The Blame Jane Game

A perfect record.

News stories remind us that Roberts could serve into the 2040s. "Is this something even the right should be celebrating?" asks OpinionJournal's John Fund "Do we really want lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices? The Framers of the Constitution, of course, gave us this judicial sinecure for the express purpose of insulating the courts from political pressures of the moment. But then again, 220 years ago life expectancy wasn't what it is today and the courts had yet to claim the power of 'judicial review,' the power to determine which laws meet constitutional muster. For the Founders, the courts did not exercise the sweeping, unaccountable power they do now.

"That's one reason why many people are now coming around to the notion of instituting an 18-year term limit on Supreme Court justices. They include conservatives such as former presidential candidate Steve Forbes and liberals such as Paul Carrington, the former dean of Duke University's law school.

"A seat on the high court is now so powerful and so heady that many justices stay long past their prime. Legal scholars have concluded that half of the last 10 retirees have been too feeble or inattentive to fully participate in the work of the court . . .

"From 1789 to 1970, justices left the Supreme Court at an average age of 68 years after only 15 years of service. Since 1970, they have stayed until they were an average of 78 years old and had served a quarter century."

Of course, the odds of a constitutional amendment passing are about a zillion to one.

George Pataki will step down after three terms, says the New York Post :

"Gov. Pataki told a group of aides last night that he will not seek re-election next year -- and alluded to a possible run for president in 2008 -- after he summoned them to a meeting at the Executive Mansion, sources at the gathering told The Post."

Are the media publicizing phony numbers about Iraq? National Review's Stephen Spruiell thinks so:

"Last Tuesday, the hard-left antiwar group Iraq Body Count issued a 'dossier' on civilian casualties in Iraq. The group compiled this dossier using its database of civilian casualties, which it maintains using reports from various media sources. The database is irredeemably flawed -- to say nothing of the dossier it spawned.

"The dossier alleges that 24,865 civilians in Iraq died violently between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005. It alleges that coalition forces were responsible for 37 percent of those deaths, and that insurgents were responsible for only 9.5 percent. 'Criminal violence' gets 36 percent of the blame, and 11 percent goes to 'unknown agents' -- a category into which suicide bombers are strangely lumped.

"The group's antiwar credentials are impeccable -- they are affiliated with a who's who of hard-left organizations, from Counterpunch to Peace UK to Operation Human Shields. A number of music professors from a group Musicians Opposing War round out the group's roster, making it such an imminently credible source of scholarly research that the mainstream media, once it got the press release, trumpeted the group's findings without much qualification. . . .

"The only story I've read that attempted to answer that question came from Los Angeles Times reporter Alissa J. Rubin , who wrote:

" Outside experts cautioned that because of the difficulty of gathering reliable information in Iraq and the inevitable political biases, the information was almost certainly incomplete ."

The San Francisco Chronicle's reader rep, Dick Rogers looks at anonymous sources in the paper:

"The use of unnamed sources appeared easily avoidable or inappropriate. In one case an 'informed source' is allowed to commit the journalistic equivalent of a drive-by shooting -- criticizing the performance of a colleague from behind a shield of anonymity.

"What bothered me most is that the paper too often failed to give readers basic information about why sources were allowed to avoid identification and why their comments ought to be believed.

"In 80 percent of the cases, the paper said nothing about the sources' motives for remaining anonymous. Were their jobs in jeopardy? Were they potentially in danger? Or was the paper just making it easier for sources to avoid embarrassment or criticize without risk?

"Half of the time, the paper failed to give readers clues to the sources' expertise or insight. If my paper tells me that an 'informed source' says someone is mishandling the city budget, it's asking me to put complete faith in both the paper and the source. If it tells me that a budget analyst who is worried about losing her job but has direct knowledge of the process says the money is being mishandled, I have reason to take the information more seriously."

Finally, my Monday column on the paucity of Supreme Court coverage on TV draws this reaction from HuffPost media man Harry Shearer

"Greta von Susteren, Dan Abrams, and Jeff Toobin. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're arguably not the dumbest people on cable news, but they'll play dummies on TV. . . . All three bemoan the lack of pictures as the reason why they won't be doing as much serious coverage of the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts as they'd really, really like to do.

"From the little I've seen of it, the Natalee Holloway coverage doesn't have all that many current pix either -- where do you get current video of a missing person? No, it has endlessly repeated family snaps, just as boring (except for the youthful blondness) as the endlessly repeated "class photos" of the enrobed Supremes.

"Toobin, whom I like, says: 'It's very difficult to illustrate the concept of separation of powers, or separation of church and state.' Anybody who, as I once did, worked as a secondary school social studies teacher has figured out ways to visualize exactly those concepts on the shoestring visual resources of the public schools. I bet somebody at CNN who runs the Harry (no relation) or Paintbox or whatever the latest visual-effects box they use for promos could figure out a neat way to visualize the separation of powers in less time than it takes to, as Greta brags about her Holloway coverage, teach us a lot we didn't know about Aruban law."