by JAMES TARANTO
Monday, August 6, 2001 12:57 P.M. EDT

Fox Does It Again
Does Roger Ailes watch his own network? Maybe it's time he started, because the folks at the Fox News Channel desperately need some adult supervision.

This weekend's "Judith Regan Tonight" posed the following question: "Did we go too far in giving airtime to psychics to discuss the Chandra Levy case?" The answer, as we've said, is emphatically yes. It's a no-brainer. But Regan acted as if it's a matter of dispute whether the proclamations of the charlatans who call themselves "psychics" are legitimate news. She began her show by reading four letters from readers cheering Fox on for putting "psychics" on the air, and two letters from critics.

Ailes's motto is "We report, you decide." Regan's, apparently, is "You decide what we report." For it turned out the whole "dispute" was a pretense to give "psychics" yet more airtime. Regan reaired "spiritual medium" James van Praagh's unsubstantiated murder allegation against Gary Condit--the initial airing of which, as we've noted, was the most outrageous example of journalistic irresponsibility we've seen in a long time. Then she interviewed yet another "psychic," one John Monti, who offered his own crackpot theories about what happened to Chandra.

Monti was paired in a "debate" format with the excellent James Randi, debunker of "the paranormal, pseudoscientific and the supernatural." During a discussion of police supposedly using "psychics," Randi observed: "There's such a thing as real police work, and that takes dedication and skill and professionalism." The same is true of journalism.

Which leads us to the question we've asked before: Does Roger Ailes care if people take the Fox News Channel seriously as a news organization? And if he does, why is he airing stuff that belongs on Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi Channel or the Cartoon Network?

Gamecocks Live to Fight Again
So much for Sen. Hillary Clinton's victory over cockfighting. The Senate, facing a threatened White House veto of the Democrats' $7.5 billion farm bill, retreats and passes the $5.5 billion Republican alternative, which doesn't include the Hillary-backed amendment to ban interstate transportation of chickens for cockfighting. The lesson for Sen. Clinton? Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Rudy's Roommates
New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is in the midst of a vicious divorce. For reasons we can't even begin to fathom, his estranged wife, Donna Hanover, continues to occupy Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence, even though she has never been elected to anything. The mayor, meanwhile, is staying with friends.

It turns out Giuliani's hosts are a gay couple, car dealer Howard Koeppel and his companion, Mark Hsaio, who works for the city's Department of Cultural Affairs. The New York Times' Frank Rich (link requires registration) paid a visit to Koeppel and Hsaio last week, "when the mayor was out" (no pun intended, we presume).

Giuliani, a Republican, is an interesting political figure--far more liberal on social issues like abortion and gay rights than the national Republican Party, but conservative enough, especially when it comes to crime, to be demonized by the dismayingly influential denizens of New York's far-left fever swamps.

Unlike several of the Democrats vying to succeed him, the mayor has not endorsed the idea of same-sex marriage. Yet based on his conversation with Koeppel and Hsaio, Rich suggests that the mayor is actually more liberal-minded than many so-called liberals: "What this couple like about their friend the mayor is that unlike many supposedly gay-friendly politicians who patronizingly 'tell us that they tolerate our lifestyle,' Mr. Giuliani treats them like anyone else, without any showboating or self-congratulation, privately or publicly."

Not that Giuliani is deeply immersed in the gay subculture. "I taught him a lot of expressions," Koeppel tells Rich. "He didn't know what a Friend of Dorothy was." We didn't know either, so we asked our friend Dorothy Rabinowitz, who explains that it's an expression meaning a gay man, and the reference is to Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," played by gay icon Judy Garland.

Term limits will force Giuliani to leave office on Jan. 1. Atop the new mayor's agenda, we suppose, will be a trip to New York City's Housing Court to petition for the eviction of Donna Hanover.

Better Gray Than Gay?
For a paper that prides itself on its pro-gay sensibility, the Times is awfully joyless. Consider this "editor's note" (link requires registration), which ran yesterday, the day after Rich's column:

Readers who solve The Times's Sunday puzzles may wish to skip this note until they have completed today's crossword.

That puzzle, on Page 64 of the magazine, is titled "Homonames." Its principal answers are homonyms of well-known names--words pronounced like the names but spelled differently and unrelated in meaning. After advance copies of the magazine had been delivered, a few readers, perhaps prompted by the sound of the title, said they perceived allusions to gay life among the puzzle clues. Slurs involving sexual orientation would be a violation of The Times's standards. The newspaper has requested and received assurances from the puzzle editor and the puzzle creator, a veteran Times contributor, that no such allusions--nor any suggestions about anyone's sexual orientation--were intended.

The most appealing thing about gay culture is the lighthearted spirit of camp. A contributor to Andrew Sullivan's letters page makes the point nicely (ellipses in original):

Twenty-five years ago I left my life in San Francisco, where almost all my girlfriends were gay men . . . and married a (sad to say) 99% boring straight man. And what have I missed most all these years? The humor . . . the endless stream of sarcasm and wit and SELF-PARODY from my gay friends.

By contrast, the old gray lady's crabbed crossword correction makes us wonder if there are any actual gay guys working for the New York Times.

Those Wacky Germans
OK, so we're raising money for a Holocaust memorial, and we need a slogan. Something that will really grab people by the lapels, that will motivate them to reach deep into their pockets and support our admirable cause. This is a really important endeavor, so we need to come up with something that strikes just the right tone . . .

Hey, we've got it! "The Holocaust never happened"! That'll get their attention!

A dreadfully unfunny joke, right? Yet that's exactly the slogan the organizers of a major Holocaust memorial came up with. In Germany, no less--the country that, more than any other, you'd expect to be circumspect about such things. The campaign dropped the slogan after an outcry, and the Associated Press reports that, in what sounds to us like a bit of an overreaction, "Berlin prosecutors are investigating several complaints that it breaks laws against stirring racial hatred."

The new slogan is "Forget nothing," which has the advantage of being able to double as the motto of a campaign to raise money for Alzheimer's research.

The Power of the Tax Issue
A black truck driver explains his affinity for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he has given a ride in his truck. Tim McCrary "said he found a kindred spirit in Thomas as a Georgia native, an African American and a committed Republican," the Washington Post reports:

"My politics sometimes puzzle other black people," McCrary said. "Most black people vote Democratic because they feel that's what's expected of them. But why shouldn't I vote for the guy who's going to help me out? This may sound kind of radical, but I'd probably vote for the grand wizard of the KKK if I thought he was going to bring my taxes down."

We're all for tax revolts, but voting for a Klansman we'd find revolting.

Pro-Life, Pro-Research
Some observers of the debate over embryonic stem-cell research have raised the question of how anyone can be both opposed to abortion and in favor of scientific experiments that involve the destruction of human embryos. Writing in Slate, Drew Clark answers the question, at least as it applies to two prominent senators who've taken this position, Republicans Orrin Hatch of Utah and Gordon Smith of Oregon: They are Mormons.

Catholic doctrine, as Father Robert Sirico has written, holds that life begins at conception and that an embryo, or even a zygote, is a human being. Mormon theology is more complicated. As Clark explains:

Mormon doctrine holds that each person lived as a spirit child of God prior to being born and receiving a physical body on Earth. From this point of view, it makes no sense to say that life begins at conception. Instead, Mormons would say that life on earth begins when the spirit and body are united.

In his testimony [at a Senate hearing], Sen. Smith made this very point. Without calling attention to his Mormon beliefs, he cited Genesis 2:7, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Smith went on to explain, "This allegory of creation describes a two-step process to life, one of the flesh, the other of the spirit." He compared stem cells to "the dust of the earth--they are essential to life, but standing alone, will never constitute life." As Smith portrayed it, the onset of life--the union of spirit and body--takes place when the embryo is implanted in a womb.

China's Abortion Quota
"A Chinese county has been ordered to conduct 20,000 abortions and sterilizations before the end of the year," the Sunday Telegraph reports from Hong Kong. "The drive to perform 20,000 abortions and sterilizations in six months in a county with a population of fewer than 1 million represents a heavy assault on the women of child-bearing age in its population. It is equivalent to the number of legal abortions that take place each year in Hong Kong, a city with a population of 7 million, where women face no family planning restrictions."

'Suspicion of Spreading Christianity'
Two dozen aid workers, including two Americans, are under arrest in Afghanistan on suspicion of spreading Christianity, the Associated Press reports from Kabul. "Under the Taliban's strict brand of Islamic law, the promotion of any religion other than Islam or the conversion from Islam to any religion is punishable by death," the AP says. Also arrested were 64 Afghans who the Taliban said had received instructions in Christianity from the aid workers.

A Clinton Republican
Luther Hodges Jr., whose fellow North Carolina Democrats saw him back in 1978 as the "dragon slayer" who could topple Sen. Jesse Helms (though he ended up losing the Democratic primary), has become a Republican, the Raleigh News and Observer reports:

Hodges said he had been drifting toward the GOP for years. Although he voted for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992, he supported Republicans Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000.

The Clinton presidency was the deciding point, Hodges said. Hodges said Clinton seemed to be driven by political polls and fund raising rather than by any set of principles. He said Clinton was symptomatic of the Democratic Party as a whole.

"All through the last four years of the Clinton administration, I did see the Democratic Party nationally changing," Hodges said in a recent telephone interview. "I really feel education is being ruined by organized labor. I think the trial lawyers . . . are the real backbone of the Democratic Party."

Peter Paul Nabbed
Brazilian authorities have arrested Peter Paul, the stock-fraud suspect who held a lavish Hollywood fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign and claims he gave Hillary an illegal $2 million campaign contribution.

Roger's Concerts
The ex-president's brother may still face legal trouble. The New York Post reports prosecutors have subpoenaed documents from Roger Clinton's music manager in an effort to find out if he took cash for pardons. "Investigators are trying to determine whether Clinton's inflated fees for overseas concerts were really a cover for those payments, sources said."

The Secrets of 'Mackin' '
Newsweek's Gersh Kuntzman visits Harlem on the day Bill Clinton is moving in, and comes back with some amusing local color:

I . . . headed a few feet down 125th Street toward a bookseller named Abdullah, who was offering a wide variety of black-interest books (including the obligatory Holocaust-denying screeds and diatribes against the white power structure).

But Abdullah also provides a second table of books that might be of more interest to Bill Clinton: romance novels, sex manuals and even a line of "pimp" books that includes "The Art of Mackin'," which, author Tariq "K-Flex" Nasheed promises on the back cover, will "help men look at female situations from a mack's point of view."

Nasheed continues: "The true mack can calmly analyze the woman and deal with her accordingly . . . instead of being driven crazy." If Clinton had only known the secrets of mackin', the whole impeachment thing might never have happened. I bought a copy and moved on.

The Bush Payroll
The Bush White House's annual payroll is is $84,000 less annually than Clinton's was in June 1998, although President Bush is employing about the same number of staffers, according to U.S. News & World Report. The top staffers make $140,000 a year--respectable, but not terribly lucrative given their authority. As U.S. News puts it, "There must be some kind of high to working for the first family, because it sure ain't the money."

Two-Front Investigation
"Authorities are debating whether to intensify their focus on possible obstruction of justice and witness tampering on the part of Rep. Gary A. Condit and his aides," the Washington Post reports. "Deciding on such a course is a sensitive matter for the U.S. attorney's office, because it would immediately place the Democrat from California at the center of an investigation, even as police continue to say that he is not a suspect or even a central figure in the disappearance" of Chandra Levy.

He's No Bill Clinton
If a report in yesterday's New York Daily News is to be believed, Gary Condit is no Bill Clinton when it comes to lying. A few years ago, the News reports, the randy representative tried to get a date with a United Airlines stewardess by telling her a bald-faced lie: that he was divorced. The savvy stew phoned the League of Women Voters and was told that Condit was indeed married. She confronted him the next time she saw him, "and then he told me his wife was terminally ill."

Clinton would not have made up the divorce story, which is easily refuted; he'd have told a lie that can't be pinned down, like "My wife doesn't understand me." And "terminally ill"? Clinton would have said his wife was "dying," which suggests the same thing but is, in a legalistic sense, true--after all, we're all going to die eventually.

More Mystified Than Ever
A Newsweek interview with Chandra's parents, Robert and Susan Levy, leaves us more mystified than ever about Otis Thomas's story, which he later recanted, that his daughter had had an affair with the congressman when she was 18. According to Mrs. Levy, when Thomas told her the story, she didn't know Chandra was involved with Condit: "As far as I knew, she was seeing a divorced congressman from southern California." Newsweek asks Mrs. Levy, "When did you and Mr. Thomas have this conversation about his daughter's alleged involvement with Condit?" Her reply:

Early April, end of March. We were talking about daughters in general, and it just kind of came out about his daughter. I didn't tell him anything about whom [Chandra] was seeing because I did not know. But I used a mother's intuitive thing to put two and two together and that's how I knew, and I asked my daughter about it directly afterward on the phone. And told her to be careful, because I didn't want her to get hurt. [Later] she told me she had talked to her friend and she said, "Everything's OK. He knows everything," and then a little bit later my daughter no longer has her job and a few days later she disappears. What can I say? Kind of strange to me. Real strange.

So we're supposed to believe that Mrs. Levy first found out that Chandra was seeing Condit when the mendacious minister told her what turned out to be a tall tale? This just doesn't add up.

Condit's Enforcer
The New York Post reports that "daughter Candee, who also works for [Gov. Gray] Davis, has called several former Condit staffers who have spoken out about his conduct to scream at them for their 'disloyalty.' " The daughter, who is actually named Cadee, is 25--one year older than her father's erstwhile concubine.

Mrs. Condit Gets Fingered
The Washington Post profiles Carolyn Condit, "the nation's most famously scorned wife," and shoots down "the most ludicrous of all rumors": that she has no thumbs. "There is not a speck of truth to this assertion--it's quite laughable, really," the Post assures us. What a relief.

A 50-Year-Old Boy
A judge in Ventura County, Calif., has ordered a couple to pay their 50-year-old son $3,500 a month to cover his living expenses. The middle-aged boy, David Culp, is a Stanford graduate who practiced law for 19 years. But now he suffers from "depression and bipolar disorder" and claims he's unable to support himself. The Scripps Howard News Service reports Judge Melinda Johnson "based her ruling on state law, Family Code section 3910(a). It states that 'the father and mother have an equal responsibility to maintain, to the extent of their ability, a child of whatever age who is incapacitated from earning a living and without sufficient means.' " There's more:

Also factored into her decision was the possibility that Culp's emotional illnesses may have been hereditary and that his behavior disorders may be caused by physical and emotional abuse by his father.

Culp told his therapists his father physically and emotionally abused him and described his father in court documents as "an evil sadist" whose favorite sport was "humiliating the great lawyer in public."

Hey, come to think of it, our parents live in Ventura County, and a David Culp-style life of leisure has a certain appeal. Get out your checkbooks, mom and dad--we're coming home!

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to James Lucier, James Allen, C.E. Dobkin and Rosslyn Smith. If you have a tip, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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