Scrapbook
Scrapbook Gore Fell Short, It's Bona Fide "Various consortia of leading V national and Florida newspapers are examining scores of thousands of disputed and/or uncounted ballots. It will be many...
...So THE SCRAPBOOK hereby announces that it will boycott the games if they are held in Beijing—and hopes that the Bush administration will use whatever influence it can to derail Beijing's application...
...Citing figures from the registrar's office that suggested more than half of all grades at the university are A's or A-minuses, Mansfield said he was "tired of punishing my students" and from now on would give them two sets of marks each semester...
...Harvard's administration is sticking with its idiotic party line: Grades are high there because the average Harvard student performs better than the average Harvard student...
...Neither paper's Miami numbers, added to Gore-favorable recount results in Broward and Palm Beach counties, the other two jurisdictions subject to litigation, are large enough to have altered the election's official result...
...But it's not likely...
...Last month, the Palm Beach Post reported that its analysis of the disputed Miami ballots suggested George W. Bush deserved a net gain of 6 votes...
...Two weeks ago the IOC's evaluation committee spent four days in China...
...I think that by far the dominant cause of grade 'inflation' at Harvard," explains Harvard College dean Harry Lewis, "is the application of constant grading standards to the work of ever more talented students...
...Trouble is, two of the leading Florida newspapers they were counting on have since completed independent reviews of those 10,644 famously "uncounted" ballots in Miami-Dade County, and both publications have concluded that the presidency wasn't unjustly awarded...
...It will be many weeks before the results of these tabulations are known...
...Clinton, or a war room, but that idea has been discarded...
...Nothing I have personally observed," university president Neil Rudenstine wrote in reply, "leads me to believe that grade inflation resulted from the enrollment of greater numbers of minority students...
...But the fifth contender is the capital of the world's only totalitarian superpower...
...Things quickly turned sour, though, when Mansfield's faculty-club critics successfully mounted a diversionary counterattack involving—you guessed it—a veiled but unmistakable charge of racism...
...oh dear...
...There had been discussion as well among Mr...
...The Scrapbook doesn't think so...
...There are not daily conference calls, there's no war room.'" —New York Times, March 1 FROM CLINTON DIE-HARDS, A COMMAND PERFORMANCE...
...Run-down homes and businesses were demolished, and "undocumented" residents were expelled to the countryside...
...Critics of the regime were placed under house arrest by the police...
...The Scrapbook thinks the ballots in question weren't legally cast...
...They Report, You Decide HIS PERKS AND POWER GONE, CLINTON FACES STORM ALONE by Adam Nagourney "He has lost much of his White House staff, the counsel of many of the people who have guided him through eight years of intermittent crisis...
...Mansfield's theory "deserves further investigation...
...Verbruggen's only stated concern was China's intention to conduct the Olympic beach volleyball competition in Tiananmen Square, where hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred in 1989...
...Clinton's advisers to set up a central operation to respond to attacks on Mr...
...Washington Post, same day...
...Clinton's chief of staff...
...Mansfield's move, and the complaint it implied, initially received widespread and favorable notice, including a frontpage piece in the Boston Globe that deeply embarrassed Harvard's administration...
...For now, an evaluation committee is carefully inspecting the five cities in the running...
...Please, President Bush...
...The International Olympics Committee will decide the site of its 2008 Summer Games in July...
...Just say no...
...Grade inflation at Harvard, Mansfield had publicly speculated, was in part a legacy of two late 1960s phenomena: the Vietnam war, when good grades were necessary to maintain an academic exemption from the draft, and affirmative action, the theory of which could not be maintained if its beneficiaries' transcripts were polluted with C's and D's...
...Perhaps, when all those molecules of air properly arrange themselves through "random Brownian motion," the scribblers will finally admit they were wrong...
...Anyone but a Harvard professor of logic would give Dean Lewis an F. Olympic Sport Where Reds Preside...
...What we want them to see," said Jiang Xiaoyu, vice president of that country's Olympic bid group, "is the real Beijing...
...PARDONS PROMPT PODESTA, OTHERS TO KEEP UP DEFENSE by John F. Harris "The uproar over Clinton's pardons has prompted a command performance of the die-hard defenders—in a long-running show the performers had assumed had been taken out of production for good...
...only the other one, jiggered upwards to conform with campus-wide practice, would appear on their transcripts...
...Four of them would make excellent and honorable hosts, we figure: Paris, Toronto, Osaka, and Istanbul, each a modern, democratic cosmopolis...
...But such hot-faced pro-Gore scribblers as Hendrik Hertzberg never agreed with us about that, and so we would expect them now to take the Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald very seriously...
...Late last week, Fifteen Minutes, a weekend magazine supplement of the Harvard Crimson, ran a long analysis of the entire controversy, which concluded, first, that "grade inflation is real," and, second, that "some evidence correlating the influx of black students 30 years ago and higher grades at Harvard does exist...
...and that subsequent newspaper investigations are mere navel-gazing...
...But wait...
...No, too far away from the Olympic housing complex China plans for the athletes...
...A Clinton damage-control operation has been assembled—churning out a daily stream of rebuttals and talking points...
...that Bush therefore won the election on Election Day...
...Shan Chengfeng, wife of imprisoned dissident Wu Yilong, was shipped to a forced labor camp for threatening to appeal to the IOC on his behalf...
...What is likely is that the independent counts will demonstrate that, no matter what standard is used, Florida, and therefore the presidency, was unjustly awarded...
...And so on...
...of course, Fifteen Minutes and the Crimson are independent publications...
...Mansfield's mention of affirmative action prompted Harvard to wag its finger at him scornfully...
...That was Hendrik Hertzberg, in the January 15 New Yorker, propounding what was only recently an unchallenged gospel for card-carrying Democratic journallectuals...
...And last week, the Miami Herald reported that its own review—employing even the loosest standards of dimple interpretation—indicated that Bush could at most have lost just 49 votes overall had the recounts Al Gore demanded been allowed to proceed...
...Profs Distort Why Standards Slide As both THE SCRAPBOOK and writer Noah oppenheim have reported here in recent issues, Harvey Mansfield, distinguished professor of government at Harvard and occasional contributor to this magazine, abandoned his long-running guerrilla war against grade inflation earlier this year...
...And it is theoretically possible that they will validate Bush's victory, just as it is theoretically possible that, on account of random Brownian motion, all the molecules of air in one of the counting rooms will rush to a corner and the counters will be asphyxiated...
...Whether they realized it or not, the IOC representatives did see the real Beijing...
...When he left Beijing, Hein Ver-bruggen of the Netherlands, chairman of the IOC evaluation committee, announced himself "most impressed with the level of professionalism of the bid committee...
...Can I kill one thing?' said Karen Tramontona, Mr...
...Inappropriate...
...Does this matter...
...The accurate one would remain unofficial...
Vol. 6 • March 2001 • No. 25
