From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Iraq
1, Senate 0
The Iraqi National Assembly has reversed a change in the rules for this month's
constitutional referendum, amid criticism from the U.N. and Sunni Arab leaders,
Reuters reports. The referendum will fail if two-thirds of the voters in at
least three provinces vote "no," and the dispute was over the definition
of "voters":
On Sunday, parliament voted to define the rules for the referendum, saying that for it to be defeated, two thirds of registered voters--rather than two in three who cast a ballot--in three of Iraq's 18 provinces would have to say "No."
Under this plan, registered voters who stayed away from the polls would have been effectively voting "yes"--which is patently unfair to the "no" side (since they would actually have to get their supporters to the polls) as well as to those Iraqis wishing to exercise their right not to vote.
Still, such scale-tipping rules are not unheard of, even in established democracies. One example is the Turkish Parliament. In March 2003, just before Iraq's liberation, lawmakers in Ankara voted 264-250 to allow the deployment of U.S. ground troops on Turkish soil. But because 19 abstentions were counted as if they had been "no" votes, the resolution was defeated, and U.S.-Turkish relations have been strained ever since.
Another example is the U.S. Senate filibuster. Breaking a filibuster requires a vote for "cloture," which ends "debate" on a bill or appointment. A cloture vote requires the approval of three-fifths of senators--not of senators voting or even present, but of all senators currently serving, which means at least 60 when there are no vacancies. Thus if 40 senators are absent or not voting, a 59-1 vote in favor of cloture would still fail.
In this regard, then, Iraq is already more democratic than the world's greatest deliberative body. Three cheers for progress.
Little
Lambsy Divy
Blogger Keith Burgess-Jackson takes on one of the arguments against Supreme
Court nominee Harriet Miers:
I . . . think there's some snobbishness involved. Miers is not an Ivy Leaguer, like John Roberts. She didn't clerk for a Supreme Court justice. She hasn't been a law professor. So what. . . .
It occurs to me that many conservatives, especially those with academic credentials, have bought into the Dworkinian idea that the Supreme Court is made up of Herculean philosopher-kings whose task is to make the law the best it can be by some external moral standard. I reject this conception of judging, as should any right-thinking person. The law is not a plaything, to be manipulated by ideologues. It has a life, a logic, and an integrity of its own that must be respected.
Marvin Olasky and Peter Olasky, writing in the Los Angeles Times, make the case that Miers's Ivylessness is an advantage:
It takes a very strong (or very principled) constitution to do without that intellectual flattery [from the establishment left]. But perhaps that makes Miers the perfect candidate. Perhaps it takes someone who did not go to Harvard or Yale and has never seemed to care. Miers went to law school at Southern Methodist University, which, although a well-respected institution, was unlikely to have been a bastion of progressive thought when she entered it in 1970.
Adds Thomas Lifson:
Critics are playing the Democrats' game. The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness. Nor does the Supreme Court ideally consist of the nine greatest legal scholars of an era. Like any small group, it is better off being able to draw on abilities of more than one type of personality.
This columnist is a veteran of what one might call the Divy League, having attended a second-rate state university. Thus we are in strong sympathy with the anticredentialist defense of Miers, for its opposite would seem to suggest we have no business working for a first-rate newspaper.
Don't get us wrong--we know many brilliant people who are products of places like Harvard and Yale. But these schools graduate, if not their share, at least a share of mediocrities too. As just one example, think of a certain haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.* He went to Yale, at least as an undergraduate, and he is unable to form a coherent sentence.
On the other hand, we'd say Lifson carries the argument a bit too far:
According to a source in her Dallas church quoted by Marvin Olasky, Harriet Miers is someone who "taught children in Sunday School, made coffee, brought donuts: 'Nothing she's asked to do in church is beneath her.' "
As the court's new junior member, the 60 year old lady Harriet Miers will finally give a break to Stephen Breyer, who has been relegated to closing and opening the door of the conference room, and fetching beverages for his more senior Justices. Her ability to do this type of work with no resentment, no discomfort, and no regrets will at the least endear her to the others.
So Supreme Court justices fetch beverages while delegating to their clerks the responsibility for writing opinions? Seems to us that says more about the court's bizarre division of labor than about Justice-to-be Miers's qualifications.
* No, we're not naming any names.
Who
Lost New Orleans?
As the Washington Post reports, there's plenty of blame to go around:
Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims.
Claims of widespread looting, gunfire directed at helicopters and rescuers, homicides, and rapes, including those of "babies" at the Louisiana Superdome, frequently turned out to be overblown, if not completely untrue, officials now say.
The sensational accounts delayed rescue and evacuation efforts already hampered by poor planning and a lack of coordination among local, state and federal agencies. People rushing to the Gulf Coast to fly rescue helicopters or to distribute food, water and other aid steeled themselves for battle. In communities near and far, the seeds were planted that the victims of Katrina should be kept away, or at least handled with extreme caution.
It may be that the media had an institutional interest in purveying the line that "it's all Bush's fault."
David Brock's Keystone Kops
"Media Matters for America does not, repeat, NOT allege 'bias.' That requires reading minds, something of which none of us is capable. We document and correct misinformation, period. If we can not demonstrate that something that has been said is factually inaccurate or deceives by omission, we don't discuss it."--Paul Waldman, Media Matters for America, on CBSNews.com's Public Eye blog (sixth comment), Sept. 22
"The issue is that [Bill] Bennett, upon thinking 'crime rate,' immediately thought of black people. The issue is that Bennett thinks and speaks of crime as an issue of race."--Media Matters for America, Sept. 30
Rodney
Dangerfield Revolutionary
The hunk of meat formerly known as V.I. Lenin "has been lying in state
on public display" for eight decades, the New York Times reports, but these
days the bygone Bolshevik can't get any respect:
"Lenin," mused Natasha Zakharova, 23, as she walked off Red Square on Tuesday, admitting that she was not quite sure whose body she had just seen. "Was he a Communist?"
Better dead than red, Natasha.
China's Newest Weapon
"World Automakers Assess What Threat Chinese Cars Pose"--headline, Detroit News, Sept. 20
"Road Accidents Kill 133 in 1st 4 Days of National Day Holiday"--headline, Xinhuanet (Red China), Oct. 4
And
We Thought Golf Was a Gentlemen's Sport
"Pakistanis Grill Taliban Official on Militant Links"--headline, Reuters,
Oct. 5
The
Left Will Use Therapy
"Bush Wants Right to Use Military if Bird Flu Hits"--headline, Reuters,
Oct. 4
Some
Want to Go to the Shore, Others to the Mountains
"Gay Community Still Divided Over 'Outing' "--headline, Associated
Press, Oct. 4
What
Would We Do Without Experts?
"Green Fireball Across Sky Likely a Meteor, Experts Say"--headline,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oct. 4
What
Would We Do Without AP?
"AP: Infiltrating al-Qaida Cells Difficult"--headline, Associated
Press, Oct. 5
Bottom
Story of the Day
"Girl's Grandmother Traveling From Bolivia"--headline, Associated
Press, Oct. 5
Girth
of a Nation
"Just when we thought we couldn't get any fatter, a new study that followed
Americans for three decades suggests that over the long haul, 9 out of 10 men
and 7 out of 10 women will become overweight," the Associated Press reports
from Baltimore. It's a big problem, and we do mean big:
Half of the men and women in the study who had made it well into adulthood without a weight problem ultimately became overweight. A third of those women and a quarter of the men became obese. . . .
He and other researchers studied data gathered from 4,000 white adults over 30 years. Participants were between the ages of 30 and 59 at the start, and were examined every four years. By the end of the study, more than 1 in 3 had become obese.
Another AP dispatch suggests that the capsizing of a tour boat in Lake George, N.Y., Sunday might have been the result of the passengers' paunch:
The National Transportation Safety Board loaded the Ethan Allen's sister vessel with barrels of water and was running it along Lake George to determine how the boat would have handled while carrying a full load of passengers weighing an average of 160 pounds.
The Ethan Allen was carrying 47 passengers--senior citizens who had come from Michigan and Ohio to enjoy the fall colors--when it flipped over Sunday on Lake George. Its capacity was 50 people--a number based on a New York standard that assumes the average passenger weighs 150 pounds.
Just days before the boat overturned, the Coast Guard began rethinking its own per-passenger weight limits to take into account Americans' expanding waistlines. The current standard, set 25 years ago, assumes a 140-pound average for each man, woman and child.
There is one bit of good news, though, in the obesity study. According to Susan Bartlett of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, "The results are pretty sobering, really." We ought to be able to look forward to a decline in drunk driving and liver disease.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Steven Platzer, Ed Lasky, Geoffrey Macleay, Paul Dyck, Dennis Smith, Sheilah Miller, Ron Ackert, Odessa Elliott, Ruth Papazian, Jonathan Mairs, Tim Graham, Jim Orheim, Dave Tinkle, Craig Steiner, Dan O'Shea, Mark Murray, Jim Jolley, Robert Koontz, Geoff Hazel, Rhonda Marsden, Mark Van Der Molen, Thomas Dillon and Michael Segal. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- John Cornyn: Finally, a Supreme Court nominee who understands real people.
- Claudia Rosett: Taiwan succeeds despite being shunned by the U.N.--or maybe because of it.
- Dave Kansas: A history of Wall Street from the inside.
