A "Public Lives" profile of the heiress Agnes Gund runs in the metro section of today's New York Times under the headline, "Rich, Yes, but Even More Different: Liberal and Fun." The headline seems to imply that most rich persons are conservative and not fun. In fact, there are plenty of rich persons who are liberal, in part because they are so rich that they can afford to pay high taxes and still be really rich. Or because they can afford to pay lawyers to create trusts and structure their holdings to avoid taxation. They can also afford to send their children to private school, so they are not particularly passionate about conservative-backed radical reforms of public schools. And they can afford to live in rich, safe neighborhoods in buildings with doormen, so they are not particularly passionate about conservative efforts to get tough on crime. This is the breed known as the "limousine liberal."
The Times profile reports that Ms. Gund "is known for unconventionality in the things that she chooses to buy and the causes that she supports. (She says she is 'pro-choice'; and advocates gun control, for instance.)" Wow, those are two unconventional positions for a wealthy New York liberal woman: support for gun control and abortion rights. Who could have possibly imagined! How does Ms. Gund stand the social pressure from all those pro-gun, anti-abortion-rights wealthy New York liberals? How unconventional!
Come on.
Bad for the Country: Under the headline "Political Missteps by Organized Labor," the New York Times has an editorial this morning denouncing the AFL-CIO for daring to speak up for its own rights to free speech. "The union move is bad for the country," the Times declares. The law the AFL-CIO opposes would ban the labor federation from running ads mentioning political candidates in the 60 days before elections. The Times actually favors this ban, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. One can only imagine how the Times would react to a federal law that aimed to ban the newspaper from running editorials or news articles that mentioned the political candidates in the 60 days before elections. The editorial doesn't even attempt to explain why the unions should have less of a right to voice their opinions than the Times does. The closest the Times gets is the assertion that the flood of money into politics is "corrupting." The money is spent overwhelmingly on speech and on television commercials that make political arguments. How more speech is "corrupting," and how limiting the rights of non-New York Times speakers is somehow less corrupting, the Times leaves unexplained.
Lost in the Middle East: The lead, front-page article in today's New York Times reports on Secretary of State Powell's trip to the Middle East. "Talks between Israel and Syria broke down last year during the Clinton administration, which held to the idea that it was possible to conduct only one track of peace talks at a time," the Times reports. The Clinton administration may have convinced the Times that it held the idea "that it was possible to conduct only one track of peace talks at a time," but Israel, Syria, the PLO and Jordan all seem somehow unconvinced, as did the American diplomats who helped conduct those peace talks simultaneously.
The same Times article claims that arming Iraqi opposition movements "would be very unpopular in the region." Well, one reason it might be unpopular is that the leading opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, stands for principles of freedom and democracy, which run counter to the principles of most governments in the region. A newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, in the one free and democratic country in the region, Israel, has in fact been editorializing in favor of arming the Iraqi National Congress. Another reason the idea may be unpopular is that the Clinton administration botched it the last time around. The Times makes this observation about unpopularity in the region as though it were spoon-fed it by General Powell, without any critical thinking about whether some countries, such as Jordan, Turkey and Israel, would come around to the idea if it were undertaken with some seriousness by Washington.
Subject-Verb Agreement: A dispatch from Tel Aviv on the front page of this morning's New York Times contains the following sentence: "The enticement to enter into a political settlement with a man long considered Labor's ideological arch-enemy are eight cabinet seats, about a third of the total, including the high-profile ministries of defense and foreign affairs." The Times needs to work on its subject-verb agreement. The subject of the sentence is "enticement," and the verb should be the singular "is," not the plural "are."