by JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, September 13, 2007 3:32 P.M. EDT

Today's Video on WSJ.com: Dan Henninger on the Iraq debate's running out of steam.

The In-Kindest Cut
By now everyone knows that the New York Times published a full-page ad Monday from the MoveOn.org political action committee attacking Gen. David Petraeus in McCarthyite terms. Now the New York Post has confirmed what blogger Bob Owens suspected. Reports the Post:

A spokesman for MoveOn.org confirmed to The Post that the liberal activist group had paid only $65,000 for the ad. . . .

A Post reporter who called the Times advertising department yesterday without identifying himself was quoted a price of $167,000 for a full-page black-and-white ad on a Monday.

[Times PR director Abbe] Serphos declined to confirm the price and refused to offer any inkling for why the paper would give MoveOn.org such a discounted price.

The Times advertising rate card (see page 5) lists a full-page weekday political ad as costing $167,000 and change. An unidentified "Republican aide on Capitol Hill" quipped that MoveOn got the "family discount." But this got us to wondering: Would that be legal?

We consulted the Federal Elections Commission's Campaign Guide for Corporations and Labor Organizations, updated in January, and here's what it has to say about in-kind contributions (see page 14):

• Services (such as advertising, printing or consulting) are valued at the prevailing commercial rate at the time the services are rendered (i.e., the amount that was paid or would have been paid for the services).
  
  
• Discounts are valued at the amount discounted (i.e., the difference between the usual and normal charge and the amount paid by the committee).

If a company sells an ad worth $167,000 for $65,000, then, that would be an in-kind contribution of $102,000. Corporate contributions to PACs are illegal under the campaign finance laws the Times itself has long championed: "Corporations and labor organizations are prohibited from making contributions in connection with federal elections," according to the FEC. (A corporation may set up and administer a "separate segregated fund," or a corporate PAC, which receives contributions from people associated with the company, but it may not contribute to its own SSF or any other federally registered PAC.)

There may be an explanation here that does not implicate campaign finance laws. Perhaps the "prevailing commercial rate" for an ad in the Times is lower than that in the rate card; maybe such deep "discounts" are routine and thus not really discounts for the FEC's purposes. In either case, we can understand why the Times's spokesmen are not eager to discuss the matter.

Tailgunner Joan
The more we hear about the comparison between MoveOn.org and Joe McCarthy, the more apt the comparison seems. We visited the subject Tuesday and again yesterday, and today the New York Sun weighs in with an editorial that opens with a McCarthy quote that sounds strikingly similar to the MoveOn attack on Gen. Petraeus:

As a backdrop to the investigation being conducted by the joint committee there is being waged a strange war, an undeclared and unacknowledged war; a war such as never before has been seen on sea or land. It is a war into which we were launched on the impulse of a President in the name of the United Nations, which has been striving ever since to disavow its paternity . . .

That is one of the startling paragraphs a reader discovers when going back to read Senator McCarthy's infamous attack on General George C. Marshall. The screed, uttered on June 14, 1951, was made in the Senate during the Korean conflict. A long version, running 60,000 words, was entered into the Congressional Record. The New York Times ran out its story the next day under the headline "Marshall U.S. Foe, M'Carthy Charges" The subheadline was "Republican Asserts General Is Part of Conspiracy Seeking American Defeat by Russia." . . .

Both demagogues--MoveOn.org and McCarthy--were upset about a war going through a difficult patch. MoveOn.org describes the Petraeus formula for keeping tabs on violence as "bizarre." McCarthy complained not only of a "strange" war but characterized it as having a "a nightmare quality" in which General Bradley reckoned we were fighting the "wrong enemy" and where the joint chiefs had "succumbed to the general confusion." There emanated from McCarthy, as there does from MoveOn.org, not only the tendency to assassinate the character of decent people but the unmistakable whiff of panic.

The Sun argues that MoveOn may be worse than McCarthy, because the former has "abandoned decency and bersmirched decent people not in pursuit of a more aggressive and broader fight against a vast evil but in pursuit of a capitulation." From a consequentialist perspective, though, McCarthy was worse. His demagoguery discredited a good cause; theirs discredits a foul one.

Workers of the World, Unite!
Barack Obama did himself some damage back in July when he blithely remarked that even preventing genocide wasn't a good enough reason to keep American troops in Iraq. In a speech yesterday, however, he expressed a newfound concern for the Iraqi people, as the Associated Press reports:

"The president would have us believe there are two choices: keep all of our troops in Iraq or abandon these Iraqis," Obama said. "I reject this choice."

Instead, he argued for creating an international working group of countries in the region and in Asia and Europe that would work to stabilize Iraq.

The man is a genius. Just think of all the humanitarian catastrophes of the past that could have been prevented if only someone had thought to create an international working group. And that's not all Obama is proposing:

He also wants a commission to monitor and hold accountable perpetrators of war crimes in Iraq.

But another AP dispatch quotes Chris Dodd, whom it charitably describes as a "rival," as saying that Obama "has a gift for soaring rhetoric, but, on this critical issue, we need to know the substance of his position with specificity."

An international working group and a commission aren't enough for Dodd. He'll settle for nothing less than a high-level interdepartmental study team!

That second AP story also has this quote from Hillary Clinton:

"[President Bush] is in essence is [sic] going to tell the American people that one year from now the number of troops in Iraq will be the same as there were one year ago," she said after picking up the endorsement of the National Association of Letter Carriers. "Taking credit for this troop reduction is like taking credit for the sun coming up in the morning."

Remember when John Kerry actually did that?

Great Moments in Public Education
In April, reports New York's Daily News, Mariya Fatima, a 14-year-old freshman at Jamaica High School in Queens, started vomiting during class. She was taken to the school's office, where she waited for more than an hour and a half before someone called 911. It turned out she was having a stroke. She "lost use of her right hand and leg, [and] has had to relearn how to speak and walk since the stroke," reports the News. "She's receiving home instruction, but her reading skills have dropped to a fifth-grade level."

Why the delay in calling 911, which, according to the paper, might "have made her paralysis worse"? Because two weeks earlier, Guy Venezia, the school's assistant principal for security, had issued a directive: "No Deans are permitted to call 911 for any reason."

The reason for this order is that in February Jamaica High "was placed on the city's impact list of dangerous schools." Venezia, who has since moved to a teaching job at another school, wanted to reduce the number of reported crimes at the school--not by cutting crime but by preventing administrators from reporting crime:

About a month after Mariya's stroke, Venezia sent out another memo, this one announcing that deans "are sanctioned to make 911 calls." But he also told the deans, "Do not use the word assault to describe a physical altercation."

The apparent effort to drive down the crime stats failed, since the school was put on the state's persistently dangerous list this summer and could face ramifications under the No Child Left Behind Act. . . .

Venezia declined to discuss the case but insisted, "I always place the welfare of the child above all other considerations."

Well, that's certainly reassuring.

Bringing a Gun Ban to a Knife Fight
When it comes to school violence, our neighbors to the north have some ideas that aren't exactly brilliant either, as Toronto's Globe and Mail reports:

Ontario Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty said Wednesday that he does not want to see the provinces' schools resort to installing metal detectors and having uniformed security officers patrol the halls in the wake of Tuesday's fatal stabbing at a Toronto high school.

Such a move, he said, would amount to the Americanization of schools in Ontario. . . .

Instead, he said, Ontario needs to distinguish itself from the United States by imposing an outright ban on hand guns.

"Let's ban handguns in Ontario," he said. "Let's ban handguns across the country. Let's declare war against handguns."

A 16-year-old Scarborough youth was stabbed to death on Tuesday on a walkway leading from Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute.

If McGuinty has his way and Canada bans handguns, we'll bet it won't take very long before it occurs to some Canuck delinquent that you can also stab people with a knife.

In a related story, the Associated Press reports on the latest crisis for the metric system:

A kilogram just isn't what it used to be.

The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight--if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies. . . .

But don't expect the slimmed-down kilo to have any effect, other than possibly envy, on wary waistline-watchers: 50 micrograms is roughly equivalent to the weight of a fingerprint.

A fingerprint may not seem like much, but it can be vital in fighting crime. Is it any coincidence that Canada, which still uses the metric system, is experiencing such an epidemic of violence?

Suiting Down
"A Rutgers University basketball player on Tuesday withdrew a slander and defamation lawsuit she had filed against Don Imus and CBS Radio, among others, after the shock jock called the team 'nappy headed hos,' " the Associated Press reports:

Marti McKenzie, a spokeswoman for [Kia] Vaughn's attorney, Richard Ancowitz, said in a statement that Vaughn had chosen to focus on her education at New Jersey's Rutgers University as a journalism major and as an athlete with the basketball team.

As we noted in August, this suit had very little chance of success, as much of a jerk as Imus is.

Life Imitates the Onion

• "Maybe We Should Try Coddling the Terrorists"--headline, Onion, Sept. 12
  
  
• "Talking to al Qaeda? Don't Rule It Out, Some Say"--headline, Reuters, Sept. 13

Life Imitates 'Saturday Night Live'

• "Governor, I call this 'What Might Have Been.' It shows the nuclear aircraft carrier Nimitz after its conversion into a floating shelter for the homeless."--Leroy Nieman (Kevin Nealon) to Michael Dukakis (Jon Lovitz), "Dukakis After Dark," originally aired Nov. 5, 1988
  
  
• "Decommissioned Navy Ship Sought for Floating Homeless Shelter"--headline, FoxNews.com, Sept. 11, 2007

'¡Él Está Ya Muerto!'
"Cuban Officials Say Castro Not Dying"--headline, Reuters, Sept. 12

'On Second Thought, Let's Not Rosh Into Anything'

• "High Holidays of Romance"--headline, New York Sun, Sept. 12
  
  
• "Jews Celibate Sweetness of the New Year"--headline, Venice (Fla.) Gondolier, Sept. 11

Thank You, Mrs. Craig
"Our Beards Are Beating Taliban"--headline, Sun (London), Sept. 12

The Valerie Plame Kerfuffle Just Won't Die
"Spy Flap Raises Questions About Patriots"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 13

Isn't He a Little Old to Be Living at Home?
"Youth Home Celebrating 100th Year"--headline, Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette, Sept. 13

We'd Rather Have Scotch on the Moon
"New Theory Explains Ice on Mars"--headline, University of Hawaii press release, Sept. 13

Great Idea, but Who'll Import Them?
"Export Control Freaks"--headline, Forbes.com, Sept. 12

Someone Set Up Us the Bomb
"Man Claims Dry Burp Flawed Breath Test"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 13

Why the Duck Has a Bill
"WA Judge Told Police to Charge Mallard"--headline, Age (Melbourne, Australia), Sept. 13

News You Can Use

• "Study: Curly Hair Tangles Less"--headline, LiveScience.com, Sept. 13
  
  
• "Earth Might Survive Sun's Explosion"--headline, New York Times, Sept. 12
  
  
• "Two Weeks in a Leper Colony Won't Make Everything Okay"--headline, Globe and Mail (Toronto), Sept. 13

Bottom Stories of the Day

• "Manager Says Foxy Brown Not Pregnant"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 13
  
  
• "WND, USA Radio, Others Almost Cut Off at Briefing"--headline, WorldNetDaily.com, Sept. 12
  
  
• "Clinton, Schumer Skeptical of Bush Speech"--headline, Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal, Sept. 12
  
  
• "Canada Votes 'No' as UN Native Rights Declaration Passes"--headline, CBC.ca, Sept. 13

Thinly Reported
Reporting from New York, Reuters brings us the breaking news that fashion models are still thin:

Models have long been skinny but their weight became a hot topic after two Latin American models died of anorexia last year. Critics say fashion's obsession with waif-like frames leads young women to dislike their bodies.

Those critics might want to target Reuters itself, which on Sunday had this to say about one Britney Spears:

No longer boasting the buff body that helped drive her to international superstardom almost a decade ago, the mother of two moved sluggishly around the stage at the Palms casino, often with the support of a troupe of dancers.

We guess one man's anorexic is another's buff body.

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Review & Outlook: World Bank reckoning: Another Volcker report for another corrupt institution.
• Dan Henninger: The Petraeus hearings prove Democrats need to change the subject.
• Kim Strassel: Bjorn Lomborg provides a calm voice in the heated debate over global warming.