collusion and unfair taxes, Wal-Mart's exploitations of labor and communities, and robber barons' hubris.

Who knew they even had Wal-Marts in 18th-century Scotland? If this reflects the quality of the education George W. Bush got at Harvard Business School, it's little wonder he was never as successful as a businessman as he's been as a politician.

Mysteries of the Times
Roger Cohen of the New York Times' Paris edition tells a moving story about how the young man who was to become Pope John Paul II saved the life of Edith Zierer, who became Cohen's grandmother-in-law, in 1945 after Edith, then 13, had been liberated from a Nazi camp in Poland:

In a corner of the [train] station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.

Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, "very good looking," as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to the girl to be a priest. "Why are you here?" he asked. "What are you doing?"

Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.

The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again, the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese. . . .

"Try to stand," the man said. Edith tried--and failed. The man carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak, and set about making a small fire.

His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla. . . .

I do not know what moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl.

When the New York Times proper republished Cohen's story, it changed that last sentence: "What moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl cannot be known" (emphasis ours).

Hmm, could it have been his religious faith?

Peeved About the Pope
The (Madison) Wisconsin State Journal reports on one of the pettier reactions to the pope's death:

A Madison secular organization is protesting Gov. Jim Doyle's order to fly flags at half-staff at public buildings all week to remember Pope John Paul II.

The gesture "appears like an endorsement of Roman Catholicism over other religious viewpoints," said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Gaylor said her organization would have looked the other way if the order had been for just Friday--the day of the pope's funeral--instead of all week.

"This seems excessive," she said. "Not everyone in the country is Roman Catholic, and (the pope's) not even American."

Is Gaylor questioning the pope's patriotism?

Pope Ursine II

"An Awful Void Is Left After John Paul II"--headline, New York Sun, April 6

"Two Young Cubs Can Fill the Void"--headline, New York Sun, April 6

What Would We Do Without U.S. Gay Catholics?
"U.S. Gay Catholics Say 'No Sex' Doctrine Tough to Follow"--headline, Reuters, April 7

Mixed-Up Kid
The Age, a Melbourne, Australia, newspaper, reports on what the headline calls a "foetus mix-up":

A mix-up that led to a stillborn baby being sent away and washed with dirty linen would not happen again, a Melbourne hospital said today.

A Melbourne newspaper reported today that the stillborn foetus, delivered at the Royal Women's Hospital, was accidentally placed in the hospital laundry system.

It was sent to Ballarat where it was washed and dried before it was discovered by laundry staff.

The hospital's medical director Professor Jeremy Oats told The Age Online the incident happened a week ago. . . .

"We alerted the family immediately when we realised the foetus was missing, alerted the laundry service and launched a major search.

"The family was greatly distressed."

The baby had died in the uterus at 18 weeks but the mother delivered it naturally, with its surviving non-identical twin, at 32 weeks.

And the Age doesn't even answer the obvious question: Was the twin a baby or a fetus?

NASA Has No Sense of Humor
"Shuttle Rollout Delayed by Crack"--headline, BBC Web site, April 6

What Would Kids Do Without Experts?
"Kids Need Hope, Expert Says"--headline, Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.), April 7

Judge Cummings Respectfully Dissents

"Court: There's No Constitutional Right to a Lap Dance"--headline, Associated Press, April 5

"mr youse needn't be so spry
 concernin questions arty

"each has his tastes but as for i
 i likes a certain party

"gimme the he-man's solid bliss
 for youse ideas i'll match youse

"a pretty girl who naked is
 is worth a million statues"--"Mr Youse Needn't Be So Spry . . . (XVIII)," e.e. cummings

Homer Gets One Right
Several readers wrote to say we'd erred yesterday in stating that Al Gore "got more than 12 million votes" when he ran for president in 2000. We wrote this from memory, so were afraid we'd gotten it wrong. But we looked it up, and it turns out Gore did get more than 12 million votes--51,003,926, to be exact. Granted, this number may be somewhat inflated due to Florida shenanigans, but still it seems clear that if anything the number we cited was too low.

The Path to Enlightenment
How many Berkeley, Calif., firemen does it take to screw in a light bulb? ask Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle:

In an attempt to answer this burning question, we offer up a recent memo to Berkeley Fire Chief Debra Pryor from Rene Cardinaux, the city's director of public works, declaring that firefighters in the East Bay burg have been granted permission to change their own lightbulbs . . . or at least the easy ones.

"Currently whenever a lightbulb burns out,'' Cardinaux details in the memo, "Facilities Maintenance will be notified and a request is made to replace the lightbulb. The Facilities Maintenance folks would try and replace the lightbulbs as soon as they could in the midst of their high-priority work requests and other emergencies. Unfortunately, with the limited resources and the great number of high-priority items and emergencies, the lightbulbs are not replaced as timely as the customer desires.

"The suggestion by (Lt.) Michael Nagamoto to have the firefighters replace their own burned-out lightbulbs that do not require special equipment or special training has a lot of merit. I am sure that nobody calls an electrician or a maintenance person to change their lightbulb at home.

"The firefighters are authorized to replace their own burned-out lightbulb as long as it is just a simple lightbulb replacement and does not require special training and equipment.''

One other thing: "The replacement bulb needs to be less than or equal to the recommended wattage for the fixture. If the fixture doesn't work after the lightbulb is changed or there are any complications/problems, Facilities Maintenance needs to notified immediately."

Everyone's a comedian. Though if that's Cardinaux's idea of a punch line, we'd advise him to keep his day job.

C No Evil
Rapper Corey Miller has changed his stage name from C-Murder to C Miller "because he thinks he's been misunderstood," USA Today reports. "I am not a murderer," Miller says in a statement. He is, however, behind bars, appealing a conviction--for second-degree murder.

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: The U.N. needs "an ambassador to the U.S."
• Peggy Noonan: When John Paul II went to Poland, communism didn't have a prayer.
• Thomas Glotz: Democrats show surprising strength in a red state.
• Jeffrey Meyers: Saul Bellow thrived on chaos.