The Scrapbook, like any patriotic American, always enjoys those European Union anecdotes that show up occasionally in the news: You know, the ones about the Italian-born bureaucrat in Brussels who fines a neighborhood butcher in Cornwall for not preparing Cornish hens according to EU specifications. Nothing like that would ever happen in these United States.
Unless, of course, you find yourself in your bathroom, and look around. Over there is the federally mandated toilet which, in compliance with the Energy Policy Act (1992), flushes—or attempts to flush—its meager supply of 1.6 gallons of water. And in the shower, it is possible (although statistically unlikely) that you are one of those lucky Americans who has recently installed a “luxury” shower fixture that features a wide head and multiple nozzles that spray and squirt and otherwise bathe you in a therapeutic avalanche of H 2O.
If so, you might want to consult your lawyer. For the U.S. Department of Energy, in its newfound zeal to persuade citizens to conserve water, is enforcing the provision of the aforementioned Energy Policy and Conservation Act which requires that a showerhead deliver no more than 2.5 gallons of water per minute at a flowing water pressure of 80 pounds per square inch. Got that? Until recently, manufacturers understood “showerhead” to mean a device that showers water onto a bather, and each nozzle was considered to be a separate component in compliance with the 2.5-gallon requirement. But the Obama Energy Department, and its general counsel, Scott Blake Harris, have decided otherwise, and are levying substantial civil penalties on manufacturers of “luxury” showerheads.
So far, the heavy hand of the DOE has fallen on manufacturers only. But just as it is a violation of federal law for a homeowner to install a 3.5-gallon, pre-Al Gore toilet in the bathroom of his private home, The Scrapbook assumes that the Obama administration will soon require citizens to bathe in compliance with its mandatory showerhead regulations. Or face prosecution. “Did Congress limit consumer choice?” asks Mr. Harris in the Wall Street Journal. “Absolutely. When you waste water, you waste energy.”
If all of this sounds vaguely ridiculous, that is because it is. The Scrapbook is all in favor of voluntary conservation, and our idea of a luxurious shower is one where the showerhead actually functions properly. But the fact is that the number of Americans who possess “luxury” showerheads is estimated to be somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of the populace—not exactly a tidal wave of environmental arrogance—and a certain number of those are people who benefit from such devices for medical reasons.
It may seem trivial to look askance at government regulations about bathroom fixtures, and a senior bureaucrat who revels in limiting consumer choice. But when federal law governs the way we flush toilets and take a shower—and threatens punishment for defiance—there is good reason to worry about the next particle of freedom on the progressive hit list. ♦
The ‘Journolist’ Scandal
Forgive us if we indulge in a little shop talk this week. The Scrapbook is well aware that journalists sometimes overestimate the degree to which the public is interested in our professional gossip. So we don’t blame you if you have tuned out the “Journo-list” story that has been all the buzz among Washington scribes—preoccupying them as only stories that feature bloggers talking about how other bloggers talk about bloggers can do. Still, we think there are items of larger interest amid the backbiting.
Journolist, until it was recently shut down by its founder, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, was an invitation-only group of 400 or so liberal and left-wing writers, bloggers, reporters, think-tankers, academics, and assorted hangers-on. They traded emails with one another—political chat, professional gossip, sports gab—and promised as a condition of membership to keep their discussions private.
Klein shut down the list last month after leaks from it caused one of his Washington Post colleagues to lose his job. The surprising thing, really, was not the leaks—this is a group of journalists, in the main, people who purvey leaked information for a living—but that they took so long to occur. Journolist members had been chattering away for three years and the law of omertà had mostly been upheld.
No longer. Tucker Carlson’s new online publication Daily Caller is apparently in possession of most or all of the group’s archived discussions and began parceling them out last week. The headlines give the broad outline:
“Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright”
“Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News”
“Journolist’s anti-Palin crusade of 2008”
“Journolisters offended by Keith Olbermann’s ‘misogynistic,’ ‘predictable,’ and ‘pompous’ show”
That last headline—if you are familiar with the bombastic MSNBC host—may surprise you at first glance. Olbermann, like the Journolisters, is a partisan lefty through and through. The news here, however, is that in private his ideological allies agree with the 299,992,000 Americans who somehow manage on a daily basis not to watch his show: Olbermann is an unbearable blowhard. The question the Journolisters discussed among themselves was whether Olbermann was too useful to the cause to be criticized in public. (We won’t keep you in suspense; their answer was yes.)
For the most part, though, the published Journolist emails seem to be a case study in support of Henry Adams’s famous observation that politics has “always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
* When Rush Limbaugh was hospitalized with heart pains, Sarah Spitz, a producer for an NPR-affiliated radio station in Los Angeles, wrote to her fellow Journolisters that if she saw the popular conservative talker having a heart attack, she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.”
* Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter at Bloomberg News, compared the Tea Party movement to the rise of the Nazis: “Is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts? . . . Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.”
* Spencer Ackerman, a reporter for Wired.com who previously worked for the New Republic, urged his colleagues to level false accusations of racism against conservatives. This, he thought, would be a good way to limit the damage being done to candidate Obama by revelations that his pastor of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was himself a raving race-baiter and America-hater. Wrote Ackerman:
It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically. . . . If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
As it happens, our colleague Fred Barnes and Karl Rove shared a laugh over this slur, as Barnes related in an excellent July 22 column for the Wall Street Journal, “The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy.” But that doesn’t make Ackerman’s suggestion—which went unrebuked by his fellow Journolisters—any less reprehensible. He is, to use the word in its strict sense, shameless.
Is there a moral to this story? Only the same one that our grandparents knew in their bones, that journalism has more than its share of reprobates in its ranks, many of them not as intelligent or witty as they think they are, and too many of them dishonest partisan hacks. Oh, and the next time you hear a liberal complain about “incivility” on the right, or call for “raising the tone” of our political discourse, you’re forgiven if you laugh out loud.
Postscript: Gallup last week released its annual survey of Americans’ “confidence in institutions.” The headline finding was Congress’s last place ranking, with only 11 percent having a great deal or “quite a lot” of confidence in it. The comparable figures for newspapers and television news were 25 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Oddly enough, The Scrapbook hasn’t yet seen these figures widely reported, either on television or in the newspapers. ♦
The American Entrepreneur Lives!
"Homeless Man Breaks into Shuttered California Bar, Starts Selling Drinks" (FoxNews.com headline, July 21, 2010). τ
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
"It had been, Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama said, a ‘rocky road.’ The year was 1968—one of those years that ranks with A.D. 33, 1066, and 1776 as an inarguable landmark . . . " ( Newsweek, Jon Meacham, July 16). ♦