A "media memo" in the national section of yesterday's New York Times mocked a cable news channel for talking about the weather forecast in connection with the election. The article ran under the headline "All News, All the Time, Even if There Isn't Any." It began, "With the race so tight and the finish line so near, it was time to consult the map. No, not the Electoral College map. The weather map." The article spoke drily of the map's coloration in "areas where the network's experts in the obscure science of politico-meteorology predicted conditions would 'strongly favor' one candidate or another." And the article sympathetically quoted an anchorman at the network as skeptically calling the whole effort "the ultimate trying to read the tea leaves."
So what should crop up in the lead, front-page presidential election story in this morning's New York Times, just one day after the Times published its "media memo" mocking "politico-meteorology" as an example of "all news, all the time, even if there isn't any"? Sure enough, two paragraphs reporting on the weather.
"In fact, Democratic strategists are deeply concerned about the weather, fearing that rain could suppress turnout in crucial Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin," today's Times article reports. 'The weather will always be a factor in turnout in Democratic neighborhoods,' said Donna Brazile, Mr. Gore's campaign manager and meteorologist for the day. 'There's a Canadian cold front, there's some rain, there's a storm that started in the Pacific, there's a storm that came out of Texas.'"
I.R.S. Envy: In a fulsome ode to Washington published in today's New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman claims, "Indeed, had Mr. Bush actually traveled abroad more than twice he would have discovered that what foreigners envy us most for is precisely: Washington. That is, our institutions, our courts, our bureaucracy, our military, and our regulatory agencies -- the S.E.C., the Federal Reserve, the F.A.A., the F.D.A., the F.B.I, the E.P.A., the I.R.S., the I.N.S., the U.S. Patent Office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency."
Mr. Friedman might consider, for one thing, that "our military" is not based in "Washington," but at the Pentagon, which is in Northern Virginia. But for another thing, what "foreigners" is he talking to? Probably not any who have had personal dealings with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is one of the most unfriendly and red-tape-laden bureaucracies in the entire federal government. The editor of Smartertimes.com has traveled the world some, though admittedly not as much as Mr. Friedman, and the editor is hard-pressed to remember a conversation with a foreigner in which the foreigner said, "You know, what I really admire and envy most about America is the Federal Emergency Management Agency." If the foreigners Mr. Friedman talks to really say things like this, maybe word hasn't reached them of the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration has failed miserably to prevent massive delays in air traffic; that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's crime lab has been embroiled in a massive scandal; that thousands of Internal Revenue Service employees are tax scofflaws; that the Federal Emergency Management Agency totally botched the rebuilding effort after the big Los Angeles earthquake. An intelligent foreigner would say, "What I really envy most about America is that its founders created a constitutional system of checks and balances designed to limit government so that the people would be free of the tyranny of unduly powerful courts, bureaucrats and regulatory agencies."