The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

Jack Ass Hill

I'm watching Jack Cashill on C-SPAN's Booktv (courtesy TiVo), talking up his new book, Hoodwinked.

Regarding Alex Haley's plagiarism suit (in the late '70s, author Harold Courlander sued Haley for cribbing material in Roots from Courlander's own novel, The African), Cashill says this:

Haley settled up for $650,000. That's $2 million by today's standards. Now, it got almost no media coverage. The only article I could find from a mainstream journal was in the Washington Post. Here's how they headlined it--they made it a local story: "Bethesda author"--[incredulously] Bethesda author--"settles Roots suit."

Now, when Cashill says "almost no media coverage," is he talking about Time Magazine? The New York Times? The Times of London (no link, but story is referenced here, e.g.)? Which other "mainstream journal" does he mean?

In fact, I had trouble finding a "mainstream journal" of the period that didn't cover the story (despite the confidentiality agreement that was part of the settlement). But then, in all fairness to Cashill, that's probably because I don't have the resources Cashill had when he researched his book.

Moderation Howls

Moderation meets prevarication. Shrillness results.

Amnesty for Thee but not for Me

The Bush Administration has apparently flip-flopped on Amnesty International's credibility.

(Via Prospect.)

Make Like a Tree

Keith Thompson in the San Francisco Chronicle announces that he's "leaving the left."

That sort of sounds like he's leaving the left now, doesn't it?

Funny thing, though: Thompson cites Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech as marking the "beginning of his departure" from the left. Reagan gave that speech in 1982.

That sounds like Thompson left the left rather some time ago, doesn't it?

To be fair to Thompson, of course, plainly stating that he left back then (rather than, you know, now) would have made his editorial a bit less topical. If a lot more true.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Run Away!

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
--President Bush

(Via  Crooks and Liars, who also has audio.)

Meta Than Ever

A metastory about sourcing errors serves to obscure the correctness of the key facts in the object story. Sound familiar?

Men are from Mars, Women are Stupid

Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke discuss why women are as scarce as hens' teeth in science and mathematics faculties at elite institutions. Very nice.

Side note: The title to this post is at approximately 180° variance from the possible answers actually adduced. (Pinker's answer: it's a blend of socializing factors, institutional bias, and innate aptitude and motivation. Spelke's answer: it's primarily socializing factors and bias, possibly with a dash of innate motivation.) But it made you look.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Full of Grace

Watching Nancy Grace on CNN (or anywhere else), you might get the impression that she's never met an accused she didn't *know* was guilty.

The 11th Circuit seems to agree.

"Disparate Impact" on Judicial Nominees

Steven Bainbridge and Juan non-Volokh endorse the idea that the Democrat political and ideological hostility toward avowedly pro-life nominees to the judiciary may indeed amount to religious bigotry due to the "disparate impact" it has on Catholic nominees.

I'm really having trouble seeing where these gentlemen are coming from, both for the sound reasons Mark Kleiman's elucidates and for a couple of what I see as legally more straightforward reasons. First, categories like "Evangelical," "Catholic" and even "religious" are not "suspect clauses," and so wouldn't be subject to disparate impact analysis. Nor should they be: ideologies--whether religious or political--are not the sort of "immutable characteristic" that would make apt Bainbridge's analogy to discrimination on the basis of race.

Second, it's well established under the Supreme Court's Free Exercise clause jurisprudence that facially neutral laws that have a disparate impact on religious groups are nonetheless constitutional. So, for example, anti-pot legislation may have a disparate impact on Rastafarians, and yet such won't suffice to invalidate the legislation. It's strange in a case allegedly involving a conspicuous infringement of religious liberties that Bainbridge wouldn't think to make this analogy instead.

Egg on the Face, Scrambled

The unconsciously reflexive "biggest hoax since the Sixty Minutes story" turns out to have two parts.

In Part One,  numerous conservatives claimed that the "Schiavo memo" was forged by Democratic operatives.

This claim, never significantly supported by any evidence or argument, was in any case subsequently disproved.

In Part Two, the posture adopted is that this disproof doesn't matter because (pace the earlier reporting by WaPo's Mike Allen) the memo wasn't "distributed to Republican Senators by party leaders," and therefore doesn't represent the attitudes of the GOP leadership.

This claim has no significant support either, though as we saw in Part One (not to mention elsewhere) that's never stopped these conservatives before.