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The NYT Stretches the Truth Again
As a professor, I receive a free subscription to TimesSelect, which gives me access to the NYT’s subscription-only op-ed page. Today, I received this email:
Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,
We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.
The Times’s Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers.
Why the change?
Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it. . . .
Like anything written by the NYT, a little fact-checking is in order. The NYT did not launch TimesSelect back in the early-Al-Gore-invention-days of the Internet, but rather just 2 years ago. Accordingly, it is not credible to say that the Internet has evolved to become more open in any meaningful sense since the advent of TimesSelect. Rather, as the NYT’s VP tacitly concedes here, the real reason behind the change is that the NYT made a bad business decision with TimesSelect--that is, they could make considerably more money by relying on ad revenue rather than restricting access to their op-ed content.
I don’t expect them to disclose their profit motives in an email canceling the service. But their excuse seems particularly lame and transparent, particularly given the fact that they didn’t need to give a reason at all.
Posted by Robert Alt | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 9/19/2007 9:22 AM
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Is Fred in Over His Head?
Dick Morris provides a lot of evidence that he is. Certainly Fred has looked strangely clueless so far when not relying on a prepared text. My own view is that he’s smarter than he’s sounded, and he might still get himself up to speed. He needs to work very hard and very fast, because he really, really wants to be president. According to Dick, the only plausible Republican candidates are McCain and Giuliani, because the only plausible Republican issue is being tough on terrorism. He also thinks Hillary will probably win. I agree with him on the the latter point, but not the former.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [255] | 9/19/2007 8:00 AM
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Popular, Practical Manliness
Here’s POPULAR MECHANICS’ list of 25 skills every man should know. I know about 4 of them. If Dr. Pat is right that our techno-prosperity is on the eve of destruction, I don’t have much of future.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [249] | 9/19/2007 1:28 AM
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A Study Shows
...that what scientific studies claim to show is more likely to be false than true.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 9/19/2007 12:59 AM
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Belgian National Identity Is Toast
Not that anyone really cares that much, but relations between the Flemish and the Walloons have turned uglier than ever.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [262] | 9/19/2007 12:54 AM
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Civic literacy again
Here’s a story on this report, which you can download from the site. You can also take the quiz. There is arguably a connection between civic literacy (whether or not this quiz assesses it) and civic engagement (what I might call self-government). Many institutions, including my own, are eager to promote civic engagement. Is there a similar eagerness to promote civic literacy? Do we assume that engagement encourages literacy, or vice versa? Inquiring minds want to know. Update: Jon Schaff: what he said. I too scored 58 of 60, though my mistakes were in the economics section.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [260] | 9/18/2007 2:03 PM
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A Berry Good Blog
Here’s a blog started by some Berry College government majors on the upcoming election. You will enjoy the rather extreme Republican partisanship, as well as the attempt to broaden the ethnic appeal of "O’Bama." Please contribute!
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 9/18/2007 1:39 PM
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Bloom-bashing
Liberals are apparently permitted to criticize the private lives of homosexuals who take some conservative positions, and to call the toleration of this private behavior by other conservatives hypocrisy, at least if this screed is any indication.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [241] | 9/18/2007 10:25 AM
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Is Heath Care a Winning Issue for Republicans?
According to one expert in winning, Karl Rove, it is. But only if the Republicans have a bold, market-based alternative to HillaryCare that addresses the legitimate criticisms of our present system. Opinion on this issue, in my view, is sliding in the Democratic direction, and mere "Be very afraid" criticism of Hillary will be ineffective.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [247] | 9/18/2007 10:06 AM
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Nobody Here But Us Incrementalists
Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago law school says that John Paul Stevens: a) was at the Supreme Court’s center in 1980, with four justices more conservative than he was and four more liberal; b) is the most liberal justice on the Court in 2007; and c) this change came about not because Stevens made “any significant change in his own approach, but because of a massive shift in the Court’s center of gravity.” Sunstein deplores this massive shift: Both “the Court and the nation benefit from a range of views and approaches, and something has gone badly wrong if the Court has a strong right wing without any real left.” Sunstein’s position on the idea of the Court reacquiring a real left wing, however, is a little difficult to pin down. On the one hand, he calls William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the two justices farthest to the left of John Paul Stevens in 1980, “visionaries, offering a large-scale sense of where constitutional law should move. . . . They wrote in clear, bold strokes . . . [and] their opinions pressed the Court toward moderation . . . ” On the other, Sunstein’s essay has an obligatory “to-be-sure” paragraph, which says “the Court does best if it proceeds cautiously and incrementally, with respect for the elected branches of government. Marshall and Brennan, no less than Scalia and Thomas, tried to use the Constitution to impose a contestable political vision on the nation.” It would not be hard to compile a list of cases where Marshall and Brennan disdained both caution and elected officials in order to impose their contestable vision. Roe v. Wade would be at the top of the list. Sunstein numbers himself among the liberal constitutional scholars who believe Roe was wrongly decided, if I correctly understood remarks he made at the recent American Political Science Convention. He has also, if memory serves, written of his misgivings about Missouri v. Jenkins. In that 1990 decision the Court upheld the gold-plated school reform plan imposed by a district judge, designed to achieve racial balance in the Kansas City school district by making all the schools magnet schools, irresistible to white suburban families. The Supremes also ruled that the voters of the city had no right to vote thwart the judge’s sweeping plan by voting against the 100% increase in property taxes it required . The decisions where Marshall and Brennan didn’t get their way are as scary as the ones where they did. Had the visionary duo found one more vote, the Court would have ruled, in Milliken v. Bradley, in favor of a school busing program that would have sent children careening around the entire Detroit metropolitan area like black and white ping pong balls. Similarly, they were one vote away from a majority to rule the Hyde Amendment unconstitutional in Harris v. McRae. Their position was an extension of the logic of Roe: just as the Constitution forbids state legislators from outlawing abortion, it prohibits Congress from defunding it, as long as there’s a Medicaid program that funds lots of other surgical procedures. (The centrist John Paul Stevens was one of the dissenters who agreed with Brennan and Marshall on this point.) I don’t know Prof. Sunstein’s position on these cases. However he might have voted, I think there is a legitimate question whether his desire for a “range of views and approaches” on the Court has more to do with convenience than principle. I don’t recall, that is, any liberal scholar or journalist worrying 30 years ago that something had gone badly wrong in a Court with a strong left wing but no real right. The sudden discovery of the benefits of a balanced Court strikes me as no less asymmetrical than the liberal position on the importance of precedent, which boils down to the position that conservatives have a moral duty to uphold past decisions that liberals like, and liberals have a moral duty to overturn past decisions conservatives like. I’m unaware of Prof. Sunstein’s career plans, though assume that every prominent constitutional scholar believes he would be flattered by black robes. In the event that he is nominated to the federal bench by Pres. Hillary, and in the event there are any Republicans left on the Senate Judiciary Committee to make things interesting, I hope someone will ask him to elaborate on the idea that William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall are liberal heroes with whom modern liberals fundamentally disagree.
Posted by William Voegeli | Link to this Entry | Comments [242] | 9/17/2007 9:51 PM
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Antietam
In addition to being Constitution Day, September 17 is the anniversary of the bloodiest day in American history. On September 17, 1862 near Sharpsburg, Maryland, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac suffered combined casualties of nearly 26,000, including nearly 5500 dead. Although tactically a draw, the fact that Robert E. Lee had been turned back after a string of victories beginning in the spring permitted Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the character of the war. I wrote a piece on Antietam as part of my series on the Civil War for Ashbrook. It is here
Posted by Mackubin T. Owens | Link to this Entry | Comments [250] | 9/17/2007 12:35 PM
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New Web Site on the Ratification of the Constitution
Today is Constitution Day. It is the 220th Anniversary of the day in 1787 when the United States Constitution was signed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and sent to the states to the ratified. Here at the Ashbrook Center, we celebrate the Constitution all year long. But on Constitution Day, we always do a few special things.
Today we are launching a new web site on the ratification of the Constitution. This great site is the result of the work of Professor Gordon Lloyd of Pepperdine University and of Roger Beckett. The site is by far the best Internet resource on the ratification of the Constitution.
This new site tells the story of the out of doors debates over the Constitution in pamphlets and in newspapers by the Federalists and Antifederalists. It is the story of the indoors debates in the thirteen state ratifying conventions and the formal struggle over whether the proposed Constitution should be approved.
The site contains an extensive timeline of the events related to the ratification of the Constitution and a map showing the Federalist/Antifederalist vote across the thirteen states. There are introductions and day-by-day summaries of the state ratifying conventions in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. Also available is the full five-volumes of Jonathan Elliot’s Debates in the Several State Conventions, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. There are biographies of the leading founders in each state involved in ratification, and in case you ever get lost, there is an overview table with links to every major part of the site.
This is not only the most comprehensive site on the ratification, it is also the clearest, with wonderful introductions and explanations provided by Gordon Lloyd.
Like everything we do, it is useful for teachers, students, and citizens alike. I encourage you to visit the site at: http://www.TeachingAmericanHistory.org/ratification.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [239] | 9/17/2007 9:49 AM
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The Constitutional Convention
On this Constitution Day, don’t forget to take a look at our web site on the Constitutional Convention. Also working with Gordon Lloyd, this web site has become known as the finest resource available on the Constitutional Convention. (It’s rather popular too. Type Constitutional Convention into Google and ours is the first site that appears.) In addition to the many other features on the site, you can see Gordon Lloyd’s summary of what happened on this day 220 years ago as well as Madison’s Notes of the Debates on September 17, 1787. And don’t miss one of the highlights of the site, the interactive painting showing the Scene at the Signing of the Constitution.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 9/17/2007 9:49 AM
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Lesson Plans on the Constitutional Convention
For the past three years, John Moser, Associate Professor of History at Ashland University, and the Ashbrook Center have been working with the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce lesson plans for their EDSITEment web site. Today the NEH is launching three of those lesson plans on the Constitutional Convention. Written by Christopher Burkett, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashland University, and Patricia Dillon, an AP US History teacher at Tug Valley High School in Williamson, West Virginia, the three lessons cover The Road to the Constitutional Convention, The Question of Representation at the 1787 Convention, and Creating the Office of the Presidency. You can also view all of the lesson plans created by the Ashbrook Center as a part of this project.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 9/17/2007 9:48 AM
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Happy Constitution Day!
Today is Constitution Day. You can read some stories about this brand new holiday--celebrated only since 2004--here and here. Here’s a rather depressing survey focusing on the state of high school students’ First Amendment knowlege, a companion to the survey about which I blogged here. (Here is a copy of the survey form; unfortunately I can’t at the moment get access to a full survey report.) Last (and perhaps least), the kind folks at The American Spectator Online have generously posted a short piece I wrote formalizing some of the thoughts I posted here last week. This new survey confirms my thought that we have a long way to go in our efforts at civic education.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [193] | 9/17/2007 6:03 AM
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Berkowitz on Lilla
Peter has the first smart and penetrating review of Mark’s book so far. A book that doesn’t really come to terms with Strauss or do justice to America can’t be all good. As I said before, there’s a third, non-stillborn alternative to political theology and Hobbesian political philosophy that gives both religion and politics their due, and our Founders’ (certainly imperfect but real) illumination by that alternative elevates them and their Constitution above what Lilla admits is simplistic and humanly unsatisfying Hobbesian psychology. (Thanks to Ivan the K.)
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [217] | 9/16/2007 10:05 PM
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