What is it with the New York Times that it can't get names right? Today's glaring error comes in the lead, front-page story about action in the Florida Legislature. The article reports that one of the legislature's legal experts "acknowledged the political risks of a special session in a Nov. 25 op-ed article in The New York Times." The news article goes on to quote from that Nov. 25 op-ed article and to attribute the quote to "Robert Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley." Professor Yoo, in fact, is named John C. Yoo, as the Times might realize if it checked the byline of that November 25 op-ed piece. He's a relatively well-known law professor. It's just mind-boggling that the Times editors can't get Mr. Yoo's first name right in a Times news story when quoting from an op-ed piece that Mr. Yoo himself wrote a few days before in their own newspaper.
'Givson, Dunn': Another article in today's Times about the election-related legal maneuvering reports on the briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Times article reports that "The Bush brief was signed by 14 lawyers led by Theodore B. Olson of Givson, Dunn & Crutcher." The law firm's name is Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, not "Givson." With a "b," not a "v."
Disparate Impact: The New York Times takes victimology to new levels today, applying the troubling legal doctrine of "disparate impact" to punch-card ballots and gym classes. An article in the national section runs under the headline, "Racial Pattern in Demographics of Error-Prone Ballots." The first paragraph of the story reports that in Florida, "the majority of the state's black voters, Vice President Al Gore's most reliable voters, stalwart supporters, cast their ballots on punch cards that are more prone to voter error and miscounts." Never mind the redundancy of "reliable voters, stalwart supporters." It turns out, if you read further in the story, that the majority of white voters also live in counties that use punch-card ballots. The Times manufactures a civil rights violation out of the fact that slightly more blacks live in those punch-card counties than an even distribution of blacks across the state would dictate. The newspaper paraphrases a history professor as saying the racial variations "could violate federal law, even if the variations were not intentional or politically motivated."
The logical extension of this reasoning can be seen in the "Lessons" column on the Times education page. The column is about a decline in the number of schools requiring students to take daily physical education classes. The article also reports that more schools are installing vending machines that sell candy, salty snacks and soda. "Such trends hurt minority pupils the most," the Times claims. "Black and Hispanic youths have the lowest rates of participation in physical activity, both inside and outside the school, contributing to a disparity in obesity: while 24 percent of white adolescents are obese, the rate is 31 percent for blacks and 30 percent for Hispanics. This places minority children most at risk for health problems when they become adults, with higher death rates from inactivity."
There you have it, according to the Times: using punch-card ballots discriminates against blacks. Discontinuing gym classes and installing vending machines in schools discriminates against not only blacks but also Hispanics. Combine the trends and you could end up with a novel legal theory that, under the Voting Rights Act, would allow dead blacks to vote for Al Gore as president; after all, if it weren't for the discriminatory discontinuation of gym classes, they might still be healthy enough to be alive and voting. And, as the Times expert in the punch-card ballot reminds us, "If minorities have less of an opportunity to participate fully in the process, that's a direct violation of the Voting Rights Act."