The Daily Grasshopper

It's well-known among politicos and their flacks that if you want to bury a news item, your best bet is to release it late on a Friday afternoon. The Saturday papers are the least-read papers of the week, and those in the know are well aware of it. That's why I always read the papers very carefully on Saturday. Another tactic that is often used by those with something to hide is to lessen the impact by getting it out while something else big is going on (like the death of JFK, Jr. or the Columbia shuttle explosion), so it will get lost in the shuffle.

So, anything important happen yesterday? Well, looking through the New York Times, you see a fair amount of shuttle clean-up coverage, more digestion of the Powell presentation at the U.N., and, of course, heightened terror alerts. It's not until you get to the very back page, A32, that you read this little headline: "Agency Ends Pursuit of Cheney Energy Panel Data." You can read the entire article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/politics/08CHEN.html

The upshot of the story is that the General Accounting Office, which is the government watchdog group for wasteful spending, is not going to appeal a ruling that allowed our vice-president, Dick Cheney, to keep a bunch of material about who crafted the administration's energy policy a secret. Perhaps you're familiar with the details of the case. If not, you can read more about it here:

http://www.consumersunion.org/telecom/chendc501.htm (from Consumer Reports - hardly a radical source...)

http://www.public-i.org/story_01_013102.htm (Center for Public Integrity)

So, now that Republicans control both houses of Congress, I guess we don't have to worry about any more pesky investigations into what the White House is doing. I don't know about you, but it sort of sounds like letting the fox guard the hen house to me. At least Judicial Watch is going to stay on Cheney's case. You can read their statement on yesterday's decision here:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/3140.shtml

If you don't hit the link, you should know that the Chairman and General Counsel of Judicial Watch, Larry Klayman, had this to say about Cheney's failure to divulge the information being sought:

"With the impending invasion of Iraq, the very serious matters before the court take on even greater relevance, given that Vice President Cheney was developing our nation’s energy policy with industry executives and lobbyists in secret. Perhaps the Cheney Task Force records will help explain why only certain countries seem to be ‘off limits’ in this growing international crisis. The American people deserve straight answers and accountability from their government, not secrecy, closed-door meetings and cover-ups."

Sound like an item for page 32 to you? It apparently does to the editors at the New York Times. They also reported today on yesterday's leak from the Justice Department of what's being called "Patriot Act II," which contains even more attacks on our constitutional rights. And there's also the story, which appeared on the front page of the Boston Globe, about the fact that the dossier the British government supplied to Colin Powell for his speech last Wednesday at the U.N. was full of material that had been plagiarized from a graduate student. You should read those articles:

"Report on Iraq didn't credity U.S. scholar"
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/039/nation/Report_on_Iraq_didn_t_credit_US_scholar+.shtml

"Justice Dept. eyes expansion of its domestic surveillance"
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/039/nation/Justice_Dept_eyes_expansion_of_its_domestic_surveillance+.shtml

Now, the leak from the Justice Department happened yesterday. Were they trying to minimize its impact - sort of float it out there and see what happens? I don't know. As for the GAO story, is it a coincidence that they decided to call off the dogs on a Friday afternoon? I doubt it. The timing of the plagiarism story is probably straight up - the speech was given on Wednesday, and "an antiwar activist" (those nervy little buggers) sniffed out the deception and alerted the opposition in Parliament.

Then there are these two items in the Times' "Arts & Ideas" section. They're pretty funny when you read them as separate parts of a single story. You'll see what I mean in a minute...

The first is an article about a commentator from National Public Radio, Elaine Fantham. It's an entertaining read, because, among other things, she compares the Roman attack on the Parthians to the U.S. government's planned war on Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/arts/08FANT.html?8hpib

Here's how the article ends:

[Fantham] is writing an introduction to Ovid's "Metamorphoses." She is also working on another, longer book, "The Roman World of Cicero's 'De Oratore,' " contrasting Cicero's recommendations for the training of the ideal statesman to the political realities of his time.

"The republican constitution was increasingly overridden and violated by men of military power," she said. And Cicero's ideals were impossible to achieve.

Any parallels to today? If anything, Ms. Fantham said, the problem is the reverse. Today, "the chief executive has too much power." She continued: "Why the Founding Fathers were dumb enough to have a president, I don't know. It worked while they were highly educated people, but they are getting worse all the time."

OK, got that? Now, right next to that article is a story entitled "Bad Seed or Bad Science?" It's about a family of rogues from New York known to sociologists as "the Jukes clan... America's most despised family." Again, for sheer entertainment, this story is hard to beat. I had never heard of them before reading this article (though the parallels with Faulkner's Snopeses - with whom I've long been acquainted - are remarkable), but apparently their case history was the basis for the eugenics movement in this country in the early part of the 20th century. Here's an excerpt from the story:

"Social science researchers long believed they were a case study of dysfunction, a bunch of genetically linked paupers, criminals, harlots, epileptics and mental defectives, whose care had placed a huge financial burden on taxpayers. The family's pedigree was used for decades as a textbook example of how heredity shaped human behavior and helped lead to calls for compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and even euthanasia against the "unfit."

Over the years, several historians and biologists have criticized the methodology of two Jukes studies as flawed and have said that many of their conclusions were fabricated. But the true identity of the family - who were dubbed the "Jukeses" by researchers - has remained a mystery, their names hidden by a code devised by the original investigators.

But now new information about the Jukeses has been found in archives at the State University of New York at Albany and in records of a forgotten Ulster County poorhouse. It turns out that many family members were neither criminals nor misfits, and that quite a few were even prominent members of Ulster County society."

What the story reveals is that the Jukeses were actually a composite of several different families, and that their story is "an example of how scientists have distorted research results for ideological and political reasons." The Jukeses were "scapegoats," according to to Elof Exel Carlson, professor of biochemistry and cell biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, an expert on the case.

As it turns out, despite the fact that the Eugenics Record Office declared that the Jukeses were characterized by "feeblemindedness, indolence, licentiousness and dishonesty," it appears that the data were skewed to include other families whose traits fit what the researchers were looking for. They list some of the names of the families whose Jukesian tendencies got them lumped into the survey:

"Today, however, some of Estabrook's papers are available to researchers at the M. E. Grenander department of special collections and archives at SUNY Albany. One of the documents included is an 88-page typewritten code book - titled "Jukes Data" and labeled "Classified" - that lists the surnames used in Dugdale's and Estabrook's studies.

Some of those listed, which number in the hundreds, include Sloughter, Plough, Miller, DuBois, Clearwater, Bank and Bush."

I haven't lied to you yet, but just in case you think I'm making it up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/arts/08JUKE.html