Dobbs leaves CNN
I want to take a moment to stop and celebrate the departure of Lou Dobbs from CNN. This is a really good sign for news. What’s more important is that apparently he left because the people in charge at CNN decided they didn’t want a crazy opinion show on their network. Fox, and to a lesser extent MSNBC, have clearly decided that opinion is a good way to get ratings, and they’re probably correct. However, it’s very good for the country that there is another network out there that’s clearly in between the two. (Also, as annoying as it is, it’s probably good that MSNBC went to the left, because it makes genuinely unbiased news look neutral, rather than looking liberal by comparison to Fox.)
I can understand the “it’s like the editorial page of a newpaper” argument, but it’s really not. A newspaper has a very careful separation between the news staff and the editorial staff, preventing overlap between the two, and clearly labels its opinion. That type of system just doesn’t exist on cable news networks—at least with their current organization.
Now, I would be happy to see any strongly opinionated show leave CNN, but it’s also worth pointing out that Dobbs is a xenophobic nutcase, and his departure from any sort of national spotlight would be cause for celebration for that reason alone.
Questionable Ethics #4
A couple times in this series we’ve responded to articles where Randy Cohen simply seemed to be unnaturally definitive and certain when faced with issues that had lots of gray area. This time, though, I really think he’s just outright wrong. The letter in question:
My listing on ratemyprofessors.com has a few positive ratings, but the majority are from students who gripe about the workload and the density of my lectures. May I suggest to my more-satisfied students that they post a rating on the Web site? NAME WITHHELD, CALIFORNIA
No, says Cohen. It’s “skewing the results” and it’s not ethical. He at least is a little less definitive than usual, quoting a professor who thinks it’s necessary and saying that he “sympathizes” with the position. But really, I think he’s missing the whole point of how the internet works.
How much respect ratemyprofessors.com (or R.M.P., as it’s called in the article), is not clear. To many, posting negative evaluations of your professors on the site is about as worthwhile as writing graffiti about them on a bathroom wall. To others, it’s an honest effort to evaluate professor’s teaching, helpful when many departments ignore teaching in favor of research and other achievements when evaluating professors. I did a little bit of research to try to see which is more true. Looking up professors I know, both from classes I took as an undergrad and those I’ve TAed for as a grad student, I found the ratings correlated pretty well with what I thought of them. On the other hand, the site has a category for rating whether the professor is hot, and whether the class is easy (though they aren’t included in the overall ranking). It’s badly designed, the search function doesn’t work, and the front page sensationalizes bad reviews of famous professors.
If you really do see the site as complete junk, then obviously it’s fine to defend yourself against slander and gossip. That could justify actually lying and creating false users to submit fake reviews. Asking some of the students who like you to say so on the site really is really not so bad.
Even if you think these are good, worthwhile reviews, Cohen seems to not understand how internet polls work. People who have a vested interest in them try to get others to go and vote. You can bet that someone who hated your class put up a facebook status update asking all their friends in the class to submit negative reviews. This doesn’t make the results bad—it just means they measure enthusiasm of those who like/dislike you at least as much as the measure the number of such people. No one would tell presidential candidates that “getting out the vote” was “skewing” the results. You’re supposed to do that. If the reviews submitted represent real positive opinions, there is no way in which anyone is lying.
I think the bigger problem, which Cohen doesn’t even mention, is that such a suggestion coming from a professor to a student won’t appear entire voluntary. No student tells a professor they really hate their teaching. If a student’s view of the class isn’t as positive as the professor thinks, it puts them in a really awkward situation. That is maybe not such a fair way to treat a student. I could imagine, though, that this could be done in a sensitive and reasonable-enough way to prevent this issue. If so, I see no problem with it at all.
Afghanistan v. Iraq
There seem to be more and more people questioning whether we should be sending additional troops to Afghanistan (or, for that matter, questioning if we should still be there at all). I’m not sure where I stand on this, though I definitely think it’s good that we’re having the discussion, rather than just accepting the assumption that the US should stay there. That said, it appears to me that there are two main reasons we would stay. The first is a selfish national security motive. If we left, the argument goes, the Taliban or Al Qaeda or something similar would take over and send more terrorist attacks to the US and Europe. It seems really clear to me that on that front we can get 90% of the benefit of being there very easily by just maintaining a base from which we can shut down training camps, sending drones over the area, and so forth. A really large presence wouldn’t be necessary. We wouldn’t be able to get rid of the longer-term threat by giving everyone there a great modern education, but that is unlikely anyway.
The other argument for staying is a moral one. We invaded and took over the country, and now we have an obligation not to leave until doing so doesn’t mean horrible things for the lives of people there. This has been a primary reason given for us staying in Iraq, and I actually think it’s a much better argument there than it is for Afghanistan. Iraq was, I think most people would now agree, a war of choice. It might have seemed like it would have national security benefits, but it definitely didn’t seem like we were forced into it. The only thing that made it seem urgent was the supposed WMDs, and the US clearly has to take responsibility for that error. The only act of war, as far as I know, was the shooting at planes patrolling the no-fly zones, and no one seemed to think that that on its own deserved anything more than the occasional retaliatory missile strike. Afghanistan, though, was clearly a case of self-defense. The government there (through its close relationship with Al Qaeda) used its territory to train people to attack the United States. That’s an act of war, and the government was a continuing threat. There was little alternative than to displace the government.
Consider the analogous situation for an individual. You’re attacked by a mugger, but happen to have a knife on you and would them in self-defense. Are you liable for the medical bills? Of course not. Now, it’s easy to point out that a country isn’t a unitary actor, and that many of the people in Afghanistan who would be hurt by the US leaving (say, children and women) had no role in allowing the Taliban to control the country. I still think, though, that the analogy works perfectly well. Say instead of wounding your attacker, you had to kill him, and that the attacker had a child. Would you be obligated to take care of the child? Clearly the child did nothing wrong and is in a horrible situation. To some extent, any random passerby (or better yet, society overall through the government) would have an obligation to help, but I don’t think your obligation is any greater because you’re the one that killed its father.
I think the same applies to Afghanistan. If the reason we’re staying is more humanitarian than self-interested, we have to acknowledge that the Afghanis in question have no greater claim to US resources than to the resources of any other country, and that Afghanis in horrible poverty or lacking liberty are no more deserving of help than any other poor or oppressed person anywhere else on the planet.
Health care and crazy people
I am far from the only one who is kind of baffled by the recent spurt of crazy nutjobs showing up at town hall meetings and likening the Democratic health care plan to some sort of secret Nazi plot. Lots of people have tried to explain it, and I think a lot of the explanations have a bit of truth to them. There is a segment of society (largely white, rural, religious, etc.—typical Republican base) that is losing the power that they recently had, and they’ve bought into a mythology where they’ve always had that power and deserve to retain it. (It’s the “real America” stuff, along with older things like praise for “the heartland.”) To some extent, any remotely liberal policy Obama chose to start out his administration pushing for would have led to claims that he was “stealing our country” and things of that sort.
I think, though, that health care reform—particularly the way it’s being done now—is an issue particularly favorable to conspiracy theorists and nutjobs. That’s because it’s incredibly complicated. In some ways, if Obama was actually proposing nationalized or single-payer healthcare, it’d be better in this respect. Those are huge changes to the system, but at least they’re straightforward and easy to understand. Instead, what we’re getting is a messy patchwork system of fixes for the status quo. People are confused. Telling a crowd of people that you’re going to set up a “health care exchange” doesn’t really clear up the confusion. Saying that instead of a public option you’ll have a “health care cooperative” doesn’t help either. These phrases are stand-ins for complicated, messy policy proposals. Even if someone was willing to take the time to explain it, they’d be incapable, because there are several different plans floating around and no final proposal. Each plan differs on huge issues of policy. The same piece of policy might be good in one plan and bad in another, depending on what other policy decisions are made elsewhere in the bill.
I understand the general outlines of the proposals, but I definitely don’t understand all the details. Even I am not willing to put in the time necessary to understand things well enough to make a truly intelligent judgment on the matter. I support the reforms for two simple reasons. First, I know very well that the current system is awful. Second, I trust those proposing the reforms much more than I trust the opponents. Those reasons aren’t going to be enough to win over enough of the population to push borderline senators into voting yes. Democrats need to agree on some plan that at least 55 of them in the Senate are ready to vote for. Then, they need to consolidate all the proposals, come up with more clear ways to explain what they’re proposing, and really go out campaigning for it. If the public doesn’t know what’s going on, some are going to tune out, some are going to revert to partisan predispositions, and some are going to go batshit insane. That is not a good way to make policy.
Not so grand a bargain
I haven’t written in a while, but I promised Z that I’d start up again. I think a good way to start is to talk about Robert Wright’s New York Times op-ed from Saturday, which bothered me in a lot of ways. The title is “A Grand Bargain Over Evolution,” and the goal is to propose a “common ground” between science/atheism and religion over evolution. Very little that he says is actually wrong, but all of it is missing the point. He proposes that the religious concede that evolution is fact. He then points out that many believe evolution is a process that is bound to yield intelligent beings with an idea of morality. He says that atheists should concede that this realization of moral sense being built into a natural process can reasonably be seen as evidence that the universe was created by a supernatural being who wanted those laws of morality to be known.
My biggest problem is with the idea of a “bargain” in the first place. I have no problem with a bargain in the sense of agreeing to disagree. I can easily reach that kind of understanding (and do) all the time with individual people. I also have no problem with (and very much support) the idea of a political compromise, where government stays out of the religion-atheism debate and guarantees the right of everyone to make the decision for themselves. I am not, however, okay with the idea of a bargain over the facts. If I claim the sky is blue, and you claim it is red, we don’t decide to just split the difference and agree that it’s purple. You don’t bargain over what is true. You debate and give logical reasons and do research and try to figure out what the real answer is. This article asks us to believe something because it’s a nice middle position. I have trouble any time I’m asked to believe something for any reason other than that it’s probably true.
Wright also makes it clear that he does not fully understand the atheist argument, which is surprising considering that he just wrote a book on the history of religious belief. He states the grand compromise he proposes this way:
Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
Of course the idea of a “higher purpose” is compatible with scientific materialism. Atheists believe in morality, after all. I am not sure why he thinks this is a concession. He makes himself a little more clear later on:
[Atheists] could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.
I have never seen even the most extreme and combative atheist fail to concede this. A creator-only god is logically compatible with any scientific evidence that could ever be produced, and this is fully conceded by atheists. In fact, even a much more active god is logically compatible with all scientific evidence that could ever be produced. You want to believe God created humans in their current form? Fine. You just also have to believe that God created fossils of various early humanoid species in such a way as to create an apparent link between them and other early apes. It seems to me like a really strange thing to believe, but it’s not logically inconsistent.
The point atheists make is that, while the religious view is logically consistent, there’s no reason to favor it over the non-religious view. We have every reason to believe that logical consequences of the laws of physics govern the events we see around us. Sure, those could be explained by any one of thousands of different possible religious beliefs, but why would we choose to believe any one of these supernatural explanations over any other, let alone over the simple straightforward explanation we can see in the world every day? Atheists don’t claim to disprove religion—they just claim that given the existence of these numerous logically consistent worldviews, the one that doesn’t posit the existence of a random supernatural being without any evidence of its existence is the one that is most reasonable to hold. Wright never even references this argument, and it’s hard to convince people to change their minds when you can’t even prove you understand what they already believe.
Time for Kennedy to go
[Note from Z: Hey, look! My coauthor A is back!]
Ted Kennedy has, without doubt, had a long and influential career in the US Senate. While I’m not far enough to the left to idolize him in the way that some do, there is little question that our country is better off because he served. He has been an excellent senator. However, as he has struggled with illness recently, I have increasingly wondered whether it was wise for him to remain in his seat. With his most recent difficulties, my mind has been made up. The responsible thing for Senator Kennedy to do now would be to resign his seat.
I see little reason for him to stay. He is fighting serious health problems, and unable to put the time and focus on his work that should be expected of a senator. I could of course understand someone pushing to stay when they know their replacement will have a different political stance. If you think certain policies are what are best for the country, then just keeping a vote in the Senate for those policies is very important. Kennedy, though, is from Massachusetts, a state with a Democratic governor who will appoint someone with very similar stances, and a state with no shortage of qualified Democrats to consider for the position. That person will continue to hold the seat easily in future elections. There really seems to me to be little reason for him to stay other than a desire to be personally involved in the decisions. That urge is of course totally understandable, but I think it would be appropriate if at this point, when a massive workload is being dumped on Congress, Senator Kennedy let someone else step in and take up the torch.
Kennedy hasn’t even been able to vote in the Senate recently. If he is unable to vote, there is no doubt that he is also unable to thoroughly research and understand whatever decisions he does make, and unable to try to influence other senators, participate in negotiations, and in general do his job. Naturally, it’s hard to push for someone who has serious health problems to resign. Everyone supports him personally and wishes him well with his illness. Being a senator is not a normal job, though, and you have an obligation to put your constituents above yourself. If an action is good for your constituents, you should do it, even if it’s unfair to you. This is one of those things, and it’s time for Kennedy to move on.
Separation of church and politics
A week ago, a group of ministers supported by the Alliance Defense Fund (which, by the way, is every bit as idiotic as the vagueness of its name would imply) made political endorsements in their sermons as part of the “Pulpit Initiative”. This is something they’re not allowed to do under the regulations that come with their tax-exempt status. The goal is to create a test case with the standing to challenge the constitutionality of that regulation.
I should say, first of all, that they have a legitimate argument, and I don’t believe the lawyers involved should be punished. Yes, the lawyers told their clients to break the law, but with standing requirements what they are, this kind of thing is common in the US when people want to challenge laws. That’s maybe unfortunate, but as long as the lawyers made very clear to these pastors what it was they were getting themselves into, I have no ethical complaint against them.
That said, it’s pretty clear to me that there is no ground for their suit. Churches are in no way required to have tax exempt status. It would actually be a constitutional violation to single them out for it, as it would be government sponsorship of religious activities. The law ignores whether a given organization is religious. What it does pay attention to is whether it’s a non-profit. Non-profits, because society has decided they are worth encouraging, are given tax-exempt status, and donations to them are tax-deductible.
Non-profits in general, not just churches, are required to live by certain regulations if they want tax-exempt status. One of these is a lack of overt campaign activities and endorsements. (They’re allowed to talk about specific political issues, advocate for a bill, and a variety of other related things.) The main reason for this is that making an organization tax-exempt costs the government money, and the country has decided it doesn’t want to subsidize these activities. Also, allowing this would create a loophole a mile wide in campaign finance reform laws. (And any attempt to add the regulations necessary to prevent that would subject churches to a huge amount of additional regulation.)
So what about free speech? Don’t they have a right to make political endorsements? The individuals do, and the clergy are free to engage in politics in their own time. The organizations also do, but they don’t have a right to tax-exempt status. When the government gives favors, it can attach strings. There are limits of course, but this one is reasonable.
The real point here is a larger one. When religious organizations get favors from the government, they get entangled with the government. The separation of church and state is as much about protecting the church from the state as it is the reverse. As soon as a religious organization becomes accustomed to government favors of some kind, it loses its independence. The government can attach conditions to these favors that it would never be able to impose on the churches directly. Even without the formal conditions, the religious groups have to be wary of doing politically unpopular things, since part of the backlash could be the removal of those favors. If you think it’s important that government not dictate limitations on religious practices, then you should also think it’s important the religious groups get no special favors. And those religious organizations that are so unhappy about the endorsement rules should think twice about demanding a faith-based initiative that allows the government to directly fund may of their activities.
Don’t trust the polls (too much)
It’s natural in an election with high stakes to follow closely any signs of who is going to win. The polls are by far the most noticeable of those signs, but everyone knows that the polls aren’t perfect predictors. There are two obvious reasons for this.
First, polls measure voters’ opinions at the moment, and those opinions can easily change before election day (and of course, some are undecided). Second, polls are a random sample of voters, and therefore suffer from random errors based on who happens to get polled. I think everyone is basically aware of these problems.
There are, however, other problems with them that I think people don’t really think about as much. The problem with these errors is that they don’t just make the polls less useful by introducing noise. They actually bias the results consistently in one direction or another. This is the kind of error that no amount of polling or averaging of multiple polls can eliminate. Here are a couple of the issues:
- Organization: The Obama campaign, which has a huge amount of money, has been spending a lot more on organizing (as opposed to ads) than is traditional. The campaign’s employees and volunteers are working incredibly hard to register new voters, and as soon as the registration deadlines pass, they’ll start preparing for getting out the vote (and in many cases, will start instantly getting out the early vote in states that allow it). Now McCain has his own forces, but overall Obama’s outnumber his substantially. Now, this varies a lot from state to state. In some states Obama has a huge advantage, while in others he has none. No one knows exactly what kind of advantage Obama might get in each state, but what we do know is that this isn’t picked up in the polls.
- Turnout: This overlaps with organization, but is different in some ways. Polls don’t just call X random people and ask them who they’re voting for. They call a bunch, then try to adjust their sample to match “likely voters”. This involves asking a bunch of questions to try to determine if each respondent is likely to come out and actually vote. It also involves weighting their samples so that various demographic/ideological groups make up the same portion of the sample as they will voters in November. This is always tricky, but it’s trickier this time. There are issues of race and gender to play with, as well as the old question of whether young voters will actually show up. The more likely this election is to violate patterns from previous elections, the more these models of who will vote are going to be guesswork and unreliable.
- Lying to pollsters: People sometimes tell people they’ll vote for X and then vote for Y, or that they’re undecided when they’re not. It’s not just about people changing their mind since the poll. Sometimes they just don’t tell the truth. Why? Well, there is a long history of people telling pollsters the things that they think the pollsters want to hear, or hiding things they find embarrassing. Polls routinely show much higher levels of exercise, for example, or church attendance, than actually happens. You could imagine several ways this would happen in this election. One is the so-called “Bradley effect,” where voters say they are voting for a black candidate only to then not vote for him. This seems to me like it would be likely in instances where the perception is that the main reason to vote against the candidate is racism. If it’s widely accepted that non-racists can vote against the candidate, I wouldn’t expect it so much. I could also imagine something of this sort based on the media message. If the current media narrative is that Bush has bungled his presidency and the Republicans are hopeless, the voter might feel as if the pollster will look down on them for voting Republican. This could lead to an artificially high number for any Democrat right now. (Incidentally, my guess is that this effect existed and was largely deflated by the Republican convention, which is where McCain’s bounce came from.) You could also imagine that this effect in general makes the polls more extreme in states with a clear favorite, because voters feel like they’re the odd ones out if they vote for candidate less favored in their area.
- Cell phones: Most pollsters don’t call cell phones. If cell phone use is correlated with particularly political preferences, this could matter a lot. Younger voters are more frequently cell-only, but this can be compensated for by overweighting other young voters who are contacted. The real question is, within a given demographic group, whether those with cell phones likely to have a different political preference than those without. Pollsters can’t control for everything with weighting, and I would assume cell phone ownership (to the exclusion of land lines) correlates with not just age and race, but also education level, income level, urban/rural location, etc. This could mean a big difference is hidden here.
So to what extent do these effects exist, and if so, whom do they favor? Really, no one has the slightest clue. The best we can do is look at previous elections (including the primary) to see if they existed there. Of course, there are multiple, possibly contradictory effects, and teasing out what’s going on is near impossible. My guess is that all effects above do exist, if only in small amounts. I also would be willing to bet that all except the lying favors Obama being better off than the polls imply. The best analysis I’ve seen of this stuff is at FiveThirtyEight, but the analysis there of the Bradley effect is based on the Democratic primary, with a very different universe of voters and a lot of other complicating factors. Same with the cell phone analysis, with similar problems (plus some others).
The bottom line is just that there isn’t enough information out there for us to really know anything that exactly, regardless of how much polling we do. Don’t think of a state as guaranteed unless the polling margins are pretty big. This is an unusual election, so don’t be surprised by unusual results.
College endowments
Senator Grassley recently held hearings into how colleges use their endowments. There’s some understandable interest here. Universities frequently control large amounts of money, with a handful of them controlling huge assets. (Harvard, the richest by far, has over $34 billion.) With college costs rising faster than inflation, some in government have thought about ways to force colleges to put this money to work faster to help out with their expenses and reduce tuition. I really think this debate, though, has missed a few points.
First of all, and I think this is the most important point, the money has to be used on education/research eventually. Most of the money in endowments is tied to specific uses. It’s for scholarships, or the salary for a named professorship or something. Even what isn’t specifically targeted is going to end up being used by an educational institution. The real complaint here is just that colleges are saving more than they should — overvaluing education in the future as compared to the present.
I’m inclined to think they are not. Recognize first of all that, to a great extent, any lack of them funding education out of their endowments right now will be replaced with funding from people paying tuition, as long as tuition doesn’t get so high as to dissuade people from going to college. Now, I believe it’s clearly the responsibility of government to provide enough financial aid that everyone can attend college (assuming they put in the effort in high school to make themselves qualified). This is what’s annoying congressmen, since they don’t want to make room in the budget for it, and of course that’s understandable.
The real problem here, though, is that the vast majority of endowment money is held by only a small handful of schools. Maybe Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and MIT can make college free for everyone for a little while by spending down their endowments (or at least, not growing them fast enough to keep up with inflation), but that only affects a tiny minority of college students in the US, and those schools already offer enough financial aid that students from poor families pay very little if anything. Most students go places that don’t have much in the way of endowments, and Congress is still going to have to offer enough financial aid to keep those places affordable.
However, these big endowments do constitute a form of national savings for the US. The American savings rate is low (or negative, really) and could use every bit of help it can get, and a half-trillion dollars in savings isn’t something we should be trying to get rid of. Also, more importantly, it helps to lock in the leading status of US universities. The world’s most elite universities are near-universally in the US (the main exceptions being Cambridge and Oxford). This is largely a consequence of economics. The schools with the ability to bring in the top people will always be the best. The US isn’t going to stay the world’s biggest economy forever, and the gap is definitely going to shrink fast. Building up huge endowments in our top universities essentially locks in their top position, guaranteeing that they’ll be able to fight and stay at the top even as the overall position of the United States deteriorates.
The government should try to avoid forcing private actors to spend their money. I’m not a libertarian, and regulation of nonprofits is something I could live with when clearly necessary. Here, though, I don’t think it is. Harvard is still raising lots of money, so clearly their donors don’t have a problem with the way the endowment is being used. At a time when the United States is failing in general to invest in the kind of long-term society-building things that keep a country at the top of its game, private charities that devote resources to planning for the very long term should be helped, not hurt.
Journalistic discretion
Bob Woodward’s new book, A War Within, is out, and is generating headlines with the report that the Bush administration spied on many in the Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Maliki. (With Maliki, it was apparently successful enough to “know everything he says.”) I really think the inclusion of this piece of information was a substantial failure of discretion on Woodward’s part. Of course we were spying on the Iraqi government. It would have been negligent not to spy on them. There were death squads working for the Interior Ministry, and some people seem offended that we didn’t just trust them on principle. It’s offensive, they say, that we were spying on an ally.
This reaction is incredibly naive. Almost every country on earth has an intelligence program, and they all spy on each other, including their allies. The US, for example, gets spied on by Israel and spies on France. It’s not all bad — if your ally has a spy in your government, they know your promises to them aren’t lies, and there’s a lot more trust all around. Good or bad, though, it’s business as usual. No government is really particularly surprised or offended by it. Their populations are, though, so the government has to act as if it’s a horrible surprise.
And this is exactly why I don’t think Woodward should have published what he did. It angers Iraqis and damages the chance of success there. (It should be noted that “success” in this case isn’t just something that’s good for the US, but pretty uncontroversially good for everyone.) It’s harmful, but has no particular value to public discourse. The spying isn’t controversial amongst anyone with the power to do anything about it.
There is, of course, a more complicated issue here. The information in question was probably classified. Clearly Woodward has a legal right to print it, but the person who told him the info was probably breaking the law. In an investigation, Woodward could be called to testify and imprisoned if he didn’t reveal his sources. Would it be proper to undertake these investigations and punishments? Would it be better if they weren’t legally available?
The real problem with the shield law debate is that intuitions vary so much based on the information in question. If the government has a secret program to burn down the houses of everyone who voted against the incumbent party, and you know it, you should leak it. No one will disagree with this, and you’d probably have a parade thrown in your honor. If instead you leak technical diagrams of US military weaponry, and the Washington Post publishes them on the front page, no one would support the Post, and everyone would support an investigation to find the leak. The dilemma, of course, is that any law punishes someone for leaking (or printing) classified information applies equally well in both cases. You can’t write an “unless it was good” exception.
In the end, I’m inclined to accept the status quo here. It’s very unusual for reporters to be supboenaed and their ability to report stays intact. (I disagree with those who want Woodward fired/subpoenaed/whatever. I don’t think he should have printed this, but he has some very good stuff about why violence is decreasing in Iraq, and to have some subjective, unpredictable standard is going to silence a lot of good reporting.) There is, though, some risk. When you leak something idiotic, like the identity of a CIA agent, there is definitely some danger of jail time. I feel uncomfortable depending so heavily on prosecutorial discretion, which can easily be political, but I don’t see any better alternative here.