Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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Researchers with Yale’s unions have just completed a new report on systematic insider trading at the University. It’ll be interesting to see what Public Affairs comes up with as this story develops…I’m betting on “The Unions need to focus more on the bargaining table,” and “Yale is a non-profit institution, so how can we be accused of trying to make money?” Here’s how Conroy handled the San Jose Mercury News:

Thomas Conroy, Yale’s deputy director of public affairs, confirmed Baker’s involvement. However, he said Baker’s role was disclosed to the other members of the investment committee at the time and dismissed the report as contract-time politics. “This is how they negotiate,” he said.

Conroy, Levin, Culver and others might be better positioned to know how the unions negotiate had they shown up at the negotiating table…

From the report:

The IRS Form 990, a public document that must be filed by Yale University, asks:

Schedule A, Part III
2. During the year, has the organization, either directly or indirectly, engaged in any of the following acts with any of its trustees, directors, officers, creators, key employees, or members of their families, or with any taxable organization with which any such person is affiliated as an officer, director, trustee, majority owner, or principal beneficiary?
(a) Sale, exchange, or leasing of property?
(c) Furnishing of goods, services, or facilities?
(e) Transfer of any part of its income or assets?
If the answer to any question is “Yes”, attach a detailed statement explaining the transactions

Yale has opted not to answer the question, marking neither “yes” nor “no” on its IRS Form 990 filed for every fiscal year from 1990 to 2000 (the most recent submitted). Instead, Yale has attached the following statement in lieu of answering the questions:

Other than the payment of reasonable and not excessive compensation and/or reimbursement of expenses for principal officers and trustees, this institution knows of no significant transaction between it and any such person or any corporation with which any such person is affiliated other than transactions in the normal conduct of its activities. All such transactions are conducted at arm’s length and for good and sufficient consideration. (Yale University, IRS 990, Year 2000 Schedule A, Part III, Line 2, Statement 16)

Yale’s statement fails to offer reassurance that individual transactions are legal and have not provided trustees with excess benefit. As one tax law training manual explains about this section of the Form 990:

While the lines covering the particular transaction in question in such cases would be answered “yes,” their “innocent” nature would be explained in the attachment that, as noted, is to be made for any question answered “yes.” … Indeed, if the filer answers any of the lines 2a through 2e “yes” and does not attach a statement explaining the transaction, a reader might suppose that the filer was not disclosing aspects of the transaction that it believed would embarrass it.[6]

Putting aside all other considerations, full disclosure is always the best and strongest defense against the charge of inappropriate self-dealing.

Yale’s refusal to disclose the interested transactions outlined in this report presents cause for concern.

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The ACLU of Pennsylvania (one of the places I’ve been interning this summer) scored an important victory today when District Judge Robert Kelly ruled, in our favor, that forcing students – public and private school both – to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day or have their refusal reported to their parents is a stark violation of students’ rights. The overruled sponsor’s measure, State Rep. Allan Egolf, had a less than inspiring defense of his idea:

“I thought there wouldn’t be any problems with it,” Egolf said. “We just wanted to make it so the kids had the opportunity to learn the pledge and what the flag means to our country and what it stands for. If you don’t learn it in school, where are you going to learn it?”

This argument, like many made in defense of school prayer, seems to demonstrate a willful disregard for the distinction between studying an idea and practicing it. It’s about as convincing as the state’s lawyer’s argument in court: “The Pledge of Allegiance is only 70 or so words long anyway.”

Kelly, relatively conservative himself, was much more perceptive:

This letter home, Kelly wrote, “would chill the speech of certain students who would involuntarily recite the speech or [national] anthem rather than have a notice sent to their parents.”

Kelly also wrote that Egolf’s comments from the House debate had made it “obvious that he views refusal to recite the pledge or anthem as something negative for which disciplinary sanctions would be warranted.”

Justice Jackson, seventy years ago, said it best however:

To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions.

That it took a District Court ruling to stop the state of Pennsylvania from forcing all children to declare their allegiance to the flag or be told on to their parents (presumably because such subversion would demonstrate to the parents a failure in their conditioning of their progeny) doesn’t make our institutions look too hot either – although that much better than if, as many expected, Judge Kelly had ruled the other way.

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Ari Fleischer closes out his time as Prevaricator-in-Chief, well, appropriately:

“I think the bottom has been gotten to …

No, we said it didn’t rise to a Presidential level. That’s what we’ve said, that in hindsight, we now realize it did not rise to a Presidential level. There is still — it would be also erroneous for anybody to report that the information about whether or not Iraq sought uranium from Africa was wrong. No one can accurately tell you that it was wrong. That is not known.”

(as quoted by Josh Marshall)

This may not top telling reporters to ask Pakistan about US policy towards Pakistan, or to count the number of felons working in the White House for themselves…but it’s a classic nonetheless.

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Zhou Tiehai has created what seems a fitting tribute to one of Giuliani’s more ridiculous actions as Mayor of New York(although certainly not his most destructive, when compared to summarily jailing the homeless or turning a blind eye to police brutalitiy):

It was only a shade less than four years ago that New York flew into a frenzy over Rudolph Giuliani’s short-lived effort to shut down the Brooklyn Museum of Art for exhibiting Chris Ofili’s dung-ornamented painting “The Holy Virgin Mary.” Last week dung returned for an encore, ceremonially clumped on a portrait of the former mayor himself that appears in a new show at the Whitney Museum. The Daily News reflexively slapped the picture, by the Shanghai-born artist Zhou Tiehai, on Page 1 (“New Rudy Art Flap”), the local television newscasters duly cluck-clucked . . . and no one cared. Even Mr. Giuliani didn’t rise to the bait. “Well, I’m really not an art critic,” he said. “If it was an opera, I’d be able to comment on it.”

Maybe this shows take from this is that being in the right place at the right time (and, to be fair, making a couple admirable moves, like having hate crimes against Arabs tracked) has caused his popularity to so skyrocket that he no longer sees a need to take potshots at free expression. Equally likely, he simply realizes that it’s more difficult to take the moral high ground when you, rather than the Holy Virgin Mary are the subject of the offending painting.

The irony of Tiehai’s work, and the reason that it strikes me as perversely appropriate, is that Tiehai’s work uses dung for the purpose of smearing (so to speak) the image of Giuliani, while Ofili, despite Giuliani’s accusations that he was smearing the Holy Virgin Mary, was using dung to honor her. As I wrote in a piece in my high school newspaper at the time,

The dung in Ofili’s painting, as well as in his other art, is not a sign of disrespect. Rather, it is a sign of reverence. “It’s a way,” he explained, “of raising the paintings up from the ground and giving them a feeling that they’ve come from the earth rather than simply being hung on a wall.” Ofili pointed to the sexual undertones of many traditional artistic depictions of the Virgin Mary as the inspiration for the sexual imagery in his own work. “Mine is just a hip-hop version.”
“Ofili,” writes Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski, “is imagining a Virgin Mary far different, but no less legitimate in devotional terms, from the one that the Roman Catholic Giuliani encountered in his catechetical youth.” Viewed in its proper context, how can “The Holy Virgin Mary” possibly be seen as anything other than what it is – the alternative vision of an observant Catholic, a bold attempt to mesh his Western upbringing with his Nigerian heritage?

And so while I would generally consider dung-throwing, literal or figurative, to be a low form of political expression, the cleverness of Tiehai’s work is that it reflects back on Giuliani precisely what he falsely projected onto Ofili’s work. Giuliani’s phantom offense has come back to haunt him. Tiehai offers Giuliani the disrespect that Ofili, an alter boy in his youth, never intended (another former alter boy to haunt the former mayor would be Patrick Dorismond, whose point-blank shooting by an undercover cop Giuliani defended with the bizarre allegation that Dorismond – based on sealed juvenile court records – was no “alter boy”).

My high school op-ed on the topic was accompanied by a photo of the painting in question, captioned “The Holy Virgin Mary.” At the last minute my editor switched that for a picture of Giuliani because we couldn’t find a good non-copyrighted shot of the painting, but he almost forgot to change the caption.

Poetic justice?

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From a piece by Robert Scheer:

In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, “It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question: What else are they lying about?”

Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by former President Bush for his role as the last American to confront Saddam face-to-face after the dictator invaded Kuwait. In a cable to Baghdad, the President told Wilson: “What you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight.”

As Wilson observed wryly, “I guess he didn’t realize that one of these days I would carry that fight against his son’s administration.”

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Ari Fleischer on mounting evidence that the White House intentionally misled the American people and the world for the sake of building support for the first test of the Bush Doctrine:

“The President has moved on.”

Feel better yet?

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Christopher Hitchens has been a thinker whose thoughts I value for a while now, both before and after his dramatic (if disappointing, and arguably petty) break with the Nation. On Iraq, as on many issues on which I’ve strongly differed with him in the past couple years, I found him to make the opposing case more meaningfully and persuasively than most, in part because when it comes to portraying the war as a matter of humanitarian intervention, it helps to have demonstrated a concern with human rights before September 11. But this article should shake the man’s credibility across the spectrum. Whereas a profile last weekend wrote:

No wonder he doesn’t give a hoot about the WMD brouhaha. That wasn’t why he supported the liberation of Iraq. Nonetheless, even though confronted by a reluctant congress and dithering allies, he wishes the Bush administration had stated its case for war in more explicitly moral terms instead of using “scare tactics”. “But what if the Left had not been abstentionist? What if it thought we can’t postpone a reckoning with Saddam Hussein?”

But in a Salon column whose Sadaam-as-Dahmer motif is worthy of a lesser writer, he shares a different logic:

The wailers will settle for nothing less than the full-dress conspiracy theory. It’s true that they have been helped in this, in some respects, by elements in both the Blair and Bush regimes that banged the drum a little too loud. But this is not to compare like with like. In 1990-91, during the occupation of Kuwait, U.S. officials circulated a graphic atrocity story to the effect that Iraqi forces had taken Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators and dumped them on the cold floor. It was one of the great sob stories of all time, and it undoubtedly affected the Senate vote in favor of war, but it was completely made up by a Kuwaiti public relations firm with links to the Bush administration. People were understandably upset when they were shown to have been emotionally stampeded. But soon after, Kuwait City was recovered by U.N. forces who unearthed atrocities and massacres 50 times as foul.

Now Hitch is suggesting first, that the penchant of some to try (in his eyes) overzealously – even blindly – to find fault with the actions of the most powerful men in the world is a greater act of intellectual dishonesty than than for the most powerful men in the world to intentionally manipulate their citizens with disinformation for the sake of sending them to war – and second, that the production of falsehoods to serve political goals by political leaders is irrelevant if other truths may exist which would serve as well as the falsehoods in retrospect.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger was a searing indictment of the man not only for contravening international law through terrorism-by-proxy, but also for contravening democracy through deceit and manipulation. Hitch closed the book in eager anticipation of the eventual opening of Henry’s sealed records after his death and in fervent hope that our country could someday catch up with the Latin American countries we ravaged by holding our own Truth and Justice Commissions.

Hitch wrote last fall:

I would, however, distinguish myself from people like David Horowitz – who has been friend and enemy by turns and whom I respect – in this way. David repudiates his past. I am slightly proud of the things I did and said when I was on the left, and wouldn’t disown most of them. I am pretty sure that I won’t change on this point, and don’t feel any psychic urge to recantation. And, if it matters, I have felt more in tune with my past when helping the Iraqi opposition and the Kurdish rebels, as I have been doing for the past several years. There must be some former Trotskyists among Andrew’s readership: I think they’ll guess what I mean..

I’ll accept compliments from the Right when they agree that Henry Kissinger belongs in the dock, and when they admit that this failure on their part is also sheltering Saddam Hussein from an indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and when they acknowledge that their trashing of the International Criminal Court is a betrayal of the whole ethos of “regime change”. And after that, I have some other bones to pick with them…

Articles like this most recent one force one to question which values from his (self-described) “Fellow traveler” period he still finds relevant and which (transparency in government – or basic appearances of democracy, at the very least) have become inconvenient. And after that, I have some other bones to pick with him…

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Have to say, this is the first time I’ve been mentioned on David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag – unfortunately, it wasn’t being lambasted for my crazy leftism. Needless to say, the author of this article pulled a silly maneuver in trying to discredit a march by demonstrating that a) there were people there who couldn’t provide footnotes on the spot for each of their assertions, b) there were people there who were far to the left of, say, David Horowitz, and c) there weren’t many people there for the early-morning rally before the 5,000 person march. This is the kind of logic that convinces the reader every time, as long as the reader is David Horowitz. If only I hadn’t been a legal observer that day, maybe Michael P. Tremoglie could have written me up for dangerous ideas or inadequate research. Maybe next time. Meanwhile, nice to know he thinks I have a sense of humor… Certainly helped in getting through his writing. I do regret giving him ammunition by mentioning the low turnout for the rally but given that he identified himself as a school teacher and that the comment was in the context of the several-thousand person march that would follow later in the day, I don’t think it was overly reckless. Just to redeem myself, I’ll have to make a point of getting written up as a left-wing crazy on that website as soon as possible…

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This is a victory for New Haven and Yale both. A letter I wrote to the New Haven Register too late to be printed:

A few months ago, Yale Associate Vice President Mike Morand decried Alderman Matt Naclerio’s resolution, on which the Board will vote tonight, as an “attack” on the “longstanding and deep-rooted American tradition for churches, colleges, schools, and others.” Given that the resolution would challenge the “super-exemption” which allows Yale to buy New Haven property even for for-profit ventures and remove it from the city’s tax base, and would call on Yale to increase its annual voluntary contribution to the city in lieu of taxes, which is currently less money than Yale pays annually to the city of New York, Morand’s comment forces me, as a New Haven resident and a Yale student, which august tradition Morand sees threatened, and what vision he and others among Yale’s leaders have for partnership between Yale and New Haven. Alderwoman Lindy Lee Gold’s description at a May public hearing of New Haveners who want to see the nation’s second-wealthiest University make a fuller contribution to one of the nation’s poorest cities as behaving like an “ungrateful petulant child” articulates one vision of Yale-New Haven relations. Yale’s public rhetoric, as when President Levin expressed his hopes last January that “by adopting active strategies for civic improvement, by becoming engaged institutional citizens, we can make a major difference in the quality of urban life,” suggests a far more progressive vision. But in struggling for years to divide a broad-based movement throughout this city for a new social contract between New Haven and its dominant employer, in conducting a Soviet-style election in order to keep a New Haven preacher and Yale Alum off of the Yale Corporation, in leading the campus and community once more towards a bitter, protracted, and unnecessary strike, and now in fighting to defend an arrangement in which New Haven loses $13 million dollars a year in differential between PILOT and Yale’s property value even as the city considers a third tax increase, my University sends a message more in line with Alderman Gold’s rhetoric than our President’s. Tonight’s resolution is not a threat to the best traditions of this city or this University but rather a step away from the ugly side of their three centuries of shared history. For this reason I am proud that my Alderman stands in support of this resolution and proud to call, with my peers, for the Board tonight to pass overwhelmingly a resolution that would push my University to act in a manner which reflects the ideals that its espouses and pursues a vision for true partnership and progressive change.

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Ann Coulter’s latest column demonstrates all the talents that have so endeared her to her fans – farcically forced fury, painfully flat humor, recklessness with facts and incoherent logic. A choice selection:

Absurdly, liberals claim to hate J. Edgar Hoover because of their passion for civil liberties. The left’s exquisite concern for civil liberties apparently did not extend to the Japanese. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese for the internment camps, liberals were awed by his genius. The Japanese internment was praised by liberal luminaries such as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. Joseph Rauh, a founder of Americans for Democratic Action – and celebrated foe of “McCarthyism” – supported the internment.

There was one lonely voice in the Roosevelt administration opposed to the Japanese internment – that of J. Edgar Hoover. The American Civil Liberties Union gave J. Edgar Hoover an award for wartime vigilance during World War II. It was only when he turned his award-winning vigilance to Soviet spies that liberals thought Hoover was a beast.

Here Coulter employs a favorite tactic – citing illiberal choices made or perpetuated under Democratic administrations and using them, despite contemporary criticism from the left or pushes from the right for even more draconian moves, as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the left as a whole (she does this masterfully with segregation, for example). The fact that FDR, bowing to the pressures of fear and jingoism within and outside of the government, betrayed the values of the left and trampled on the Constitution and principles of human decency in signing Executive Order 9066 simply demonstrates that FDR was neither as courageous nor as Left as history makes him out to be. The fact that a man like Daniel Pipes, who refuses to condemn internment, is considered a distinguished scholar and an ally of this administration in foreign policy, and that a man like Howard Coble (R-NC), who came out in support of the camps last February, chairs a house subcommittee on domestic security raises troubling questions about the agenda this administration (Republican, for those of you keeping score at home) wants to lead this country. Coulter, for her part, spent her last column gloating about a Department of Justice report acknowledging abuse of immigrants detained after September 11 as evidence that the government isn’t letting details like the constitution get in the way of the Bush Doctrine (but this is the same woman who maintains both that we should “bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” and that conservatives are the most compassionate suffering people in the world). Coulter, in fact, seems not to have ever met a regressive policy towards immigrants that she couldn’t countenance, spin, and celebrate – but at least she’s against internment camps… Congressman John Rankin famously declared, “I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawai’i now and putting them in concentration camps…Damn them! Let’s get rid of them!” He was also instrumental in securing the place of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in American Government.

The final lines excerpted above raise the self-parody to an even higher plane. Faced with the information she provides – the leftist ACLU praised Hoover for opposing FDR assault on civil liberties and condemned him for later launching his own – a logical person might conclude that the left supports protecting civil liberties – maybe even that some on the left are willing to condemn political allies who pursue regressive policy and work with political opponents for shared progressive goals (the ACLU’s coalition against the PATRIOT Act – one of Coulter’s favorite pieces of legislation – is a contemporary example as well). Instead, Coulter judges the left as hypocritical for supporting Hoover’s left-wing moves and opposing his right-wing ones. One can understand why this might bother Coulter – for her, personality trumps politics every time.

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Today marks a long-overdue but nevertheless greatly welcome reversal of the High Court’s 1986 defense of Sodomy Laws. It’s a notable loss for the “Religious Right” that was so central to the Republican Party of the Impeachment Era, and increasingly seems to be on its way out in favor of the foreign policy hawks and domestic libertarians (and the single-issue grassroots campaigns of the NRA). The response on the right ranges from Sullivan’s celebration to Will’s argument that sodomy laws are wrong but a purely local issue (like segregation?) and a constitutional right to privacy is a step on a slippery slope to damnation (like interracial marriage?), to some inspired Lamentations from the Christian News Service:

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul says men whose “foolish hearts were darkened” exchanged the truth of God for a lie. His warning about man’s wisdom has apparently gone unheeded in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down an anti-sodomy law in Texas — effectively telling states they can no longer punish homosexual couples for engaging in activities the Bible says are “unnatural” and sinful.

Fortunately for AgapePress, the Supreme Court is yet to rule on whether the right to privacy includes other Biblical prohibitions like eating fish without fins and scales (same Hebrew word – to’evah – as is used to describe homosexuality).

“Under our constitutional republic, it is the place of the state legislature, acting through its duly elected representatives, to decide what is moral,” [American Family Association Chief Counsel Steve Crampton] says. “For a handful of un-elected judges to impose their views of morality is not law, it is tyranny.”

Actually, today would be a shining example of what a Supreme Court should do – hold a nation’s legal system to its own best values. Crampton may be thinking of this.

A Florida attorney believes the decision handed down will awaken Americans who want to preserve traditional marriage. Mat Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, says the decision will galvanize the majority of Americans who want to preserve family values but who have ignored the radical agenda of homosexual activists.

“This particular decision essentially is a shot over the bow and a wake-up call that I believe will galvanize the sleeping giant of the majority of Americans who believe in traditional family values and traditional marriage so that every American will get involved in this cultural war,” Staver says.

“If we don’t, in the next decade or two, we could lose traditional family values and marriage in this country.”

See my parents’ marriage, as I testified in March, is holy because of the love with which it’s infused, not because they get legal recognition our gay friends don’t. It’s sad to me that some people see anything that expands and democratizes the legal institution as chipping away at the worth of the personal bond. It’s a shame to see people convinced that their marriage needs to compete for significance and exclusivity.

Staver also says the decision underscores the importance of the next Supreme Court appointment.

Indeed. Bring it.

P.S.: In case there was any confusion, Justice Scalia wants us to know that he has nothing against gay people personally. Well that’s a relief. It’s easy to lost track of his personal preferences when you get so caught up in his exercise of power as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States… But I’m sure some of his best friends are gay, right? Well, let me clear up any confusion now by sharing that some of my best friends are people like Justice Scalia…

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Israel’s Supreme Court made the just choice and the reasonable decision today in allowing Palestinian Knesset Members Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bishara to run for reelection at the end of this month, overturning the Central Election Committee’s ruling disqualifying them on the grounds that they’ve challenged the Jewish nature of the state. It upheld the CEC’s decision to allow Baruch Marzel to run, despite his connection to the late Meir Kahane’s outlawed Kach party and his public support for forced “transfer” of Palestinians out of Israel and the territories. That too is reasonable, insofar as democracies around the world trust the voters, rather than a subset of elected politicians, to evaluate whose vision is or is not worthy of their vote. What was disturbing and unconscionable was the CEC’s choice to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel of the chance to vote for Palestinian candidates while suggesting that separating church and state is a greater violation of Israel’s fundamental values than ethnic cleansing. TIbi, Bishara and others now face the challenge of convincing Palestinian voters that their vote still counts and that the system can work – as one Professor noted, the damage has already been done. New Israel Fund President Peter Edelman got it right: “The decision today upholds a bedrock principle that underlies democracy – the right of all citizens to stand for election, the right of minorities to political representation, and the supremacy of the rule of law. At the same time, all who love Israel’s democracy must be concerned that it continues to be necessary to call on the Supreme Court to be the last line of defense for such critical democratic values.” Meanwhile, Sharon’s problems continue to mount…