Cheating by students can be discussed!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

Cheating by teachers cannot: On Monday, we mentioned three key facts good mainstream journalists mustn’t discuss.

In the featured editorial of that day’s New York Times, one of those facts got deep-sixed.

In its featured editorial, the Times recommended the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Early on, the paper listed three bad things which can happen if student test scores aren’t used:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/17/12): Traditional teacher evaluations often consist of cursory classroom visits by principals who declare nearly every teacher good, or at least competent, even in failing schools where few if any children meet basic educational standards.

As a result of this system, bad things can happen. High-performing teachers who have an enormous impact on student achievement go unidentified, and they often leave the district. Promising, but struggling, young teachers never get the help they need to master the job. And disastrous teachers who have no feel for the profession continue as long as they wish, hurting young lives along the way.

In our view, one of those scenarios makes good sense. The other two, possibly not.

(Presumably, horrible test scores would be a strong sign that a teacher has turned "disastrous.")

Whatever! In principle, we aren’t opposed to the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. But there is a large problem with this idea—and in a lengthy editorial, the Times never brought it up.

That problem is cheating by teachers! As everybody knows by now, teachers and principals sometimes cheat when they administer high-stakes test. The higher the stakes become, the greater the incentive.

There are ways to address this problem, of course—though solutions may cost money. (The use of proctors, for instance.) But in a lengthy editorial about the use of student test scores, the Times never mentioned this existence of this obvious problem.

Teachers and principals cheat on tests! By now, even journalists know this is true—but mentioning this obvious fact is largely verboten. Quite routinely, mainstream pundits recommend the use of test scores in teacher evaluations without showing the slightest sign that they know this problem exists.

You can't discuss cheating by teachers! In the Times editorial, the silence was especially striking because the editors chose to write this:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: Reasonable school officials understand that test scores, while important, do not reflect the sum total of what good teachers provide for their students. In Washington, D.C., where the evaluation system is now in its fourth year, school officials have decided to change the weighting of tests. Originally, value-added scores accounted for 50 percent of teacher evaluations; that has been reduced to 35 percent, with an additional 15 percent consisting of other goals (like the students’ mastery of certain skills) collaboratively arrived at by teacher and principal.

Impressive! Unfortunately, Washington is one of the big school systems where massive cheating has occurred. But so what? The editors blew right past that fact as they recommended putting even more pressure on tests.

Every good journalist knows the rules: You’re not allowed to tell the world about those gains on NAEP scores. And you’re strongly encouraged to avoid all discussion of cheating by teachers. As a result, pseudo-discussions often take place, like this discussion on Monday.

The editors seemed to know—you’re not allowed to discuss teacher cheating. And good lord! Right next to their editorial, this letters column appeared.

Five letters appeared beneath this headline: “What to Do About Student Cheating.”

Students cheat—but teachers do not! No, we’re not making this up.

David Brooks turns the logic around: Last Friday, David Brooks advocated using test scores in teacher evaluations.

Our pundits rarely know much about schools. We thought Brooks’ logic was a bit upside down:

BROOKS (9/14/12): Though the final details are still uncertain, there will also be a serious teacher evaluation process [in Chicago]. The various elements of those evaluations will change for each teacher year by year, but, as teachers progress in their careers, student performance will become more and more important. That’s vital because various studies have shown that evaluations that rely in part on test scores really do identify the best teachers. Teachers who score well on these evaluations really do produce measurable improvements in their students’ performance for years to come. Rigorous teacher evaluations will give reformers a profound measuring tool.

Citing unlinked studies, Brooks said the use of student test scores helps “identify the best teachers.” But when student test scores are used that way, it does increase a teacher’s incentive to cheat.

Brooks didn’t mention this problem. Surely, he knows it exists.

Brooks said the use of test scores can help us find our best teachers. Absent some solution to the cheating problem, student test scores seem better suited to help us find our worst (most “disastrous”) teachers. Presumably, no one cheats to produce bad scores.

If a teacher’s scores are disastrously bad, those horrible scores can almost surely be trusted.

What we learned from Oliver North!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

That fact is politically dangerous: For what it’s worth, that fact about the 47 percent is politically dangerous. But first:

In July 1987, we learned a valuable lesson from watching Oliver North.

North testified on network TV about the Iran-contra matter. He had never been seen in public before.

We thought he was an absolute clown. Late that day, we chuckled as we went to the pool to swim some laps.

A few days later, the polling came in. The American public was in love with the wonderful Oliver North!

Within a few years, the public’s view of North had changed. In 1994, he lost a Virginia Senate race to Chuck Robb, in a Republican year.

We never really understood why the public changed its mind. But back in 1987, we learned a valuable lesson from those polls. We learned that the way we view an event may not align with the way the public views it.

We’ve been thinking about Oliver North in the past few days. Mitt Romney made some unfortunate remarks about the 47 percent of adults who don’t pay federal income tax.

Politically, that is a dangerous fact if it isn’t explained with great skill and great care. Many liberals don’t seem to see that. They may be reacting to that fact the way we reacted to North.

Forty-seven percent of adults don’t pay federal income tax! If it isn’t explained with great care, that fact can be very dangerous. Never mind how Romney’s statements sound to you. Absent skillful explanation, Romney’s statements may sound quite different to many voters.

Forty-seven percent of adults don’t pay federal income tax! There are dangerous ways to explain that fact.

We’ve heard quite a few this week. More on this topic tomorrow.

MISUSE THE CHILDREN WELL: Wisecracking history!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2012

Part 2—Gail Collins leaves no joke behind: About twenty percent of Gail Collins' new book is devoted to the Texas public schools, a topic she seems to know little about.

It’s much as some reviewers said (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/18/12). Her work on the Texas schools is full of “jokey asides”—jokey asides which drive her “wisecracking polemical style.”

And alas! Collins’ work on the Texas schools is also characterized by the leaps of logic about which major reviewers complained. To all appearances, the jokey asides and the logical leaps help Collins drive a polemical agenda, in which Texas schools have gone from horrendous to merely bad, with the improvements stemming from additional spending—not from the “testing mania” she associates with George Bush and No Child Left Behind.

What is the current state of the Texas schools? Such questions aren’t easy to answer, but Collins makes virtually no attempt to examine the relevant data. When she does cite those most relevant data, she cherry-picks in egregious ways, or she simply misstates what the data say. In the process, readers are misinformed and misled about the current state of the data, imperfect as those data will inevitably be.

Collins misuses the children well. Her performance can only be called a journalistic scam.

In part 3, we’ll look at Collins’ feigned attempt to assess the current state of the Texas schools. For today, let’s examine some of the bungled history she offers, in which she pretends to walk us through the development of Lone Star schools from the 1940s on.

The jokey asides are plentiful, along with apparent errors. The tolerance for imprecision is vast, as in this typical passage:

COLLINS (page 78): During the last half of the 1990s, Texas schools did get better. It was very, very hard to figure exactly how much better, given the amount of conflicting data floating around, but some observers were wowed by how well the students were testing. (“I couldn’t believe it,” said David Grissmer, who wrote or co-wrote several important education studies on the state.) Some were just prepared to thank God for small favors. (Molly Ivins called it the “story on how our schools rocketed from abysmal to only slightly below average in a mere thirty years.”) The doubters would be empowered later, when reporters discovered that in some places the results had been, shall we say, rigged.

Whether the lift was huge or modest, it had very little to do with George W. Bush, whose role as governor was to arrive at the party after the refreshments had been served and the orchestra had finished its first set.

This passage is striking in several ways. According to Collins, Texas schools got better during this period—she just can’t tell how much. According to Collins, the improvement may have been huge or it may have been modest. But it had nothing to do with George Bush!

This reflects Collins’ claim that the important reforms in Texas schools were set in place before Bush took office—and that the important reforms had nothing to do with testing. She makes little attempt to support these claims, although the jokes never stop.

Question: If we can’t tell how much improvement occurred, why should we be so sure that any improvement occurred at all? Collins relies on the kindness of strangers, assuming that her experts, Grissmer and Ivins included, must be pretty much right.

This leads us to a striking example of Collins’ intellectual sloth.

According to Collins, it’s “very, very hard” to figure how much the Texas schools improved during the 1990s. This is strange, because the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began assembling data for Texas in 1990.

Collins, along with the rest of the world, has said that these are the most reliable educational data we have. She cites NAEP data in her book. She praised them as the most reliable data in a subsequent column.

Is it “very, very hard” to figure how much better the Texas schools got during the period Collins cites? It certainly is—if you try to figure it out in your head or by quoting Ivins’ columns! On the other hand, anyone who cares about such questions can review the NAEP data for this period.

If she does, she will observe the giant gains in eighth grade math scores achieved by black kids and Hispanic kids in Texas during this decade. And she could see something else in those most reliable data. She could see that, by 2000, black and Hispanic kids in Texas were outscoring their peers nationwide by very substantial margins. This represented a large improvement from their status in 1990.

In 2000, Ivins wrote that the Texas schools had gone “from abysmal to below average.” Twelve years later, in her wisecracking book, Collins still seemed to believe that this wisecracking assessment was right.

On-line, it takes about sixty seconds to access the most reliable data for the period Collins cited. We’re comparing the 1990 NAEP scores to those from the year 2000. Intermediate years could be reviewed too.

(To access the NAEP Data Explorer, just click here, then click on MAIN NDE. After that, you’re on your own.)

The most reliable educational data were already being assembled for Texas by 1990. But Collins doesn’t seem to know this, even as she writes three breezy, wisecracking chapters about the Texas schools.

But then, Collins seems to know very little about public schools, except for the scripts which are required to act out her narrow agenda. Reading her attempt to record the history of the Texas schools, we were struck, several times, by the way she quoted political figures who seemed to have no idea about the way public schools function.

Collins never notes their cluelessness. Happily, their stated views always align with her outlook.

According to Collins, Texas schools began to improve after 1983, due to two reform pushes. She insists that any improvements happened because of increased spending, not because the Texas schools turned to the “testing mania” which, as she correctly notes, was occurring in other states during the 1990s. (Texas didn't invent this.)

Can we talk? Collins has no way of knowing what produced the presumed improvements in Texas schools. She simply asserts her preferred conclusion, in which any such improvements occurred because of increased spending, not because of testing and accountability procedures.

She offers no evidence that her claims are true. But then, she doesn’t even seem to know that NAEP data were already being assembled as of 1990—data which would help her track the improvement in the Texas schools.

When it comes to public schools, Collins rarely seems to know what she’s talking about. More than that, she seems preternaturally lazy; she seems to have made every effort to avoid doing any real research. She assembles her jokes and she pimps her agenda. But she doesn’t care enough about Texas kids to engage in sixty seconds of clicks.

Those clicks suggest that the wisecracking Ivins may have been somewhat misinformed too.

According to the most reliable data, black kids in Texas were making great strides from 1990 to 2000. Why did that happen? Like Collins, we can’t say. But Collins doesn’t even seem to know that these data exist.

In all honesty, Collins seems to have little real interest in the children of Texas. Collins misuses those children well all through her breezy, wise-cracking book—a book which becomes an act of fraud when she quotes Diane Ravitch.

Tomorrow: Journalistic fraud

Did John Sununu strong-arm the Post?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

A bad report gets worse: Directly below, we discuss Philip Rucker’s astoundingly awful news report at the Washington Post.

Accurately but misleadingly, Mitt Romney said that 47 percent of adults pay no federal income tax. In his news report, Rucker never quotes this remark by Romney. He offers no background information about who pays federal taxes.

Instead, Rucker quotes a New Hampshire voter saying that 47 percent of adults pay no taxes at all. This remark is plainly false, but it goes uncorrected.

Why would Rucker present such a news report? Assuming Joan Walsh’s account is accurate, we may have our answer!

At Salon, Walsh describes what John Sununu said on TV this afternoon. According to Walsh, the loud and blustery Romney spokesman told Andrea Mitchell to tell the story exactly as Rucker told it:

WALSH (9/18/12): John Sununu just went full-tilt crazy on Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, telling her the media shouldn’t be criticizing Mitt Romney’s dishonest, divisive comments about the “47 percent.” He said it should be after “a president who’s decided to run a campaign on class warfare, he attacks success.”

Sununu falsely claimed Romney was talking about polling showing that 47 percent of voters support Obama–when Romney clearly said he was talking about the 47 percent who pay no federal income taxes. Then he flipped and said Romney was talking about “the constituency that Obama’s been pandering to.” He went on to claim that in 2008, Obama “made race a divider,” and told Mitchell with a flourish, “You ought to be saying ‘Shame on you, Obama!’”

Rucker’s report perfectly tracks that second highlighted passage.

On the videotape in question, Romney did say that 47 percent of voters support Obama. But Rucker only mentioned that part of Romney’s remarks in his news report.

As if under Sununu’s direction, Rucker didn’t mention what Romney said about people not paying income taxes. Instead, he quoted that New Hampshire man making an inaccurate statement.

Rucker’s report is astoundingly bad—except as a version of the script Sununu dictated to Mitchell. Did Sununu stamp his foot at Rucker too?

Does Rucker’s editor care? Does the Post still employ such people?

The Washington Post visits Club 47!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

An astoundingly bungled report: On the Washington Post’s web site, Philip Rucker has offered this astonishing news report. The report concerns Mitt Romney’s remarks about folk who don’t pay income taxes.

Why does constant massive confusion characterize our public discourse? In part, it’s because of astonishing news reporting like the passage which follows.

This passage starts about midway through Rucker’s hopelessly bungled report. Note the uncorrected statement by a New Hampshire voter:

RUCKER (9/18/12): Romney hastily called a news conference here Monday night to try to diffuse the controversy. He acknowledged having made the remarks and stood by them, although he conceded that they were “not elegantly stated” and that he had been “speaking off the cuff in response to a question.” Romney called for the release of the full video, and Mother Jones said they would do so later Tuesday afternoon.

At a rally for GOP vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan on Tuesday morning, some supporters said that Romney’s remarks were right on.

“The 47 percent—they’re not paying any taxes, so they don’t have any incentive to support him,” Jim Pacocha, a 70-year-old retiree from southern New Hampshire, said when asked about the remarks Romney made at a fundraiser in May.

“Once it gets past the tipping point, we’re going to be as bad as any European, socialist country,” he added.

Romney said his comments underscored the contrast between the two candidates’ divergent visions for the nation.

“This is ultimately a question about direction for the country: Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free-enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?” he told reporters. He added that his is a “free-people, free-enterprise, free-market, consumer-driven approach.”

Incredible. Rucker quotes a New Hampshire man making a major misstatement. “The 47 percent—they’re not paying any taxes?” Surely, Rucker must know that this statement is flatly inaccurate.

But so what? The statement sits in the middle of the Washington Post’s featured news report on this topic. At no point in his report does Rucker make any attempt to offer any background information about Romney’s statement—or about the inaccurate way the New Hampshire man reprocessed it.

At no point does Rucker make any attempt to correct that New Hampshire man’s error. People reading Rucker's report aren't told that this statement is wrong.

Indeed, Rucker doesn’t even quote Romney’s statement about the 47 percent. Instead, he quotes a New Hampshire retiree offering an inaccurate version of what Romney said!

Duh. As every journalist must know by now, it isn’t true that 47 percent “aren’t paying any taxes.” It isn’t true that 47 percent aren’t paying any federal taxes.

At WonkBlog, the actual facts of this matter are being explained in a series of posts. But Philip Rucker’s news report is featured at the top of the front page of the Washington Post’s web site, accompanied by a color photo of Romney himself.

In this high-profile report, Rucker quotes a man making a bogus statement—and the statement goes uncorrected! In fairness, if you fumble all around on the Post's web site, you can eventually figure out that the man's statement is wrong.

Can Rucker possibly be that incompetent? Does Rucker have an editor? On Sunday, the New York Times’ new public editor devoted her column to a fumbling attempt to figure out what sorts of facts must be included in news reports.

Under any circumstance, Rucker should have included some basic information about how many people pay what sorts of federal taxes. Instead, he quoted a man making a flatly false statement—and he never corrected it!

Who are these people? Where do they come from? Are they flesh and blood of this earth?

We’ve asked these questions many times. The life-form they’re calling “Philip Rucker” makes us ask them again.

A note concerning the politics of a very dangerous fact: It’s true: In 2011, almost forty-seven percent of adults paid no federal income tax.

Absent careful explanation, that is a very dangerous fact. Last night, the children kept repeating the fact on MSNBC as they danced on Romney’s grave for the three hundredth time.

That is a very dangerous fact. If you don’t explain it every time, it can do a great deal of political harm.

We thought the children were careless last night. Rucker is from Planet Zarkon.

Final note: We assume this astounding report will be corrected at some point. As of 2:37 P.M., Rucker's report contains no account of what Romney said except Pachoca's bungled statement. There is correction of Pachoca's statement—absolutely no explanation of why his statement is wrong.

Joe Nocera has no idea what he’s talking about!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

Major journalist who can’t seem to write complains about kids who can’t read: Joe Nocera has no idea what he’s talking about!

You can tell that from the ridiculous headline which sits atop this morning’s column: “How to Fix the Schools.”

New York Times columnists write their own headlines. Who would write one like that?

Does Joe Nocera actually know “how to fix the schools?” In this column, he doesn’t even specify what he wants to fix, although there are certainly many problems.

At one point, citing an educational expert, he does at least give us a hint. According to Nocera, two countries, a province and a city “have far better results than we do.”

He doesn’t explain, but we can assume that he refers to scores on international tests:

NOCERA (9/18/12): [Marc] Tucker, 72, a former senior education official in Washington, is the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which he founded in 1988. Since then he has focused much of his research on comparing public education in the United States with that of places that have far better results than we do—places like Finland, Japan, Shanghai and Ontario, Canada. His essential conclusion is that the best education systems share common traits—almost none of which are embodied in either the current American system or in the reform ideas that have gained sway over the last decade or so. He can sound frustrated when he talks about it.

According to Nocera, Tucker knows “how to fix the schools.” That said, there is no sign that Nocera has any idea if that implied claim is true.

Consider the claim about those places which “have far better results.”

As usual, Finland is waved like a magic wand, the source of all earthly reform. But does Finland get far better results than we do with children living in poverty—or with low-income immigrant children from low-literacy backgrounds who don’t speak the language?

Trust us: Nocera doesn’t have any idea! Nor did it occur to him to ask Tucker any such question. And good God! In the on-line version of his column, Nocera provides a link beneath the words, “far better results.”

Nocera’s link takes us to a post at the Guardian; the post says nothing at all about any country’s “results.” (Ontario and Shanghai aren’t mentioned.) The site to which Nocera links presents data about a range of inputs—“class size, teacher's pay and spending.”

That’s good information, but it isn’t “results.” Does Joe Nocera have any idea what he’s talking about?

In his column, Nocera simply reports the beliefs of Tucker concerning our public schools. He makes no attempt to help us know if Tucker’s beliefs make sense. Unsurprisingly, Tucker thinks we need better teachers, an idea which has occurred to about three million other people by now.

Question: How much would better teachers help us with our greatest challenges—challenges Finland doesn’t face? There is no sign that Nocera asked. He simply recites what Tucker has said, assuming that these unremarkable ideas will magically “fix the schools.”

To his credit, Nocera opposes the tendency to demonize teachers unions. But even here, he makes a standard pointless claim—he says that many “high performing” nations do have teachers unions. That said, what if our unions are out of their minds while the unions in Finland are not? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Nocera that one country could have a real problem with teachers groups while some other country did not.

For ourselves, we don’t think our teachers unions are the source of our problems. But that’s not the point of this post.

Manifestly, Nocera has no idea what he’s talking about in this morning's column. But when it comes to the public schools, this basic fact stops none of our pundits from throwing decrees from on high.

“How to Fix the Schools!” Joe Nocera has no idea. And he seems to have no idea that he has no idea!

Really and truly, who are these people? Unless we grade on a very broad curve, their “results” are amazingly weak.

Tomorrow: That New York Times editorial

That Guardian site offers one result: At the site to which Nocera links, one graph does seem to involve educational “results.” The graph is titled, Top achieving immigrant children.

The text accompanying the graph is hard to decipher. The graph seems to say that 55 percent of all top-achieving US students are immigrant children. (Of all those in the top quartile.) We would assume that can’t be true. But that’s what the graph seems to say.

Does the Guardian mangle these matters too? We'll admit it: We have no idea what that graph means.

That said, Finland seems to rank near the bottom on this graph. Nocera linked us to it!

Candidate Romney and the 47 percent!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

A remarkable flip from the sayings of Candidate Bush: Mitt Romney has said some unfortunate things, on tape, about the 47 percent.

We’re less sure than others may be about the political effects of these comments. On the merits, David Brooks does an excellent job in this morning's column explaining how foolish these comments were.

Romney complained about an actual fact: 46.4 percent of American households currently pay no federal income tax. As Brooks notes, many of these “households” are actually senior citizens. (We believe that’s more than half the total.) Many of the other households in question pay large amounts of federal payroll taxes.

Alas! Many people don’t understand the difference between income taxes and payroll taxes. On last evening’s Last Word, Kornacki described one result of this confusion:

KORNACKI (9/17/12): There was a movement on the right last year to really build resentment against, you know, the 47 percent, this “We are the 53 percent” movement. And they were all of these sorts of conservative people posting messages and telling their story how they were the makers, you know, they produce goods. They work their jobs. And one of the things you found out is these people would post their stories and they weren’t even aware of it, but they were actually part of the 47 percent. They would tell their stories and talk about what their income level is and what kind of work they do and you could run the numbers and you could see they actually don’t pay federal income tax either they’re just not aware of it.

We can’t vouch for the accuracy of that claim, but it makes perfect sense. In this, as in all other debates, tremendous confusion lies at the heart of our hapless political discourse.

For our money, professional liberals overdid the outrage on last evening’s TV shows. We're not sure how voters may react to the statements made by Romney. On the bright side, the fury and outrage made us liberals feel extremely good.

On MSNBC, this was at least the three hundredth time Candidate Romney had lost the election. Somehow, he's still just a few points behind!

Whatever! For ourselves, our minds drifted back to what Candidate Bush used to say.

Today, Romney stirs anger against the moochers who pay no federal income tax. All during Campaign 2000, Candidate Bush took a completely different approach to the topic.

Back then, Bush boasted about the millions of families he would remove from the income tax rolls! Today, those families pay no federal income tax—and Romney attacks them as parasites!

Conservative fury has come a long way! On December 1, 1999, Candidate Bush unveiled his now-famous tax cut proposal. What follows is part of what he said.

Be sure to note the pledge Bush advanced in the last paragraph we have posted. Under his plan, six million additional families would "pay no income tax at all!"

BUSH (12/1/99): Let’s start where the need is greatest: with social mobility for hard-working American families. We need a tax system that makes it easier, not harder, to join the ranks of the middle class. Half the revenue cost of my income tax cuts goes to financing two changes which I believe are vital for encouraging upward mobility.

I propose we cut the current 15 percent tax bracket by a third—to a 10 percent rate—for the first $12,000 of taxable income for married couples...

I also plan to double the child credit to $1,000. This, combined with lower tax rates, can completely eliminate taxes for a four-person family earning $35,000—a tax cut of over $1500. Many two-income families making $50,000 a year will see their income taxes cut by half.

Single parents will also see their taxes cut drastically. Today, a single parent with one child earning $25,000 per year pays almost $1500 in income taxes. I will cut that by over two-thirds—over $1000.

It is not just the amount of taxes that matters, it's also what the economists call a taxpayer's marginal rate: the taxes we pay on every extra dollar we earn. That rate determines the incentives to work.

Under current tax law, for example, a single waitress supporting two children on an income of $22,000 faces a higher marginal tax rate than a lawyer making $220,000. As she moves up, the federal government starts taxing her income at the same time it is reducing her Earned Income Credit benefit. She can work overtime. She can earn a raise. Yet when all taxes are considered, half of her new earnings are taken away. In other words, the hardest hours of labor are taxed at the highest rates.

Under my plan, she will pay no income tax at all! And she will be joined by 6 million other low and moderate income, working families, who will be removed from the tax rolls entirely. That is one of every five families in America with children.

Candidate Bush boasted about the millions of families he would remove from the income tax rolls. He said he would "completely eliminate taxes [sic] for a four-person family earning $35,000."

Today, Candidate Romney complains about those people!

That statement by Candidate Bush was not an anomaly. In the Washington Post and the New York Times, it was clear that Bush’s aides had highlighted this part of the tax cut proposal in the days before Bush’s speech. And Candidate Bush never stopped citing the millions of families he would remove from the [income] tax rolls.

Here he is in his first debate with Candidate Gore, making his point even as he misstates the facts several ways:

BUSH (10/3/00): The man's practicing fuzzy math again. There's differences!

[...]

He says he's going to give you tax cuts. Fifty million of you won't receive it! He said in his speech he wants to make sure the right people get tax relief. That's not the role of a president to decide right and wrong. Everybody who pays taxes ought to get tax relief. After my plan is in place, the wealthiest American will pay a higher percentage of taxes than they do today, and the poorest of Americans—six million families, seven million people—won't pay any tax at all.

It is a huge difference. It's the difference between big, exploding federal government that wants to think on your behalf and a plan that meets priorities and liberates working people to be able to make decisions on your own.

Bush meant to say that six million additional families would pay no income tax at all. Or maybe he wanted to gain from the confusion regarding that latter distinction, since (unless we're mistaken on short notice) most of those families would still be paying federal payroll taxes.

(Beyond that, no: Those additional families wouldn’t be the poorest of Americans. Jim Lehrer let all this shit go.)

The second debate dealt with foreign affairs. In the third and final debate, Candidate Bush stated his point a bit more precisely:

BUSH (10/17/00): We just have a different philosophy. Let me talk about tax relief.

If you pay taxes, you ought to get tax relief. The vice president believes that only the right people ought to get tax relief. I don't think that's the role of the president to pick, “You're right” and “You're not right.” I think if you're going to have tax relief, everybody ought to get it. And, therefore, wealthy people are going to get it. But the top one percent will end up paying one-third of the taxes in America and they get one-fifth of the benefits. And that's because we structured the plan so that six million additional American families pay no taxes. If you're a family of four making $50,000 in Missouri, you get a 50 percent cut in your federal income taxes. What I've done is set priorities and funded them.

In this instance, Bush included the word “additional.” He still said that those additional families would “pay no taxes” at all.

Aside from the issue of payroll taxes, there was another mini-scam involved in this long-standing boast. Many of those six million families were paying a very small amount of federal income taxes. They would be removed from the income tax rolls—but this would save them few dollars.

Most voters didn’t understand this. Based on his permissive conduct, neither did slumbering Lehrer.

Whatever! Our point this morning is different from that. The focus of conservative anger has shifted in the past twelve years.

Bush complained about big government. In his view, it was a good thing when millions of families paid no income tax.

By today, the logic has flipped. Bush removed millions of families from those rolls. Today, that makes them moochers.

This debate is still marked by total confusion. That said, the complaint has completely changed.

In Campaign 2000, big government was the target. Today, the target is the millions of families freed from big government's yoke.

MISUSE THE CHILDREN WELL: An act of fraud!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

Part 1—Gail Collins’ wisecracking book: Where does a major insider go to get a good book review?

In the case of her recent book about Texas, Gail Collins couldn’t even get such a review in her own New York Times!

The book in question has a clumsy title: “As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda.” And yes, that dot-dot-dot is part of the book’s formal title.

Collins’ book appeared in June of this year. It argues, or pretends to argue, that the state of Texas has been disproportionately setting our nation’s political agenda.

“Texas runs everything,” Collins writes (her italics). “For good or ill.”

Collins may even be right about that to some degree or other. In the reports which follow, we won’t attempt to evaluate this thesis.

That said, few of Collins’ major reviewers seemed to think that she established her basic point. Where does a major insider go to get a good review?

In the weekday New York Times, Erica Grieder was down on the book. (Grieder is the Economist’s woman-in-Texas.) As she started, Grieder called attention to a major historical blunder by Collins—an error which appears in the book’s second paragraph. Before long, Grieder was rolling her eyes about one of the ways Collins’ book messed with the great state of Texas:

GRIEDER (7/3/12): As Ms. Collins says, Texas has one of the highest teenage birthrates in the country, and three of the four state-approved health textbooks never mention the word ''condom.'' It's possible, however, that Texas teenagers are nonetheless aware of what condoms are. According to 2009 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of sexually active teenagers in Texas reported that they didn't use a condom during their most recent sexual encounter. Around the enlightened nation the figure was not much better, at 39 percent.

In this context, a 39 percent non-usage rate is worse than 42 percent rate. But can you build book which mocks a huge state around statistical distinctions like that?

Grieder seemed to say no. “In opting for the easy jokes, Ms. Collins misses the chance for a more substantive critique,” she judged—right in the New York Times!

(This was the headline atop the review: “Everything There Is Big, Stereotypes Included.”)

Lloyd Grove wasn’t much kinder in the Sunday Times' Book Review section—although, as a press corps insider, he observed a few etiquette points. (Earlier in his career, Grove worked for two major newspapers in Texas.) In the passage which follows, he pretends to believe Collins’ claims about the genesis of her book. And as is required by Hard Pundit Law, he remembers to say he's a “fan” of Collins’ “wisecracking style.”

That said, Grove joined Greider and other reviewers in citing some of Collins’ unfortunate intellectual tendencies. In this passage, he cites her fondness for drawing Texas-sized conclusions from tiny, utterly pointless events—events which have been chosen for the way they make (white) Texans seem like bozos:

GROVE (6/10/12): Herself a native Ohioan who has spent much of her professional life in Connecticut and New York, Collins is an admitted Johnny-come-lately to the Texas phenomenon, having been swept off her feet by two recent occurrences. The first was a spring 2009 Tea Party rally at which the fabulously coifed Perry invoked Sam Houston's famous warning against Texas' ''submission to any oppression'' and threatened secession as a possible response to President Obama's stimulus package. The second was a Texas headline sent by a friend: ''Man Allegedly Beat Woman With Frozen Armadillo.'' ''I was totally hooked,'' she writes.

So she set off on a whirlwind tour to discover the Lone Star State and its transcendent meaning, deploying a breezy, wisecracking polemical style familiar to fans (including me) of her twice-weekly column in The Times. Alas, she also exhibits a fondness for generalizing from eccentric particulars, positing what ''21st-century Texans'' must believe about this or that nutty idea, like dropping out of the United States to become a sovereign country—a notion that, despite Collins's insinuation to the contrary, was overwhelmingly rejected by Texans in a Rasmussen poll around the time of Perry's musings.

Surely, no one believes that Collins decided to write this book based on that frozen armadillo assault. But the pointless incident serves to make (white) Texans sound stereotypically dumb. As such, it fit that “wisecracking polemical style”—a style which one other major reviewer described as an agenda.

In the Washington Post, Brian Burroughs took the clever way out. He penned a satirical review of Collins’ book in the form of a memo from a Texas power broker. In the process, was Burroughs perhaps mocking Collins a tad? We thought it was hard to tell.

Where does an insider have to go to get a good review? Certainly not to the Texas Monthly, where James Henson didn’t feel the need to pose as a fan.

Henson isn’t a press corps insider. He’s an influential political science professor at the University of Texas—and, on balance, he isn’t a fan of Collins’ book. As he started, he joined Greider in complaining about Collins’ facile, wisecracking style. And he said that Collins doesn’t much know what she’s talking about:

HENSON (6/12): During Rick Perry's brief presidential campaign, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote frequently about the governor and his home state. Her columns took all of the obvious swipes—she was particularly taken with the time he seemed to flirt with the notion of secession and the time he shot and killed a coyote while jogging. But she rarely offered original insights about Perry or Texas, at least to anyone who had more than a passing acquaintance with either. Yes, it's utterly hilarious, and so telling, that Perry wears boots stitched with the words "freedom" and "liberty"! Got it.

Collins, for all her wit, epitomizes a coastal take on Texas that frowns on the state's political ideology even as it misses the underlying politics that actually explain things. And there are real consequences to this sort of blithe indifference. Collins's columns doubtless amused her loyal readers, but Team Perry long ago learned to use press criticism to its advantage. Every time the "liberal media" takes on Perry in clichéd terms, his surrogates cry, "Bias!" which electrifies the echo-chamber conservative networks that have supported his last two political campaigns.

As she breezes along, Collins is willing to work with armadillos and coyotes, along with Irish setter. But uh-oh:

According to Henson, Collins’ “clichéd” approach represents a gift to Texas right-wingers like Perry. For that reason, Henson said, “It’s disappointing to open Collins's new book...and discover that it deploys pretty much the same tone as her Times columns.”

The book is “chock-full of jokey little asides,” the disappointed reviewer notes. “But I suspect that even the fans who enthusiastically email me links to her latest Texas takedowns will admit that the devices that pep up an eight-hundred-word column become tiresome over the course of a two-hundred-page book.”

In fairness, Henson did have some good things to say about Collins’ padded book, which runs a bit less than 200 pages. On balance, though, he was negative. “Collins draws a one-dimensional portrait of the state,” he judges at the end of his piece. “This suits her agenda just fine but exposes her as a smart writer looking at Texas from too great a distance to convey much more than the obvious.”

(As he concludes, Henson really sticks in the porcupine quill: “When it comes to taking potshots at Texas, Collins is almost as quick on the draw as the governor she relies on for easy laughs. Unlike Rick Perry, though, she only wounds her prey.”)

Where does an insider have to go to get a fawning review? (Before our award-winning series is done, we will be happy to show you.) For ourselves, we aren’t fans of Collins’ work, although she occasionally writes a real column. That said, we won’t attempt to assess her whole book in the series of posts which will follow.

We won’t assess her sweeping claim about the way Texas is running the nation. We’ve mainly been struck by the parts of her book which deal with the Texas schools.

Collins devotes a large chunk of her book to the Lone Star State's public schools. In one major part of her (clichéd) presentation, she commits what can only be called an act of intellectual fraud. Granted, she states a familiar party line, one which may seem pleasing to liberals, in which she claims that excessive testing has harmed the Texas schools.

That said, it’s amazing to see a major journalist wallow in bogus and cherry-picked data to the extent Collins does. It’s amazing to see the liberal world keep accepting such scams as OK.

Collins claims to be upset about the way Texas is running its schools. She claims to be especially upset about the way Hispanic kids are getting educated in Texas—more precisely, about the way Hispanics kids are failing to get educated.

To our ear, her public comments about Hispanic kids have tended to sound rather odd, with just a hint of a high lady’s fear of a brown peril emerging up from the south. But for now, let's put that sense to the side! In the posts which follow, we’ll describe one of the basic ways our modern “journalism” works.

In fact, the Texas schools are relative high achievers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-praised “gold standard” of American educational testing. In her book and in her columns, Collins cites the NAEP as our most reliable educational data. But there’s little sign in her joke-ridden book that she has ever consulted the NAEP’s voluminous data about the Texas public schools, except in the search for misleading data-—data she plainly cherry-picked from the NAEP's bounty.

(It's always possible that one of her "expert sources" cherry-picked those data for her. We think of the expert Collins quotes making a flatly false claim.)

There's no sign that Collins knows what the NAEP data say about Hispanic kids in Texas. Jokey asides to the side, there’s also no sign that she cares.

Does it matter if the public is told the truth about our public schools? About the children who attend them? About our public school teachers?

About Hispanic kids in Texas, who outperform their counterparts in Collins’ more upscale home states?

Or are the children and teachers of Texas merely tools for this jokey insider’s use—useful tools with which she can fuel her “breezy polemical style?” Useful tools with which she can make us pseudo-liberals feel better, even as she tries to dumb us all the way down to the ground?

In major ways, this wisecracking book with the jokey asides constitutes an act of journalistic fraud. What kind of “journalist” functions this way?

What kind of “liberal world” is willing to let this shit happen?

Tomorrow: Some breezy, wisecracking history

How the Mousketeers hustle us kids!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2012

Alex Wagner adopts the position: Alex Wagner is spectacularly telegenic and she’s plenty smart.

For that reason, she is one of MSNBC’s gang of fiery new liberal Mouseketeers. They make us feel that we’re part of the gang. They’re youngish and they're lots of fun. They're our very best friends on TV.

If they came out one day yelling, “I’m Alex! I’m Chris!” would anyone be surprised?

When necessary, these Mouseketeers may adopt the company line. To see Wagner do so concerning the Chicago school strike, click over to Digby’s post.

One point is essential:

None of the people on that panel have any idea what they’re talking about! They don’t know what goes on in urban schools. Beyond that, they don’t care. They don’t understand the potential problems with the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers. They certainly don’t understand the reasons for the current strike.

They have no idea what they’re talking about. That said, they do know their scripts.

(In principle, we’re not opposed to using standardized tests as part of teacher evaluation. Key words there: In principle.)

After her initial presentation, Wagner adopts the corporatist line in every word out of her mouth. Here’s what she said in her second throw, the toss she made to John Heileman:

WAGNER (9/12/12): It’s worth noting, it’s hard to say, “Look, we don’t want to be evaluated. You just have to keep paying us what you’re paying us.”

Cute. You’ll have to watch to evaluate her tone, which we would describe as snide.

In her next contribution, Wagner snidely noted that Chicago teachers are being paid an average of $76,000. She forgot to say what she is paid for reciting the company line.

“Let me say one thing though,” the fiery TV liberal continued. “I mean, the narrative here is that somehow the teachers unions do not have the interests of children at heart. And the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of Chicago school children not in school doesn’t do much to ameliorate that image.”

Wagner snarked as she said it.

Once more, let’s stress a key point: Wagner doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know squat about low-income schools. She has no plan to learn.

Like everyone else in the insider press, she does know her approved narratives. For whatever reason, NBC and its cable arms have always been weirdly involved in pushing the Bloomberg/Gates “education reform” agenda. In this post at the Atlantic, Molly Ball helps explain how these alignments are coming to the Democratic Party itself:

BALL (9/8/12): [Michelle] Rhee, the controversial former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor known for her hard-charging style, has worked with Republican governors to push her reform ideas in states across the country. Her ongoing pitched battle with the teachers unions has put her at odds with one of the Democratic Party's most important traditional constituencies.

Yet there are signs that Rhee's persona non grata status in her party is beginning to wane—starting with the fact that the chairman of the Democratic convention, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, spoke at the movie screening Rhee hosted at the convention earlier this week. Another Democratic star, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, spoke at the cocktails-and-canapes reception afterward. Across the country, Democratic officials from governors like Colorado's John Hickenlooper to former President Clinton—buoyed by the well-funded encouragement of the hedge-fund bigwigs behind much of the charter-school movement—are shifting the party's consensus away from the union-dictated terms to which it has long been loyal. Instead, they're moving the party toward a full-fledged embrace of the twin pillars of the reform movement: performance-based incentives for teachers, and increased options, including charter schools, for parents.

For ourselves, we’re not unalterably opposed to performance-based pay. On balance, we think experimentation with charter schools has been quite constructive. We’re not opposed to everything Rhee says and does. As we've said in the past, we like some things she says.

But the highlighted text explains what’s happening as liberals adopt the “reform” position. For whatever reason, big-money people like the Bloomberg/Gates version of “education reform”—and Democratic candidates adore those big-money people! Cory Booker ran out to kiss big-money ass during the dust-up over Bain Capital.

Now, Booker is kissing big-money ass over “education reform.”

Beyond that, big-money people have been behind NBC’s weird advocacy for the Rhee/Bloomberg line—and Wagner is paid by NBC. We’ll have to guess that she is paid much more than that $76,000 per year. The future pay-days will be vast, as long as she colors inside the lines.

For whatever reason, Digby singles out Heileman for (well-deserved) criticism, thereby giving Wagner a pass. That’s also a typical part of this process. But if you want to see a liberal Mousekeeter cheerfully adopt the position, click over to Digby’s site and watch Alex Wagner sound off.

Wagner is scornful toward Chicago teachers. Please understand that one key point:

She has no idea what she’s talking about! Performing like a good Mouseketeer, she’s simply reciting her lines.

Two final points: When Wagner forgot to say how much she's paid, all the other panelists forgot to ask her.

At the New Republic, Richard Kahlenberg notes that the median salary for Chicago teachers is $68,000. He'll never make it on TV advancing points like that! (His whole piece is worth reading.)

Three things you can’t say in the mainstream press!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2012

David Brooks moves beyond Carlin: According to George Carlin, there were seven naughty words you weren’t allowed to say on TV.

According to us, there are quite a few things you aren’t allowed to say in the mainstream press.

Our mainstream press corps is very scripted. To cite just three examples, major insider journalists know they mustn’t discuss these facts:

Three things you aren’t supposed to say:
Our health care spending is massive as compared to the rest of the world.
Our nation’s test scores are on the rise.
There has been a tremendous amount of cheating on our high-stakes educational tests.

For the record, our test scpores have risen on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, where no one has had an incentive or, it is widely assumed, an opportunity to cheat.

Back to those mandated no-nos:

The first statement offends the powerful interests involved in the health care looting. The second statement, which is completely verboten, may tend to undermine the drive for a certain mandated type of “educational reform.”

Ditto for the third statement. Major journalists know that they aren’t supposed to say these terrible things.

David Brooks flirted with all three topics in his most recent column. Of the three forbidden statements, he came closest to making the first:

BROOKS (9/14/12): For example, between 1960 and 2006, health care spending increased twice as fast as G.D.P., but there were no comparable gains in health outcomes. A study by the Institute of Medicine estimates that 30 cents of every $1 spent on health care is wasted—about $750 billion a year.

Brooks cited a recent study which claimed that 30 percent of our health spending is wasted. Last Tuesday, the New York Times editorial board discussed that same study.

Brooks is flirting with a forbidden statement. On the other hand, he fails to say that we spend two to three times as much on health care, per person, as other developed nations. By this measure, that daring study only located half of our excess spending.

When it came to excessive health care spending, Brooks flirted with the forbidden. When it came to our nation's rising test scores, he did a much better job toeing the mandated line:

BROOKS (continuing directly): Over the past 50 years, spending on K-12 education has also skyrocketed. In 1960, Americans spent roughly $2,800 per student, in today’s dollars. Now we spend roughly $11,000 per student. This spending binge has not produced comparable gains in student outcomes. Education productivity is down, too.

If you’re a very careful reader (with prior knowledge), you may have seen that Brooks at least did not deny the major rise in our test scores. He just says that any such gains have not kept pace with the rise in spending. Please note: In accord with mandated pundit thinking, Brooks is eager to cite the rise in spending, though he hides or omits the rise in test scores.

He cites the big spending but not the big score gains. This is mandated conduct.

Finally, how about the role of educational testing in evaluating our teachers? In this passage, Brooks recites the mandated line about this idea. In the process, he forgets to mention an obvious problem:

BROOKS: Though the final details are still uncertain, there will also be a serious teacher evaluation process [in the Chicago public schools]. The various elements of those evaluations will change for each teacher year by year, but, as teachers progress in their careers, student performance will become more and more important. That’s vital because various studies have shown that evaluations that rely in part on test scores really do identify the best teachers. Teachers who score well on these evaluations really do produce measurable improvements in their students’ performance for years to come. Rigorous teacher evaluations will give reformers a profound measuring tool.

Finally, principals will apparently be given discretion to hire who they want, and they will be held accountable for the performance of their schools. This, too, is a big win for Chicago’s children.

Reciting another mandated line, Brooks is sure that it's a “big win” when principals get that discretion. But uh-oh! He forgets to mention an obvious problem with the use of high-stakes tests to locate “the best teachers.”

Sometimes, teachers cheat on high-stakes tests! For ourselves, we have been writing about this problem since the late 1970s, when we incomparably started discussing the topic in the Baltimore Sun. In the last few years, the situation became so obvious that it even some major journalists noticed.

The topic broke through in a few major newspapers. On the national level, USA Today was the highest achiever.

By now, everyone knows about this problem. But insider journalists like Brooks know that it can't be discussed!

Until a solution to this problem is devised, it’s hard to know how we can find the best teachers from high-stakes testing. Brooks knows he mustn’t say this. But then, it’s amazing how many basic things you aren’t told—as a result of insider group silence on the part of the mainstream “press.”

The Washington Post and the New York Times have agreed that you mustn’t be told about all that cheating by teachers and principals on our high-stakes tests. The Post has been the chief offender, but the Times is keeping things close.

Tomorrow, we’ll see this mandated silence observed in today's New York Times editorial. The simultaneous publication of these letters about student cheating adds a tragicomical note.

Carlin couldn’t say certain words. The scripted folk in our “mainstream press corps” can't discuss whole topics!

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE: On balance, these people just aren't very sharp!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2012

Epilogue—Who is the new public editor: Margaret Sullivan may turn out to be a superb New York Times public editor.

That said, we were puzzled by Sullivan’s first real column, the column which appeared in yesterday's paper. So were a bunch of Times readers.

In comments, those readers offered accurate gripes, from both the right and the left.

To her credit, Sullivan chose a very good topic—the issue of so-called false equivalence (false balance). In Sullivan’s words, “false balance is the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side.”

That was stated a bit unclearly, but you probably get the idea. Long ago, Paul Krugman described the problem a bit more colorfully. Just last year, he restated his famous complaint:

Some of us have long complained about the cult of ''balance,'' the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ''Views Differ on Shape of Planet.''

Fourteen months after Krugman's column appeared, Sullivan chose a very good topic for her first public editor piece. And not only that! Along the way, she made several good points about the problems involved in avoiding false balance. In this passage, she makes a good point about the types of demands partisans sometimes make:

SULLIVAN (9/16/12): You’re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts, goes the line from Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

The trick, of course, is to determine those facts, to identify the established truth. Editors and reporters say that is not always such an easy call. And sometimes readers who demand “just the facts” are really demanding their version of the facts.

“There’s a temptation to say there are objective facts and there are opinions, and we should only use objective facts,” said David Leonhardt, the Washington bureau chief. “But there’s a big spectrum. We have to make analytical judgments about the veracity of all kinds of things.”

As quoted, Leonhardt’s remarks are a bit fuzzy (that may be Sullivan's fault). But Sullivan’s highlighted points are quite valid.

In many cases, it isn’t easy to say what “the facts” actually are. Equally important: It isn’t always easy to say which of the various established facts should be included in a news report. That’s may be part of what Leonhardt meant or said in the longer remarks Sullivan excerpted.

Beyond that, partisans often want to see their version of “the facts.” In the heat of battle, they may not realize that their own idea of the “facts” may be a bit skewed.

Sullivan chose a very good topic; she made a few decent points. But uh-oh! In this, her maiden outing, the public editor went off the rails when she discussed a recent news report about which Times readers have complained. Beyond that, her logic and language were often quite fuzzy. This extended right to the end of her piece, at which point she authored a major, deeply unfortunate groaner.

Sullivan may turn out to be a great public editor. But yesterday’s column had us asking that question again:

Who the heck are these guys?

Sullivan’s effort went off the rails when she discussed the recent report about which readers complained. According to Sullivan, readers said that a front-page report in last Monday’s Times displayed a bit of false balance:

SULLIVAN: Readers are quick to cite examples. Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression—hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements—rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

Sullivan praised Bronner for having “made every effort to provide balance.” Since readers had complained about Bronner’s alleged false balance, this sounded somewhat strange.

At any rate, the Times had published a front-page report about the nationwide drive to establish “voter ID” laws. Somberg complained that Bronner ignored the Times’ own recent reporting. According to Somberg (no relation), the Times had established, in multiple reports, that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

In Somberg’s view, Bronner should have cited this fact in his front-page report about voter ID. He suggested the Times might be sliding back toward the cult of false balance.

That was the complaint. The wheels came flying off the cart when Sullivan offered these reactions:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

Good God! Sifton sounded like a high priest in the cult of false balance. Of course the Times should report what “each side” has said. The claim is that the Times should also include relevant facts about the validity of those claims.

As quoted, Sifton sounded thoroughly clueless. As quoted, Bronner made matters worse. Sullivan quoted him saying that there is “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud.” But even after making this statement, he only said that this information could have been included in his lengthy front-page report.

Somewhat vaguely, Bronner was quoted saying that the lack of evidence of (in-person) voter fraud isn’t “the core issue.” Whatever that means, it may even be true. But isn’t it a highly relevant fact, whether it’s the “core issue” or not?

Many citizens will be kept from voting by these new voter-ID laws. Given that serious downside, should readers be told that these laws address a problem which can’t be shown to exist?

Inevitably, that’s a matter of judgment. But Sifton sounded like an apostle of false balance—and Bronner was said to agree with what Sifton said. And uh-oh!

At no point did the public editor express her view of these Timesmen’s remarks. Did Sullivan agree with Sifton’s view? There was no way to tell.

To appearances, Sullivan thought that Sifton’s remarks made all the sense in the world. She didn’t show the slightest sign of getting the smell of false balance.

In comments, many readers complained about the part of Sullivan’s column which dealt with Bronner’s front-page report. Quite correctly, others complained about the gigantic, world-class groaner with which came at the end of her piece.

It probably isn't what Sullivan meant. But this highlighted statement is a world-class groaner:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): It ought to go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what to believe, to help them make their way through complicated and contentious subjects.

The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them, the better off the readership—and the democracy—will be.

Good God! That highlighted statement probably isn’t what Sullivan really meant. She probably meant something like this: Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what the relevant facts are.

But Sullivan clumsily chose to say that the Times should “help readers know what to believe.” Good God! Conservatives have been accusing the Times of that strategy since the dawn of time!

Sullivan’s work was fuzzy throughout. At the end, she emitted a major-league groaner—a groaner which will be repeated for years. In comments, conservatives rightly complained about that clumsy statement. Liberals rightly complained about her hear-no-false-balance reaction to the remarks of Sifton and Bronner.

What a debut for this new public editor! Who are these people, we found ourselves asking, after reading this very weak effort.

We’ll offer the answer we’ve given for years. Strange as it seems in a very large nation, these people just aren’t very sharp.

As we've long told you, our mainstream press is a D-plus elite! If you doubt that counterintuitive claim, just read yesterday’s column!

Visit our incomparable archives: Sullivan became editor of the Buffalo News in September 1999. Three months later, the News published one of the most appalling editorials in the whole of the mainstream press corps’ twenty-month war against Gore.

The press had established a very low bar. Sullivan’s editorial board managed to slither beneath it.

Everyone with a hand in that sad editorial should have been canned the very next day. In truth, these people just aren’t very sharp. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/11/12.

Kevin Drum makes a very good catch!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

A professor’s long nap in the woods: For all we know, Andrew Gelman is the nicest guy on earth. More on this point below.

But Gelman is also a professor—a political science professor, no less. We’ll grant you, he teaches at a lesser school.

But still.

Yesterday, Gelman offered a truly remarkable post at his Monkey Cage blog. Kevin Drum spotted Gelman's post. And he posted about it!

Gelman’s post shines a hot blinding light on a basic part of our political world. We’ll offer a full post on this topic tomorrow or Monday. Just so you’ll know, we got dinged by Kevin for our “obsession” with the press coverage of Campaign 2000. At least one (otherwise) well-informed commenter offered the same assessment.

So you’ll know, “obsession” is a bit like “shrill.” In modern parlance, it’s a term applied by those who were wrong to those who were right from Day One.

It’s considered obsessive to be right all along. Psychiatrically, it’s considered more balanced to discover the truth twelve years later!

Whatever! Kevin made a very good catch—and Gelman’s post is highly instructive. The wages of group silence are vast—willful group silence by “liberals.”

Just click here. Marvel at the basic idea one professor had never encountered! Our question:

If professors have never heard these things, what hope is there for the public?

As we said above: For our money, Gelman may be the world’s most honest person. In the face of pushback from his commenters, he quickly said that he may be wrong.

On this topic, the professor was wrong. But how in the world did that happen?

What was Romney talking about!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

The Post and the Times disagree: Late Tuesday evening, as Libya burned, the Romney campaign issued a statement:

''It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Question: To what “first response” from the Obama administration did this statement refer? On Thursday morning, it all depended on which major newspaper you happened to find yourself reading!

In the New York Times, Baker and Parker reported that Romney’s statement referred to the very first tweet from the Cairo embassy. That tweet was issued several hours before violence or protests began:

BAKER AND PARKER (9/13/12): Mr. Romney came under withering criticism for distorting the chain of events overseas and appearing to seek political advantage from an attack that claimed American lives. A statement he personally approved characterized an appeal for religious tolerance issued by the American Embassy in Cairo as sympathy for the attackers even though the violence did not occur until hours after the embassy statement. Mr. Romney on Wednesday said the embassy statement, which was disavowed by the administration, was ''akin to apology, and I think was a severe miscalculation.''

Mr. Obama fired back later in the day, accusing his opponent of politicizing a national tragedy. ''Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later,'' he told CBS News for its ''60 Minutes'' program. ''And as president, one of the things I've learned is you can't do that—that, you know, it's important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts, and that you've thought through the ramifications.''

The harsh exchanges had their origins on Tuesday night as Mr. Romney's team was following the increasingly volatile developments in the Middle East. The embassy statement, issued hours before protests in Cairo and the attack in Libya began, had tried to mollify Muslims upset at an American-made anti-Islam video. ''We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others,'' the statement said.

For Mr. Romney, whose 2010 book, ''No Apology,'' assailed Mr. Obama for what he saw as trying to placate America's enemies, the embassy statement rankled. When aides showed it to him, they said he reacted strongly to the notion of ''hurt'' religious feelings. In his mind, they said, the Obama administration was aligning itself with those who would do harm to the United States. Already on the defensive for not mentioning Afghanistan in his convention speech and losing some ground in recent polls, Mr. Romney saw an opportunity to draw a stark contrast.

In the Times, there was little doubt. The Romney statement on Tuesday night referred to the embassy’s initial tweet, which was issued “hours before protests in Cairo and the attack in Libya began.” This meant that Romney’s statement contained a bungled chronology when it complained that this “first response” failed to “condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions.”

The attacks had not occurred when that first tweet was issued.

In the Times, Romney had made a mistake. But in the Washington Post, the basic facts seemed to be different. In his front-page news report, Philip Rucker lightly suggested, but never said, that there was a problem with the chronology in Romney’s Tuesday night statement. But uh-oh!

In an accompanying graphic attributed to three other writers, the Washington Post plainly said that Romney’s statement on Tuesday night referred to the second tweet from the Cairo embassy. That tweet reaffirmed the embassy’s original statement—and it occurred after the violence had begun.

We can’t find this graphic on-line. (A different graphic is now being offered.) But we’re looking at Thursday morning’s hard-copy Post, and the graphic’s attribution is explicit. The graphic unmistakably says that Romney’s Tuesday night statement referred to the embassy’s second tweet. This meant that he had not made a chronological error. (Presumably, the logic was that the embassy’s second tweet was its “first response” to the violence.)

In the Times, the Romney statement had made a mistake; it had bungled the basic chronology. But in the Post, the chronology differed—and no mistake had occurred.

A similar dichotomy appeared Wednesday night on cable “news” channels. On MSNBC, liberals were constantly told about Romney’s chronological error. On Fox, the alleged error was barely mentioned.

No one seemed to make any effort to say how they knew their account was correct. But citizens heard very different facts, depending on where they were looking.

Increasingly, this is the way our press system works. We’re not calling this bad or wrong. Once again, we’re just saying!

What the heck are mortgage bonds!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

At the Times, you never find out: Binyamin Appelbaum writes the featured report on the front page of today’s New York Times.

Plainly, this is important stuff. Including a pair of bracing headlines, here’s how the news report starts:

APPELBAUM (1/14/12): Fed Ties New Aid to Jobs Recovery in Forceful Move/
With Shift of Policy, Officials Concede Flaws in Incremental Approach

WASHINGTON—The Federal Reserve opened a new chapter Thursday in its efforts to stimulate the economy, saying that it intends to buy large quantities of mortgage bonds, and potentially other assets, until the job market improves substantially.

Plainly, this is important stuff. This leads to today's top question:

What are “mortgage bonds?”

Trust us—almost nobody knows! That includes people who read to the end of Appelbaum’s report, which runs 1441 words.

What the heck are mortgage bonds? On page B4, in paragraph 25, Appelbaum finally gives the impression that he has tried to explain.

Or something. We're not quite sure:

APPELBAUM: The decision to focus on mortgage bonds reflects the Fed’s conviction that the housing market still needs help, and that lower rates on mortgage loans will produce broad economic benefits. Buying bonds drives down rates by increasing competition for the remaining bonds, forcing investors to accept a lower rate of return or move their money into other, riskier assets.

From that, a careful reader could conclude that buying mortgage bonds may lower the rate on mortgage loans. How does this happen? It seems that buying (some) mortgage bonds increases competition for the remaining mortgage bonds.

This forces investors to accept a lower rate of return or move their money into other, riskier assets!

What the heck are mortgage bonds? Very few Times subscribers would know how to answer that question. And not only that:

Even if they read all the way to end, few readers will have any idea what Appelbaum is talking about. Now will they understand the lingo they hear when this topic gets rattled on cable.

We’re not calling this a bad thing. As Paul Reiser said, we’re just saying!

WHO ARE THESE GUYS: Bob Dylan's pity!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

Part 4—Who the Benny Hill is Gail Collins: “Who are those guys?”

Famously, Paul Newman once asked. Often, his question pops into our heads when we gaze of the ways of our “press corps.”

Who are these deeply puzzling people? For decades, they have complained when major pols bore them silly with substantive speeches. Last week, Ruth Marcus became the latest ranking scribe to offer this strange complaint.

Who are these guys? Plainly, modern homo journalisticus is the script-reading animal. This Monday, Joe Nocera was rattling script about the nation's public schools. These scribes always know which facts to omit when they rattle their Approved Standard Stories.

Who are these people? They seem to have few actual interests aside from status and career. In 2002, Mark Leibovich was shoveling shit about John Kerry’s loud and bossy, much-too-rich wife.

By the start of this month, little had changed in this journalist’s work. It’s little wonder he described himself as “completely depressed.” Anyone who lived this way would likely bring on that problem.

They have few concerns beyond themselves. They rebel when pols present real concerns; they live their lives reciting scripts. Setting one phrase from the song to one side, might they remind you, a small tiny tad, of Bob Dylan’s famous poor immigrant?

DYLAN (1968): I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would've stayed home
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone
That man whom with his fingers cheats
And who lies with every breath
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise fears his death.

I pity the poor immigrant
Whose strength is spent in vain
Whose heaven is like Ironsides
Whose tears are like rain
Who eats but is not satisfied
Who hears but does not see
Who falls in love with wealth itself
And turns his back on me.

Let’s ignore the phrase about “do[ing] evil.” Sometimes, this punishing portrait comes to mind when we gaze on the work of our “press corps.”

We had planned to finish our current award-winning series with a look at Gail Collins’ recent alleged book, As Texas Goes. Last night, we reviewed the points we had planned to address.

We decided to hold this topic over for a fuller review.

Collins is a very high-ranking member of the upper-end press corps. In her new alleged book, she devotes a great deal of attention to the Texas public schools.

This summer, we said we would review her book as part of an award-winning back-to-school series. Last night, reviewing the things Collins wrote, we decided her work should not be reviewed in one post.

Who is this person? How could such a high-ranking “journalist” author such pitiful work about such a serious topic?

Next week, we’ll devote a week to Collins’ review of the Texas schools. For today, one more question comes to mind, along with one more part of Dylan’s famous portrait:

“I pity the poor immigrant,” Dylan wrote, “Who tramples through the mud/
Who fills his mouth with laughing/ And who builds his town with blood.”

Set aside the phrase about building towns with blood. Next week, we’ll do a very-special back-to-school-week report concerning what Collins wrote about the Texas schools—by extension, what she wrote about the children of Texas and about their teachers.

Here’s that one additional question:

You could argue that Collins fills her mouth with laughing as she turns her back on thee. While we’re talking about poor immigrants, how can it be that the “liberal world” tolerates work of this type?

Coming next week: Who are these guys? Gail Collins talks about schools!

In theory, we should love Kristof’s column!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2012

In reality, we don’t: We agree with several key points in Nicholas Kristof’s new column.

Kristof writes about the teachers’ strike in Chicago. We agree with something he says near the end of his column:

“Teaching is so important that it should be like other professions, with high pay and good working conditions but few job protections for bottom performers.”

We need to get rid of those “bottom performers.” More on that point below.

Beyond that, we don’t disagree with what Kristof says right at the start of his piece. But as early as paragraph 4, we’re starting to jump off the cart:

KRISTOF: The most important civil rights battleground today is education, and, likewise, the most crucial struggle against poverty is the one fought in schools.

Inner-city urban schools today echo the “separate but equal” system of the early 1950s. In the Chicago Public Schools where teachers are now on strike, 86 percent of children are black or Hispanic, and 87 percent come from low-income families.

Those students often don’t get a solid education, any more than blacks received in their separate schools before Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago’s high school graduation rates have been improving but are still about 60 percent. Just 3 percent of black boys in the ninth grade end up earning a degree from a four-year college, according to the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

We don’t disagree with that highlighted passage, although those highly standardized claims may be a bit overwrought. But we don’t like the point we've reached by paragraph 4.

Here we go again! Kristof implies that things are getting worse in the schools—that our educational system has become a structure to transmit inequity. That’s an odd thing to say in paragraph 4 if you’ve just recalled, in paragraph 2, that our educational system once ran on “separate but equal.”

Our test scores say blacks kids are doing much better than they did in those gruesome old days. But people like Kristof won't say that.

Darlings, it simply isn’t allowed! That fact muddies up the party line, the line he will pimp in this column.

We ought to be happy to see someone like Kristof calling for better low-income schools. But as someone who has actually taught in such schools, we’re always annoyed when lords like Kristof toss off bold commments like this:

KRISTOF: In fairness, it’s true that the main reason inner-city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty. Southern states without strong teachers’ unions have schools at least as lousy as those in union states. The single most important step we could take has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids.

How bold, how great Kristof is!

Upper-class hustlers who haven’t taught in low-income schools find it easy to call such schools “lousy.” As they do, they perform the conflation of the unconcerned—they imply that the good schools have the good test scores and the “lousy” schools don’t.

It ain’t necessarily so. In truth, those schools tend to be “lousy” for one major reason—the deserving children who attend them come from low-income, low-literacy backgrounds. They're years “behind” on the day they arrive. When people like Kristof call those schools “lousy,” they’re really referring to those kids—although, of course, they don’t understand that, never having chosen to go there.

When you read such columns by people like Kristof, you are reading scripts. To all appearances, he doesn’t much know what he’s talking about, though he speaks from a lofty perch.

Kristof employs a lot of sleight of hand in this column. Let’s just mention two problems:

First, Kristof is happy, as his class always is, to beat up on striking teachers. We don’t favor teachers’ strikes ourselves. But we have taught in low-income schools. We know how hard and depressing the task can be.

By way of contrast, Kristof’s a brand. He tours the world, tending to tell us about his own moral greatness. He goes to Aspen, where he learns the things his class wants said about schools.

What his class doesn’t want said is this: Those test scores seem to be much better! Until tools of power are willing to say that, we’ll advise you to be very careful about the rest of the crapshit they offer. Even when they cite the studies they may or may not understand!

We agree with Kristof on that one key point: Lousy teachers should be removed from low-income schools. We assume it isn’t all that hard to figure out who they are.

But almost everything else is hard when it comes to low-income schools. Until this brand name is willing to say that—until he’s willing to tell you that test scores have gotten much better—we’ll see him as the latest in a long line who are serving their billionaire leaders.

That’s how it worked when our schools were “separate but equal.” Does Kristof keep old ways alive?

WHO ARE THESE GUYS: They’re bored and depressed!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2012

Part 3—Who is Mark Leibovich: Why do our journalists get so annoyed when major pols talk about substance?

In a rational world, this reaction would make little sense. And yet, our journalists have been reacting this way at least since Bill Clinton took office. Last week, they keened and wailed and tore their hair when Clinton spoke for (gasp!) 48 minutes at the Democratic Convention.

His substance was great, Ruth Marcus said. But why did he make us listen to so much of it?

Why do our journalists react in this very strange way? We can’t exactly tell you. But if we had to take a guess, we would cite a recent piece by Mark Leibovich in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

Leibovich has been writing about politics for more than a decade. Back then, he wrote for the Washington Post. Today, he writes for the Times magazine.

Three Sundays ago, he shared his angst. We join his 4800-word complete waste of time in progress:

LEIBOVICH (6/2/12): This spring, for the first time since I started writing about politics a decade ago, I found myself completely depressed by a campaign. ''How am I ever going to get through it?'' is not the question you want to be asking yourself as you enter what are supposed to be the pinnacle few months of your profession.

But that's what I was doing to an alarming degree. Maybe it had to do with how bad off the country felt and how outmatched our politicians were by the severity of our problems and how obvious it was that the proverbial ''tone'' of Washington wouldn't change no matter who won. Or maybe it was because my daughters were getting older and starting to tune in more. When I drop them off at school, I sometimes watch them stare wondrously at the vice president's motorcade as it sirens past en route to the White House. It is a moment of fascination and reverence and one of the cool things about raising a family in what is otherwise the most disappointing city in America. I had also just been through a rough winter in which my 11-year-old suffered a head injury that brought some terrifying and unexplained side effects that incapacitated her for months. There's something about wondering whether your kid will ever be able to go back to school and live a normal life that makes a steady ingestion of super-PAC poison, talking-point Novocain and fund-raising spam a little harder to take.

Who knows? Maybe Leibovich should take some time off to tend to his daughter—or to himself. Having said that, we would also say this:

It’s hardly shocking if Leibovich is depressed by the state of the current campaign. Judging from the work he presents, he brings an empty, upper-class mind to the task of discussing our politics. He shows no sign of having any real interest in the real outcomes of our debates.

He doesn’t seem to care about much (except perhaps his daughter’s health). He has a very high platform from which he could speak.

But he seems to have nothing to say.

Lack of purpose will often result in the depression Leibovich claims—though it’s hard to take the claims he makes in this long, worthless piece seriously.

His piece was entitled, “Feel the Loathing on the Campaign Trail.” As such, it’s supposed to be some sort of homage to Hunter Thompson, who wrote the famous “Fear and Loathing...” way back in 72.

But do you believe the things this scribe says? As Leibovich starts his endless piece, he asks us to believe this:

LEIBOVICH: Sometime early last May, I began to have this goofy notion, which turned into a daydream and eventually became a recurring fantasy. It went like this: One morning, I would wake up to the news that the previous evening, with no advance warning to the media, Mitt and Ann Romney stopped by the White House at the invitation of Barack and Michelle Obama. No one was certain what happened while they were there or what they talked about or how it came together, though eventually some details would trickle out. The couples told funny stories from the campaign trail and shared pictures of their families. Mitt drank lemonade, and Michelle led a moonlit tour of her garden. Everyone ate hot dogs loaded with toppings, which inspired a cable christening of the ''Sauerkraut Summit.''

Do you believe a word of that? Do you believe that, sometime last May, Leibovich began to have a goofy notion which became a recurring fantasy? Do you believe that Leibovich had or has a recurring fantasy in which the Romneys go to the White House to enjoy a Sauerkraut Summit?

Sorry, but no—we don’t believe that. Nor do we believe that this represents straight talk:

LEIBOVICH (continuing directly): I knew this would never happen. It was dumb, naïve, unsophisticated and frankly out of character for me, someone with little patience for the Kabuki pleasantries of politics. It wasn't immediately clear what drove the fantasy—a desire for less free-floating hostility in the campaign, I suppose, but that seemed too easy. Whatever the case, I was yearning for something that felt big, or at least different, even if it was just a social visit. Something that messed with what the political know-it-alls refer to as the Narrative.

We don’t believe that either. That passage takes us right to the passage we quoted at the start of this post—the passage in which Leibovich claims that he feels completely depressed by the current campaign.

In fairness, there’s a lot to be depressed about in the current campaign—in the current state of our politics and our political journalism. A bit later on in his unlikely piece, Leibovich seems to show that he understands this fact.

Quite correctly, he refers to our current politics as “a giant inanity machine.” But look where this gloomy thought takes him:

LEIBOVICH: I am as cynical as any political reporter. And perhaps my recent craving for uplift was a sublimation of my own anger at being a small cog in a giant inanity machine. But I write and read and talk about politics because beneath that cynicism I understand that the stakes are high. On top of which, oddly, the job also keeps me patriotic, a byproduct of seeing—as I did at a Romney event in Ohio in July—things like a Korean War veteran in a wheelchair removing his insignia cap and struggling to his feet to salute the flag during the national anthem. (Immediately after which, I looked down at my BlackBerry to learn that the Democratic National Committee had just released a new ad ridiculing Ann Romney's dressage horse.)

But what's been completely missing this year has been, for lack of a better word, joy. Yes, it's always kind of fun to follow Joe Biden around and wait to hear what will come out of his mouth next, and who knows what Paul Ryan has hidden under his oversize jacket. But the principals don't seem to be experiencing much joy as they go through their market-tested paces. A kind of faux-ness permeates everything this year in a way that it hasn't been quite so consuming in the past. The effect has been anesthetizing and made it difficult to take any of the day's supposed gaffes, game-changers and false umbrages seriously. The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers' spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?

Leibovich says he knows that the stakes are high. But just like that, he’s back in the faux, complaining that the campaign lacks joy.

This campaign lacks many things; joy is the least of its shortfalls. Because our politics really is an inanity machine, the current campaign lacks clarity. It lacks serious, well-defined issues.

As a journalist with a major platform, Leibovich could, in theory, do something about those shortfalls. But no sooner has he noted the inanity of our discourse than he is living off it again, making references to Joe Biden’s gaffes and Paul Ryan’s oversized coat.

Those themes are the basic stuff of that inanity machine! Leibovich complains that the DNC wastes our time on Ann Romney’s horse. He then quickly wastes our time on two other standard distractions.

Go ahead! Read this long, painfully pointless piece, in which a major political journalist pretends to be wander the countryside, looking for joy in the current campaign. The piece is as fake as a twelve-dollar bill. And it’s written by someone who, in theory, could have been using his oodles of space to write about something worthwhile.

But Leibovich has never been about worthwhile reporting—about things that actually matter. Long ago and far away, he started a long, snarky piece for the Washington Post like this:

LEIBOVICH (6/2/02): Teresa Heinz is getting up a full head of rage while her husband, Sen. John Kerry, fidgets.

They are in the living room of their Georgetown home, where Heinz has lived ever since her late first husband, John Heinz, came to Washington in 1971 as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. In the front entrance, the first things a visitor sees are two framed photos of Teresa Heinz cuddled with tall, smiling men with big heads of brown hair: In one is John Kerry, in the other John Heinz.

She still calls John Heinz "my husband" and doesn't always correct herself—"my late husband”—even when Kerry is around. She still wears the blue sapphire engagement ring that Heinz gave her.

But John Heinz's enduring presence in Teresa's life is best revealed when someone slights his memory. Which, at least indirectly, is why she and Kerry are now in mid-bicker.

Hiss! Hiss-spit! Hiss-spit! Mee-ow! This profile ate 4800 words. In Washington’s fatuous inner circle, it created a whole lot of buzz.

Here’s the reason:

By June 2002, it was time to start the stupid shit about Kerry and his hopelessly bitchy wife, who was also much too rich. The mainstream “press corps” had devoted ten years to poking its long nose all around in the underwear drawer of the Clintons’ marriage.

Kerry was going to run in 04! Darlings! Let’s chat about him!

That was the garbage this scribe was presenting as his nation was moving toward war with Iraq. Today, he pictures himself dropping his daughter off at her school as emblems of power screech by on the street. Frankly, we wondered what neighborhood Leibovich lives is; how much money he is paid by the Times; and what school his daughter attends.

We wondered about his class status.

Why have our journalists spent twenty years complaining when pols give those boring speeches? We can’t answer that question, but we’ll offer a guess:

They possess boring upper-class heads. They simply don’t care about too many things. They have theirs, and they'd like to have yours.

They don't care about folks who aren't like them.

Throughout history, upper-class courtiers have always been boring and bored—and depressed. Today, this famous old syndrome is seen all through our upper-end “press corps.”

Tomorrow: Back to school with Gail Collins