We can’t say we were surprised that Newt Gingrich’s reaction to the debt ceiling deal was like no one else’s in all the world. No sooner had the agreement been struck than Gingrich released a statement that was vaguely disapproving. But then he went positive: “As president [wait—Newt Gingrich is running for president?], I will approach solving America’s debt crisis by adhering to three principles.” We knew it had to be at least three.
The first principle is that the highest priority of federal fiscal policy should be private job creation. The second is that national security spending should be permanently safe from political considerations.
So far, so normal. Only in the third principle did Gingrich’s inimitable Newtness show itself. Government spending, he said, could be reduced by half a trillion dollars a year “by applying Lean Six Sigma to the federal government.”
Our first reaction, as it so often is when listening to Gingrich, was “Huh?” We were evidently sick the day our business prof discussed Lean Six Sigma. Our next thought was, quick! To Wikipedia! (We click so you don’t have to.)
Six Sigma, we learned, is a “business management strategy.” It looks as if it could have been designed for Newt Gingrich, appealing to his every intellectual need. There are impenetrable attempts at quantification, lots of jargon, and miles of lists: for example, DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) is not to be confused with DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify). We’re sure either one would light a fire under those bureaucrats down at the Federal Interagency Committee for Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds.
Whether business gimmicks—sorry, management strategies—can make government more rational is an old question that crackpots from Henry Ford to Ross Perot to Al “Reinventing Government” Gore have answered with a resounding “Yes!”
We won’t bore readers by offering our own views on the subject. But we do note with pleasure that once again Newt Gingrich has succeeded in reminding us of one of our favorite lines from one of our favorite movies: “You just keep thinkin’, Butch,” the Sundance Kid tells his partner with an affectionate smile. “That’s what you’re good at.”
We never could tell whether the Kid was being ironic.
More Gas from the New York Times
While the New York Times can barely conceal its glee at the phone-hacking scandal embroiling the rival Murdoch empire, The Scrapbook confesses to a certain schadenfreude of its own at the Gray Lady’s latest embarrassment. The Times’s slanted coverage of the natural gas industry continues to generate -radioactive fallout.
Steven F. Hayward explained round one in our August 1 issue (“New York Times Passes Gas”). In a pair of long front-page stories in late June, the Times purported to expose the prospects of the “gas revolution” as not just hyped but likely fraudulent: Industry dissidents were likening the shale gas boom to the dot-com bubble and a Ponzi scheme.
Hayward’s chief criticism of the series was its “stupefying economic ignorance and disregard for any data analysis.” But he also faulted its reliance on “the sensational views of two would-be whistle-blowing ‘insiders,’ along with leaked emails and documents.” The Times posted online hundreds of pages of source materials but took care to black out the names of email senders and recipients.
The series brought a hail of criticism, including from the paper’s own ombudsman. His column in mid-July argued that “such a -pointed article needed more convincing substantiation.”
In particular, he deplored the misleading identification of one of the few sources actually named, Deborah Rogers. Far from being an energy industry insider, Rogers is a goat farmer proud of her prize-winning artisanal cheeses. While the Times correctly stated that she once worked as a stockbroker and is a member of an advisory council to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, it failed to note that this group of business-people, academics, and local notables meets twice a year to offer thoughts about business conditions, for which participants receive $100 a pop. Also left out was Rogers’s personal clash “with Chesapeake Energy, a leading shale gas producer, over its drilling on land next to hers” and her activism with the anti-shale-gas Oil and Gas Accountability Project.
Oddly, the author of the piece, reporter Ian Urbina, and his editors, instead of admitting missteps and moving on, dug in their heels. National editor Richard L. Berke defended the story as “deeply sourced, meticulously reported and measured.” The editors, he said, “would not change a word.”
Time for round two, or “Why Redacting E-Mails Is a Bad Idea.” That headline announced the second column by ombudsman Arthur S. Brisbane on July 30. By now, Brisbane had read, unredacted, the internal emails from the Energy Information Administration, the independent data branch of the Department of Energy, of which the series made extensive use. He found that some redactions of content had distorted the writers’ meaning. Most preposterously, an intern hired out of college in 2009 and promoted to an entry-level position this past March had been given pumped-up billing. Wrote Brisbane:
One of his emails was attributed to “one official” who said the shale industry may be “set up for failure.” Later, he was an “energy analyst” wondering, “Am I just totally crazy, or does it seem like everyone and their mother are endorsing shale gas without getting a really good understanding of the economics at the business level?” Next he was “one federal analyst” who said, “It seems that science is pointing in one direction and industry PR is pointing in another.”
Brisbane concluded with admirable restraint: “Anonymous material says to the reader: Trust us. But if the reader ends up feeling burned—if, for example, an ‘official’ proves to be an intern—the trust won’t be there the next time.”
Conceding nothing, the editors stand by Urbina, whose latest contribution to a well-rounded view of his subject is an August 3 piece on the only publicly documented instance of contamination of a drinking well by the controversial drilling process known as fracking—which occurred, as he reveals in paragraph 11, in 1984. When he finishes speculating that evidence of similar atrocities may lie hidden in sealed case files somewhere, Urbina no doubt - will unleash his reportorial zeal on the technological advances in gas extraction made in the past 27 years.
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Elders Gets a Hot Seat
With federal funding gone limp, administrators in American higher education are groping for ways to get the donors’ juices flowing again and firm up school finances. No one has turned the trick as neatly as the University of Minnesota Medical School. It has fingered a completely original source of revenue: porn.
The school’s singular scheme was touched off by a company called Adam and Eve, “America’s most trusted source for adult products.” Trusted? Who would dare distrust the source of much-loved films like Junk in the Trunk and Juicy White Booty, as well as essential merchandise like erotic body suits, Hot Rod Silicone Sleeves, and its own eponymous brand of “Not Yet Delay Gel”?
Certainly not a university administrator worried about his endowment.
Two weeks ago Adam and Eve announced that it was pulling out from its huge bottom line a load of cash big enough to endow the Joycelyn Elders Chair in Sexual Health Education at the university’s med school. You think we’re joking. We’re not. We’ve got the press release right here, dated July 29, 2011, and datelined Hills-borough, North Carolina, home base for Adam and Eve.
With 40 years of experience under its belt, the press release says, Adam and Eve has earned the loyalty of “ten million satisfied customers.” We’re not sure if that 10 million is a hard number—it might be artificially enhanced—but however many customers Adam and Eve enjoys, we have no doubt they’re satisfied. And now, counting the University of Minnesota med school, we can make it ten million and one.
The major thrust of the announcement was laid out by Chad Davis of Adam and Eve. “Adam and Eve is proud to help establish this esteemed position,” Davis said. “Sexual well-being is the cornerstone of our company.” The announcement elicited the usual ejaculations of gratitude from a man named Eli Coleman, “director of the Program in Human Sexuality” at the med school.
“We are very pleased with the support from Adam and Eve,” Professor Coleman said. “Through the Elders Chair we will build on our strengths to advance sexual health education.”
Readers of a certain age will recall Joycelyn Elders, who served under President Clinton in at least two different positions. He was forced to let her go as surgeon general after she publicly advised grade schools to teach masturbation to America’s glabrous-palmed youth.
Thanks to Adam and Eve, Dr. Elders has found a new stroke to approve of: the stroke of the pen that writes the check for this singular honor. It’s too early to know how the med school and the pornographers at Adam and Eve will make out. Late night comedians surely will make the school the butt of their tittering jokes and smutty word play. No doubt we can expect the usual moaning and heavy breathing from the blue-nosed community, whose angry members will wage a full frontal assault to prevent the deal from being consummated.
Our guess is that if the criticism gets too hot, Dr. Coleman will see how large his support is, and how firm. We have no doubt that his students will be happy to lend him a hand—especially if he can arrange a special showing of Bondage Babes at homecoming next year. It’s a classic of Sexual Health Education.