The Volokh Conspiracy

Roger Ebert died this past week. He was best known for his various reviewing gigs on TV, starting with his show teamed with Gene Siskel. Because Siskel was tall and Ebert was short, during the show Ebert sat on phone books to lessen the height difference. Another odd story about Ebert is that he once agreed to be hired as the primary Washington Post film reviewer, but the Post backed out when Ebert made it clear that he had no intention of moving to DC.

One thing I liked about Ebert is that he sometimes wrote very engagingly about bad films, a talent that led to my favorite line of his (as I remember it):

“This film is so much in favor of the human race that it almost makes you want to choose sides.”

I first met Roger Ebert in 1978 in the green room of a Public TV show when I was hosting Frank Capra for his multi-day visit to the University of Chicago’s Law School Films. Ebert was bright and charming, but I was struck by how little he knew about 1930s and 1940s films. I think that Capra (and Mickey Rooney) were just as surprised as I was.

The next time I saw Ebert was less than a year later. I picked him up at his apartment on the North Side and brought him down to Hyde Park for an evening at UC Law School Films. As I drove him home afterwards, I just handed him a wad of cash, our receipts for the night plus enough additional money to bring it up to $500 (somehow I’ll bet that bookkeeping would not be so casual these days, even for a student organization). I was able to talk with him enough that night to understand that his knowledge of films from the mid-1960s on was stunning, really impressive; it’s just that Ebert had not worked through the older films released before he became a film reviewer. (IMO, this shortcoming contributed to Ebert’s rather ad hoc approach to film.)

That night at UC in front of the crowd, Ebert was a bit bored until I asked him a question about how it was to work for Russ Meyer, after which he really lit up. Ebert, a fan of Meyer’s films, had met Meyer in the late 1960s at the infamous Yale Law School Films Russ Meyer film festival. Meyer then hired Ebert to write what became “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.” Ebert said, “If you work for Russ Meyer, there is no such thing as writer’s block.” Meyer was sitting in the next room; if Ebert’s typewriter stopped for a minute or two, Meyer would just shout, “Hey, what’s going on in there?” (I never saw the movie, or any of Meyer’s films, so I can’t give you my opinion of whether the film is any good.)

Andrew Sarris (another UC Law School Films guest) told me that Ebert was a bit of a protégé of Pauline Kael, Sarris’s chief rival, and that Kael had championed Ebert’s career, aid that I suspect helped Ebert win the Pulitzer Prize (the first film critic to win one).

Though Sarris said nothing critical of Ebert to me (and why would he to someone he just met?), Sarris laughed when I told him of a poster used by our film society’s competitor, UC’s DOC Films. By far the most famous — and meanest — poster in DOC Films’ long history was one for “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,” with a screenplay by Ebert. As I remember the poster, on the left side was the heading, “Roger Ebert’s Contribution to the Art of Cinema,” with an ad for the movie. On the right side of the poster was a blank space with the heading, “Gene Siskel’s Contribution to the Art of Cinema.” For those having trouble picturing the poster, the implication was that Ebert’s contribution to cinema was in writing a porn movie and that Siskel’s contribution was nothing. A funny movie poster, but grossly unfair — to Ebert at least!

P.S. The movie theater at the Art Institute of Chicago is named after Siskel, so I assume Siskel made significant contributions to cinema there.

On MSNBC over the weekend, Melissa Harris-Perry had some very kind words to say about some of my research a decade ago on guns in early America and the errors of Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America:

MSNBC:

Here is the transcript of Harris-Perry’s comments:

[I]t`s not just sports where knowing the rules of the inside game can make all the difference. Let me take you to the original Nerdland, the academy, where inside fights rarely make the news, but sometimes the topics pack enough political heat to make professors into headliners. Take this scandal. In 2000, a remarkable piece of academic work was published by the then much respected Emory University historian, professor Michael Bellesiles. In his book, “Arming America,” he used hundreds of old documents to prove that gun ownership was uncommon in the 18th century. He went on to say that given the rarity of gun ownership, there is no way the Founding Fathers intended the Second Amendment to ensure individual gun ownership rights. It was a moment of triumph in the gun control debate, when data, not polemic, proved the point.

Except it was not true. In an epic academic takedown a year later, a law professor from Northwestern University, James Lindgren, went through hundreds of pages of Bellesiles`s footnotes and found that much of the data were falsified. In fact, there were far more guns in earlier America than Bellesiles claimed. And Professor Bellesiles resigned from his tenured job, and was stripped of his book awards.

But most damning of all, the research he`d hoped would make a case for gun control only served to bolster the claims of the NRA.

It`s an example of inside baseball. The minutia of academic footnotes and the insiders game of replicating data turned into a politically consequential battle that shifted the discourse on guns in America.

She is referring to my co-authored Wm & Mary article and my Yale review of Arming America. As many of you remember, other researchers made significant contributions to the debate, especially Clayton Cramer, who was the first to find significant problems with Bellesiles’s research.

The Dow Jones Industrials fell 313 points (2.36%), the worst day for the Dow this year. Also, the S&P 500 fell 2.37%, while the NASDAQ fell 2.48%.

UPDATE: CNBC reports:

Markets have performed unfavorably both days following Obama’s presidential victories. In fact, back on Nov. 5, 2008 — the day after Obama was first elected — the Dow closed down almost 500 points.

Excluding 2008, the only other time stocks have performed as poorly the day after a presidential election in the last 60 years was on Nov. 3, 1948, when the Dow dropped 3.85 percent as Harry Truman claimed victory over Thomas Dewey.

Thus, the three worst post-election days since World War II are 2008 (Obama), 1948 (Truman) and 2012 (Obama).

At about 11:14pm ET, FOX News just called the race for Obama.

At 10:16pm ET on Tuesday night, the S&P 500 mini stock futures are down 13.75 points, or just under 1%. The Dow futures are similarly down 107 points. Roughly, a move of this size in the market tomorrow would just erase today’s gains.

Accordingly, those few investors who feared a big down day on Wednesday should take heart that so far the futures do not indicate such a large negative day.

I wouldn’t be surprised, however, to see a big move one way or the other later tonight or tomorrow.

UPDATE: At 11:15ET, the stock futures drop has been trimmed to only about 7.5 points on the S&P and 56 points on the Dow.

As the first exit polls are discussed, only certain internal questions are reported. Among them is the percentage thinking that they are better off than four years ago. AP is reporting that only 25% of voters in exit polls report being better off. That contrasts with a Gallup Poll of two weeks ago showing 38% feeling better off than four years ago.

If a smaller percentage (a 13% drop) feeling better off means that the rest are more likely to vote for Romney, then this might indicate that Romney will perform better than expected. (Gallup didn’t report the results on its website in a way that would permit me to check this reasonable assumption.)

UPDATE (from EV): Jim asked me to post this:

While I was preparing analyses of other exit poll questions, most of which tend to be good news for Obama, my computer crashed. Until I return to Chicago in a few hours, I will not be able to provide the updated analyses I had hoped to add.

2D UPDATE (from JL): Among the analyses that I was working on before my computer crashed was one whether the country was on the Right Track or Wrong Track. The percentage on the right track was considerably higher than in pre-election polls, a very good sign for Obama.

The most interesting pro-Obama internal result of an exit poll that I heard in the last 90 minutes is that in New Hampshire, Obama was leading among independents by 8%. Even if these results were to be off by a few percent, if they are even close to accurate (and I assume they are), I don’t see how Romney could win New Hampshire.

It is not surprising that President Obama, a strong proponent of doing more to equalize incomes, would speak about voting as the “best revenge.” After all, as I explored in “What Drives Views on Government Redistribution and Anti-capitalism: Envy or a Desire for Social Dominance?” (available at SSRN), strong proponents of income leveling are more likely than strong opponents to admit that when they are angry, they plot revenge. The data come from the 1996 General Social Survey, which asked about 900 respondents about their emotional and psychological makeup.

On revenge, the paper reports:

Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. Further, when asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. [p. 36]

This is part of a general pattern of greater anger and less happiness among redistributionists (pp. 32-26):

In terms of relative odds (Table 3-3), compared to strong anti-redistributionists (category 7), strong redistributionists (category 1) had about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were “angry” (2.0 times higher odds), “mad at something or someone” (1.9 times), [and] “outraged at something somebody had done” (1.9 times) . . . . Similarly, as Table 3-4 shows, anti-redistributionists had about 280% higher odds of reporting being happy (3.8 times) and about 110% higher odds of reporting that they were at ease (2.1 times). Overall, favoring income redistribution positively predicted 9 of 12 superficially negative emotions and negatively predicted 4 of 7 superficially positive emotions, which was a remarkably consistent pattern. The data are consistent with redistributionists in the general public being considerably more angry, sad, lonely, worried, and restless, and less happy, at ease, and interested in life.

The problem with many gaffes committed by both President Obama and Mr. Romney is that a politician’s true beliefs may be revealed too clearly.

Because when they get angry, redistributionists are much more likely to plot revenge, for them voting might indeed be the “best revenge.”

If I am correct about the psychology of the “revenge” gaffe, then Obama is unlikely to get much criticism on this front from his fellow redistributionists, who may share his attitude toward revenge.

Nate Silver reviews the post debate polls, which show President Obama as the narrow winner, a result that more or less accords with my view:

Scientific polls conducted after Tuesday night’s presidential debate in New York give a modest edge to President Obama.

A CBS News/Knowledge networks poll of undecided voters who watched the debate found 37 percent giving an advantage to Mr. Obama, 30 percent favoring Mitt Romney and 33 percent calling the debate a tie. That represents a narrower lead for Mr. Obama than Mr. Romney had after the first debate in Denver, when a similar poll gave Mr. Romney a 46-22 edge.

A CNN poll of registered voters who watched the debate — not just undecided voters, as in the CBS News survey — also gave the debate to Mr. Obama by a seven-point margin, 46 percent to 39 percent. Mr. Romney had won by a much larger margin, 67 percent to 25 percent, in CNN’s poll after the first debate.

Mr. Obama may have benefited in the CNN poll from diminished expectations: 73 percent of voters in the poll said he performed better than they expected, against just 10 percent who said he did worse.

Two other polls gave Mr. Obama a somewhat clearer advantage. A Battleground poll of likely voters in swing states who watched the debate had him winning 53-38.

An online poll by Google Consumer Surveys gave Mr. Obama a 48 percent to 31 percent edge among registered voters.

There were also two scientific surveys about the debate conducted among voters in particular states.

A Public Policy Polling survey of Colorado voters who watched the debate found 48 percent declaring Mr. Obama the winner, and 44 percent for Mr. Romney. Mr. Obama’s advantage was clearer in the poll among independent voters, who gave him a 58-36 edge. However, the candidates were roughly tied when Public Policy Polling asked them how the debate swayed their vote, with 37 percent saying the debate made them more likely to vote for Mr. Obama, with 36 percent for Mr. Romney.

By the way, Nate Silver at 538 has been taking unmerited grief from some in the the right-leaning blogosphere this year. Silver’s comments on his models have been mostly fair and very detailed. His models might be under-estimating Romney’s chances a bit right now, but Silver should be doing exactly what he is doing: following the estimates that his models generate. No models are perfect, but his are probably better than anyone else’s.

In the Second Presidential Debate, I thought that the choice of questions was pretty even-handed. I counted 5 questions that in my opinion a priori favored President Obama: 3. Mr. Romney’s tax plan; 4. Female wages; 5. Romney as Bush; 7. Immigration; and 10. Outsourcing.

I counted at least 3 questions that favored Romney – 2. Secretary Chu and gas prices; 6. Not optimistic, living is expensive; and 8. Benghazi – though Ann Althouse thought that Q6 favored Obama because it was an invitation to emote. In addition, it could be argued that Q1 on employment at graduation and Q11 on misperceptions of the candidates favored Romney more than Obama, at least before one heard the answers. The question on assault weapons, though it was asked from a liberal perspective, was pretty innocuous for either side.

These assignments of political valences are far from clear. I would expect most people who watched the debate to disagree with me on at least 2 or 3 of my classifications. And, of course, some questions, such as the Romney as Bush one actually seemed to help Romney rather than Obama. But the conclusion would still seem robust: the questions asked by the audience were roughly balanced.

While the audience questions were fair, I thought that Candy Crowley did a poor job of keeping her own biases out of the debate, chiefly in her allocation of speaking time. Leaving aside her offering of an opinion on Benghazi, she quite consistently allowed Obama to make the last speech on questions, leading to a 3-minute gap in time allotted in favor of Obama (according to Politico). That means she gave 8% more time to Obama. And Romney was trying harder than Obama to get in the last word.

Romney was allowed to make the last speech only on question 3 (his tax plans) and question 6 (from the man who was worried about expenses and not optimistic). Obama was given the last speech on 8 questions (speeches of 169-406 words), though on question 10 on outsourcing, after Obama’s 169-word final speech Romney was allowed to say 10 substantive words (“Government does not create jobs. Government does not create jobs.”).

One question was hard to assign—question 8 on Benghazi—because though Obama made the last speech, Romney had the floor at the end, which he used to engage in banter with Obama. For that reason, on balance I would assign the last speech on question 8 to Romney. That would mean that Obama was allowed to make the last speech on 8 questions, while Romney was allowed to make the last speech on only 3 questions.

QUESTIONS ASKED (with most major followups included)

1. Employment on graduation: Romney then Obama; followup: Romney then Obama
2. Secretary Chu and Gas Prices: Obama then Romney; followup: Obama then Romney; 2d followup: Obama
3. Romney’s tax plans, deductions & credits: Romney then Obama then Romney; followup to Obama; 2d followup to Romney
4. Female wages: Obama then Romney then Obama
5. Romney like Bush: Romney then Obama
6. Not optimistic, expensive prices: Obama then Romney
7. Immigration: Romney then Obama
8. Benghazi: Obama then Romney; followup: Obama then Romney
9. Assault weapons: Obama then Romney; followup: Romney then Obama
10. Outsourcing: Romney then Obama; followup: Romney then Obama
11. Misperception about candidate: Romney then Obama

Until the Presidential debate commission diversifies the moderators, one can expect similar problems with unconscious favoritism, tending unfortunately in one direction.

How good was Gallup’s vetting of the questioners at the 2d Presidential debate held at Hofstra on Long Island?

One explicitly feminist question was asked by undecided voter Catherine Fenton:

And it’s Katherine Fenton, who has a question for you.
QUESTION: In what new ways to [do] you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?

By a strange coincidence, there happens to be a Catherine Fenton who in 2008 identified herself as the Media Coordinator of CodePink Long Island.

Is she the same Catherine Fenton? Presumably we will be able to determine this over the next few days. [UPDATE: Orin points out that the questioner seems too young for the CodePink official. I think he's probably correct.]

For now, it is worth noting that the CodePink Fenton discussed whether feminists in March 2008 should support Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or a third-party candidate:

As a liberal, I believed and still do believe, that after the complete and abject failure of conservatism, we should have been heralding in a President Al Gore, or if not, then a President John Edwards. Barack Obama is not my first choice. But as he did vote yes on banning cluster bombs in civilian areas, and speak out against this war before it happened, perhaps he is the better choice. Perhaps a third party candidate is a better choice for you. These are matters of individual conscience. But Hillary is not the answer.

And I’m not turning my feminist card in.

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

Catherine Fenton
Media Coordinator
CODEPINK Long Island

The CodePink Fenton seems to argue that Hillary Clinton is not reliably left wing enough for her tastes.

More here and here.

UPDATE: Because probably few people who supported McCain in 2008 are undecided today, Gallup had a problem coming up with unbiased undecideds. Indeed, CNN admitted that almost all of the audience had voted for Obama in 2008.

There may be a partial solution to this problem: pick a majority of people who supported Bush in 2004. 2004 was a close election, so it shouldn’t have been hard to find undecideds today who voted for Bush in 2004. Next, CNN (or the debate commission) could have picked a Republican-leaning reporter to be a moderator.

2d UPDATE: Orin above points out that the questioner seems too young to be the CodePink official. I think he’s probably right.

 
I find it strange that the Obama campaign would be making so much of Romney’s income from foreign sources when Obama’s foreign source income appears to be a much bigger percentage of his income over the last few years. Of course, one can’t tell for sure because Mitt Romney has not released his 2009 tax return.

Yet in the three tax years in which Barack Obama has been President (2009, 2010, and 2011), fully 30.1% of the Obamas’ gross income has come from foreign sources: ($2,711,340 out of a 3-year total gross income of $8,993,449).  In 2009, 26.5% of the Obamas’ gross income came from foreign sources. In 2010 it was a whopping 41.4%, and in 2010 it was 30.2%.

The salary that we taxpayers pay him as President (just under $1.2 million over the 3 years) accounted for less than 13% of the Obamas’ income, a share dwarfed by their 30% from foreign sources over the same period.

From 2009 through 2011, the Obamas paid $87,429 in foreign taxes, which they applied toward a credit to reduce their U.S. tax bill.  The amounts I examined are reported on Form 1116, of which there are two filed along with their 1040 when they had both general and passive foreign income.

Their returns do not disclose which foreign countries are responsible for paying the Obamas the $2.7 million in foreign source income, but the overwhelming bulk of it must come from payments resulting directly or indirectly from book sales.  Nonetheless, the Obamas did report a total of $3,611 in foreign passive income in 2009 and 2010, a type of income that most often results from investments in foreign countries.  Like some of the foreign investments for which Romney has been pilloried, this Obama passive foreign income might result from the foreign investments of U.S. financial entities in which the Obamas invested. [See update below; the passive income indeed came from the foreign investments of a U.S. entity in which the Obama's had an interest (Michelle Obama in a beneficiary), but it is not one over which they had any control over the investments.]

I hope that the White House press will be able to determine the foreign sources that account for over 30% of the Obamas’ income. And given President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, I would especially like to know the origins of the foreign passive income [again, see below].

UPDATE: Mystery solved. Jeffery Silver, Visiting Asst. Professor at Detroit Mercy, kindly emails to point out that in the 2010 return Statement 14 following one of the the Obamas’ Forms 1116 shows that 2010′s passive foreign source income ($1,571) resulted from “Freeman Henry G. Jr. Decd TW,” which is the so-called “Pin Money Trust” set up for first ladies by Henry Freeman, who died in 1917. The 2009 return does not appear to contain a similar statement, but given the similarity in amounts, the passive income in that year must come from the same source. Just to be clear, the Obamas would have no discretion over the investment of the Freeman Trust.

As people discuss whether Justice Roberts avoided politics by siding with the left side of the Court or instead yielded to political pressure to change his vote, I want to point to an article that I posted on SSRN a couple of days ago.  It shows that Supreme Court justices do tend to act politically in one respect: They tend to retire or take senior status strategically to favor the party of the president who appointed them.

My co-author, Rafe Stolzenberg, and I also plot how much older the justices have become in the last half-century.

Figure 1

Means of Sitting Justices’ Age at Oath, Age, Eventual Age at Departure From Court, and Eventual Age at Death (in order listed) Versus Calendar Year
Note: Lines are fitted and smoothed by Cleveland’s locally weighted regression (LOWESS).

Note that, while the age at oath has changed little in the last 150 years, the age of the sitting justices and the eventual age at departure have both increased in the last half-century (the latter markedly).

We also made a large number of methodological improvements on prior work. For example, most studies had assumed that the longer justices served, the more likely they were to retire. If that were true, that would be a strange job. In most jobs, once people settle in, they are more likely to stay, rather than more likely to leave. Indeed, our analysis shows that it is not until justices reach their 25th year of tenure on the Court that an additional year on the Court makes them more likely to retire. Before that, each additional year of service makes them instead more likely to stay on the Court. Some of the odd results of prior studies on strategic retirement might in part reflect their using a linear version of the variable longevity of tenure on the Court. We used fractional polynomials to (nearly optimally) determine the shape of the longevity curve to fit.

Moreover, we introduce the first good measures of justices’ health when they retire. We know the date of death for all retirees except the most recent ones. There is substantial demographic research suggesting that knowing the years left to live is an excellent measure of both actual and subjective health on the date of retirement.

Our paper, “Retirement and Death in Office of U.S. Supreme Court Justices,” can be downloaded at SSRN.

More here.

UPDATE: On the effect of more years on the job:

The effect of an additional year of tenure becomes increasingly negative through the 15th year on the Court, when an additional year of tenure decreases expected retirement odds by 12.5%. Thereafter, the negative effect of an added year of tenure weakens annually, until it becomes positive at 25 years. At 28 years of tenure, an additional year increases expected retirement odds by 11.2%. At 29 years, the increase is 15.8%. . . .

Tenure effects on retirement follow the “bathtub distribution” typical of orderly failure time processes. Justices start their service with elevated risk that removes individuals unsuited for the position (called “manufacturing defects” in failure-time studies), followed by a long period of low retirement rates (“regular service”), after which failure rates rise sharply (“end of service life”).

Do U.S. Supreme Court justices tend to try to time their retirements to help the political party of the president who appointed them? University of Chicago sociologist Rafe Stolzenberg and I have an article in the journal Demography that finally answers that question: Yes, justices do act politically when deciding whether to retire or take senior status.  One interesting finding is that since 1789 justices have been more likely to die in office when the party of the current president is different from the party of the president who appointed him.

Our paper, “Retirement and Death in Office of U.S. Supreme Court Justices,” can be downloaded at SSRN.

Here is the abstract [abstract revised after posting]:

In this study, we construct demographic models of retirement and death in office of U.S. Supreme Court justices, a group that has gained demographic notice, evaded demographic analysis, and is said to diverge from expected retirement patterns. Models build on prior multi-state labor force status studies and data on justices permit an unusually clear distinction between voluntary and “induced” retirement. Using data on every justice from 1789 through 2006, with robust, cluster-corrected, discrete time, censored, event history methods, we (1) estimate retirement effects of pension eligibility, age, health, and tenure on the timing of justices’ retirements and deaths in office, (2) resolve decades of debate over the Politicized Departure Hypothesis that justices tend to alter the timing of their retirements for the political benefit or detriment of the incumbent President, (3) reconsider the nature of rationality in retirement decisions, and (4) consider the relevance of organizational conditions as well as personal circumstances to retirement decisions.

Computing robust standard errors with adjustments for clustering by justice, we find that the odds that a justice will retire (or resign or take senior status) in the first two years of the term of a president of the same political party as the president who first appointed him to the Court are about 2.6 times the odds of retiring under a president of the opposing party in the last two years of his presidential term. As hypothesized, roughly the opposite pattern is observed for dying: The odds of death in office odds are about three times higher when the incumbent president is not of the same party as the president who appointed the justice (compared with when the incumbent president is of the same party).

To illustrate that our analyses are not sensitive to different ways of conceptualizing the problem, we also show that if one views death and retirement as competing risks, an approach that we do not favor, the results of a multinomial probit show much the same effects as we show for separate analyses of retirement and death in office.

We find that the odds that justices will retire or take senior status in a year when they are eligible for their pension are more than eight times larger than the odds of retirement in years in which they are not eligible for their pension. Also, contrary to researchers who have hypothesized tenure on the bench as a linear predictor or those who find that increasing tenure always increases the estimated odds of retirement, we find that until judges have been on the bench for 25 or more years, each additional year of tenure makes them less likely to retire, rather than more likely to retire. We also document the secular increases since 1789 in the ages at which United States Supreme Court justices leave the Court, the ages at which they ultimately die, their length of tenure on the Court, and the probability that they will leave office by retirement, rather than by death.

In general, our empirical account supports the rich historical literature that documented individual cases in which justices resigned, retired, or took senior status to perpetuate party influence on the Court. We find that Supreme Court Justices act more or less as one would expect sophisticated people to act regarding their careers. While personal factors, such as pension eligibility, are more important predictors of retirement than political variables, the data are nonetheless consistent with a hypothesis of politicized departure: Whether leaving by retirement, resignation, or death, justices tend to time their departures from the Court based in part on a president’s party and the years remaining in a president’s term in office.

After an investigation commissioned by the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick has been reinstated as its President.  The Institute released a carefully worded statement saying that the investigation supported what Gleick had said “regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute.”  Gleick had eventually admitted that he had pretended to be a board member of Heartland to obtain non-public materials from them.  Once Gleick confessed to this, that much was not in dispute.

But the part that was still open to dispute involved the fake document that was not obtained through Gleick’s “interaction with the Heartland Institute.”  Gleick claimed that someone anonymously sent it to him “in the mail.”  Thus, he was not claiming that it came through “his interaction with the Heartland Institute.”

Remember: based on the language, content, and document properties, Gleick was identified by some commentators as the likeliest author of that fake document even before Gleick came forward to admit his role in feeding both the real and the disputed (i.e., fake) Heartland documents to bloggers.  What a coincidence that the author of the fake document used some phrases that Gleick favors, that the document inflated Gleick’s importance, and that Gleick admitted passing the document to others, but yet he didn’t write it (or so he claims)!

So what does the Pacific Institute have to say about the fake document that everyone agrees did not come from Gleick’s interaction with the Heartland Institute?  Absolutely NOTHING!

 PACIFIC INSTITUTE BOARD OF DIRECTORS STATEMENT

The Pacific Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Gleick back to his position as president of the Institute. An independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute. This independent investigation has further confirmed and the Pacific Institute is satisfied that none of its staff knew of or was involved in any way.

Dr. Gleick has apologized publicly for his actions, which are not condoned by the Pacific Institute and run counter to the Institute’s policies and standard of ethics over its 25-year history. The Board of Directors accepts Dr. Gleick’s apology for his lapse in judgment.

You’ve heard of non-denial denials. This is a non-confirmation confirmation.  Any lawyer worth his salt would read the Pacific Institute’s statement and assume that, while the investigation supported Gleick on the issue that no one disputed (“regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute”), it probably did not support (or was silent) on the issue on which the Heartland Institute seemed to have the more likely explanation.

So there are two possibilities: EITHER (1) the report did not support Gleick on the origin of the fake document and the Board of the Pacific Institute is now trying to mislead the public with an evasive press release, OR (2) the Board of the Pacific Institute is extremely incompetent at writing press releases.

If the Pacific Institute were to release the report, not only would we be able to determine which alternative is true, but we would be able to assess the report’s plausibility—in particular, what the supposed original document and envelope to Gleick looked like and where they came from, and whether Gleick’s computers could have produced the document.

It is instructive to compare the gullibility of Felicity Barringer at the New York Times Green blog to the proper skepticism of her Times colleague Andrew Revkin at his Dot Earth blog.

 Barringer:

Nancy Ross, a spokeswoman for the Pacific Institute, declined to release specific details on the findings of the investigation, saying it was an internal personnel matter.

By saying that its investigation . . . confirmed Dr. Gleick’s account, the institute was implicitly backing the scientist’s claim that he was not responsible for cobbling together a document labeled a fake by Heartland, which he disseminated along with other genuine ones.

The bogus document spoke of effective ways for “dissuading science teachers from teaching science” and of “cultivating” respected writers on climate issues. Dr. Gleick said he had received it “in the mail.”

Revkin:

Here’s the troubling part: The Pacific Institute described its investigation as “a confidential personnel matter” and said for that reason no details on the process or findings would be released. Most notably, the group and its board declined to elaborate on the finding that the investigation, conducted by Independent Employment Counsel, “supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute.”

Does that mean the group expressly confirmed that a particularly provocative, and disputed, document was in fact produced by the Heartland Institute and not by Gleick himself or someone else?

No answer.

It’s fine to have an internal personnel investigation, but if you’re going to then release the finding publicly, but not any other details, it’s hard to see that carrying much weight in discourse outside the organization itself.

That’s why I see little merit in descriptions of the reinstatement as an exoneration — a word used by Michael E. Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist who, like Gleick, has become a prominent campaigner for action on curbing greenhouse gases. Here’s how Mann was quoted on the Gleick affair in Politico:

“I’m very pleased to learn that Peter has been exonerated,” Michael Mann of Penn State told ME. “He’s been a tireless champion for an informed discussion about how we deal with the challenges of climate change and diminishing access to clean water. I, for one, welcome him back to that discussion.”

Revkin concludes that “the big questions about the Heartland incident [are] still unresolved.”

Kudos to Andrew Revkin of the Times for knowing how to read a press release.