Should legislators read the legislation they pass, or should they simply sign it into legislation? It’s an open question, apparently. In this video of a town hall meeting in Philadelphia yesterday, you can see a citizen asking Senator Arlen Specter, “When congressmen stop at the notion of reading a legislation because they are unqualified or they aren’t competent to understand it, how can we be confident that those congressmen are competent to re-engineer the entire health care system?”
It’s the essential question at the moment, but one that Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services who stepped in to field it, deemed unfair: “I am not a member of Congress, have never been — that’s just a fact — I’m just, I’m just telling you…I have never seen a member of this congress work harder (than Specter), and it is unacceptable to ME for somebody to…” At this point, the crowd began to shout angrily, and Specter stepped forward to tell the audience that bills are often so large — “a thousand pages”, he said — that they have to be broken up into sections and handed out to his staff for perusal, because “we have to make judgements very fast…”
It was that phrase — “very fast” — that drove the crowd to almost apoplectically explode “Why? Why?” Those assembled knew that Specter had essentially said: “This is one more lengthy piece of legislation. There’s not enough time to for me to personally read it because it has to be passed quickly.”
Paul Mirengoff at NRO:

…it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Senate is not a deliberative body at all — not when Senators concede that they would vote on legislation to overhaul one-sixth of our economy, and arguably the most important sixth, without having read the legislation. Specter’s defense that there’s not enough time for him to read it all himself simply raises the problem in a more acute from: why would the world’s greatest deliberative body consider legislation on a timetable that leaves Senators with insufficient to see for themselves exactly what’s in the bill?

Mark Steyn, too, finds odd the notion of casually outsourcing the duties that are integral to one’s job description:

If (a legislator) doesn’t read the law before he makes it law, he’s not doing the only job he has. When you go to see Barbra Streisand, she has an orchestra and a conductor and arrangers and lighting designers and hair stylists, but she’s still expected to do the singing herself. If she stood up and said, “Okay, I’ve outsourced ‘People’ to my intern Kevin and ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’ to the niece of a friend of mine who needed a summer job and the Yentl medley to some people Kevin met for a breakfast session and said seemed to know what they were talking about,” you’d begin to wonder why anyone needs Barbra.

…she ain’t as aware of her surroundings as she used to be.
On July 17, the New York Times published a piece, “Cronkite’s Signature: Approachable Authority” on the public life of Walter Cronkite. Five days later numerous changes were made — a virtual rewrite — with this notice given underneath:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

Deadline pressure can certainly lead to errors; one could imagine that the author of the obit/appraisal, Alessandra Stanley, was pressed for time, or that maybe the sudden passing of Cronkite left the NYT’s editors unable to fact-check as carefully as they otherwise would have, but in fact Stanley wrote the piece, and gave it to her editor, one month before Cronkite’s death. The New York Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt explains, though, in a piece titled How Did This Happen? that the piece was submitted on a “Friday, a heavy time for the culture department, which was processing copy for Saturday, Sunday and Monday.”
A full ten days after the first correction was published, this second correction was added underneath it:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

No word on whether it took the NYT thirteen days to issue that last correction, or if it took that long for ABC employees and execs to notice that their flagship news broadcast had been incorrectly named in America’s supposedly most consequential and influential newspaper.

In Britain, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls channels George Orwell:

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

The comments underneath this Daily Express Story show once again the enormous schism in Britain between average citizens and those who would rule them.

Mark Steyn on the transformative power of an all-organic diet:

At the risk of being holed up the next time I’m driving in Vermont for hate crimes for my Vermontophobia, I think the women in Vermont would benefit from eating less organic food. I was down in your part of the world last year, and I must say, the California women look great on it. But…I think if you eat organic in the winter climate, you start to actually take on the character of the organic vegetables…

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposium. This week, for your delectation, here is Dr. Dan Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, presenting his Exploring the Frontiers of Happiness ¤ lecture, in 2005 (34:09). As usual, I’ll be our symposiarch for this episode of this series; please recall that this is not Reader Tips (our regular Reader Tips entry will appear tonight as scheduled), and that the topic here is Dan’s lecture and related matters (and the dress code is: no gratuitous insults). And now, as I wrote over three years ago: your table’s waiting, simply link this way. (Yeah, yeah, if I could link that way, honey… 😉

A Rasmussen poll released today shows Obama’s Approval Index sitting at minus 12 percent, his lowest number yet. 40 percent of American voters now strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance, compared to just 28 percent who strongly approve. Perhaps more significantly, a slight majority of voters now oppose his multi-trillion dollar health-care scheme, with the gap most notable among those who express strong opinions: 41 percent of voters now strongly oppose his planned reforms, with only 25 percent strongly in favour.
The lost ground certainly isn’t due to a lack of raw ambition or nerve on the President’s part. Within the last few weeks he slagged doctors as blood-money butchers (“The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out”), made clear that he views the very existence of a congressional debate on health care as a needless holdup, a throwback to the pre-Obama years (“The legislative process is a little bit like sausage making, and the sausage factory is not an attractive place”) and blamed Republicans for blocking his reforms, despite the fact that

“The Democrats won everything in last year’s election….(They own) the White House, a filibuster-proof Senate, and a 70-seat House majority. As one House Republican aide quipped: ‘We could have every GOP congressman and their parents vote against a Democratic bill and still not stop it.'”

There’s at least some degree of obstinate innumeracy in play. It can no longer be denied that Obama is trying to elide the issue of where the money for his multi-trillion dollar fast-track socialist rewrite is going to come from. When, during last week’s press conference, a reporter noted that Congress is “trying to figure out how to pay for all this reform,” Obama responded “Well, before we talk about how to pay for it, let’s talk about exactly what needs to be done.” Pretty bald, that, considering that his essential demand is for talk and debate to stop in the interests of facilitating passage of his glorious reforms. Questions, too, are evidently unnecessary at this point. From that same press conference:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. On Medicare, there are obviously millions of Americans who depend on Medicare, and when you talk about bending the long-term cost down, or when you talk about cuts in the current proposal on Capitol Hill, you talk about cuts in Medicare and they talk about cuts in Medicare, but there are never many specifics. Specifically, what kind of pain, what kind of sacrifice, are you calling on beneficiaries to make? And even if not right away, aren’t future beneficiaries going to be getting less generous benefits than today’s?

President Obama: No. No.

Q: And a subsidiary question….

You get the idea. Earlier the President had sternly warned: “This debate is not a game.”

I think she’s missing the entire point of the battle.
Whether we are debating ethically turns for the most part on our intentions. Are we trying to get our point across in a way that is as productive and simultaneously harmless as possible? This is the ethical approach. Or are we trying to win by any means possible, including character assassination and the bullying of opponents into submission?
Those, such as Levant, who argue that human rights commissions should not have authority to regulate speech are, in my view, entirely right. But how some people advance that view is quite wrong.