The metro section of today's New York Times carries an article on how President Bush's education plan would affect New York City. The article has an oddly crimped view of the plan, considering it mainly not in terms of how it would affect students and their families, but in terms of how it would affect the government-run school monopoly.
"The city could lose tens of millions of dollars in federal education aid," the article warns. This is false. The city isn't going to lose any money. In the Bush plan, the money follows the student and would stay in the city. It could just get spent by the student's parents at a school run by someone outside the government school monopoly. It's not "the city" that could lose tens of millions of dollars, it's the government-run school monopoly.
What's amazing is how frank the city's edu-crats are in acknowledging that they are judging the Bush plan not by its effect on children but rather its effect on the government-run school monopoly in which the edu-crats are the prime stakeholders. "The remedy that he proposed has to actually help the system. We won't know that until we see the details," the New York schools chancellor tells the Times, which dutifully records his comments while showing no sign of understanding the significance of his remark.
Shocking: An editorial in the New York Times today denounces President Clinton for his pardon of financier Marc Rich, calling the action "a shocking abuse of presidential power" and "irresponsible." It's funny how the Times gets all worked up about the pardon of a rich person whose "crimes" probably more accurately fell into the category of civil infractions. The newspaper's editorialists haven't uttered a word of objection to the pardon of Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground who was serving a long sentence because of her suspected role in a 1981 robbery of a Brink's truck. Two police officers and a guard were killed in the robbery, according to the New York Post. For the New York Times, it seems, becoming rich in any way other than by inheriting a newspaper is an unpardonable offense.
Distortion: Another editorial in today's New York Times attacks President Bush for asserting that taxpayer funds shouldn't be used to pay for abortions. It accused Mr. Bush of committing a "distortion of the issue." The Times says, "Since 1973 federal law has barred American foreign aid money from being used to promote or pay for abortions. What is at stake is a Reagan-era ban, extended during the Bush years and lifted by President Clinton in 1993, on any aid to groups that use their own money to provide or promote abortions." The Times doesn't seem to recognize that money is fungible. Under the Times principle, America should start sending foreign aid to Iran, because, after all, the money the Iranians would be using to build nuclear missiles and launch terrorist attacks against Israeli and American targets wouldn't be American money, it would be "their own money."
Bloody: Today's New York Times metro section carries a "Public Lives" profile of an aide to Hillary Clinton, Tamera Luzatto. The article says, "To succeed, Mrs. Clinton must reach across party lines, and that, too, is something Ms. Luzzatto knows about, in the most personal way. Three years before her husband's death, he had open-heart surgery. One hundred and twenty of Ms. Luzzatto's Senate and staff colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, donated 56 pints of blood." These numbers don't make much sense. Blood donors usually give about a pint in a session, so it's strange that 120 donors would only yield 56 pints of blood. And a 150-pound man has only 11 or 12 pints of blood, so there's still a lot of donated blood unaccounted for beyond that needed for Ms Luzzatto's husband. There's a commercial blood supply in this country, and open-heart surgery is fairly common, so it's not entirely clear why a special blood drive would have been launched in advance of this surgical procedure. It is, as the Times puts it, a "personal" subject, but if the Times is going to go there, it would be better off doing it in a way that doesn't leave readers with all these unanswered questions.