Blogoland

Sometimes I don't understand Howard Kurtz. In a perfectly fine story (second item) lacertating news organizations for noting that Clinton appointee Lani Guinier had a "nanny problem" -- when no such problem existed, it was her legal writing that got her in hot water -- he does not do one thing: Find out how it started. Volokh did some work on this. Wouldn't that be easy enough to do? Run a Lexis-Nexis search with "nanny" and "Guinier" find the organization, call them up and ask them why they ran it? Hm.

So we at Blogoland did. The first mention we can find is an Associated Press story filed Dec. 10 -- the night of the Kerik disclosure -- by Terence Hunt.

Lani Guinier, a Clinton classmate at Yale University Law School, was the president's choice to head the Justice Department's civil rights division until it was learned that she had not paid taxes for a domestic worker.

And one last thing. Kurtz appears to be wrong in fingering the The New York Times as one of the Guinier nanny-floggers. A search of Lexis and the on-line archives all the way back to 1993 (when the appointment was deep-sixed) reveals no link to "nanny" and "Guinier." In fact, the most recent mention of Guinier I can find in the paper was on November 7. [Full disclosure: I'm a freelancer whose work frequently appears in the NYT]