[Note: This is the original version of a post that was edited to correct two mistakes. Corrections are appended below. The edited version is here.]

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is at it again, trying to obscure crucial facts on two highly visible issues, the President's Supreme Court brief in the University of Michigan case and his new tax cut proposal, mirroring spin from the administration and other conservatives.

First, in describing the Michigan case, the Journal pushed this red herring (WSJ subscription required):

Michigan uses a point system to rate applicants. How many points you receive depends on what color you are (20 bonus points for being black or Hispanic or Native American). It's that simple, and offensive.

Actually, it's not "that simple." The system rates applicants on a 150 point scale, so how many points you receive does not depend solely on "what color you are" but a whole host of factors. As the Detroit Free Press puts it, "[a]cademic factors account for 110 points, including up to 80 points for grade-point average, and up to 12 points for standardized test scores (ACT/SAT). Nonacademic factors account for up to 40 points. Those include being a member of an underrepresented minority (20 points for African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians)."

As the Daily Howler's Bob Somerby has shown, many commentators have made similarly deceptive statements, arguing that being a member of certain racial and ethnic groups is worth twenty points in the Michigan application process, while a perfect SAT score is worth only twelve. While this statement is technically accurate, it is constructed to create a false dichotomy while omitting a number of other factors that the point system considers.

The Journal also approvingly quoted Bush's condemnations of the Michigan policy as a "quota system". But this bit of rhetoric is politically motivated nonsense, as The New York Times argued:

"[Q]uota" has a specific meaning, and the University of Michigan's admissions policies do not meet it. In University of California Regents v. Bakke, the landmark 1978 case that upheld affirmative action while striking down quotas, the Supreme Court invalidated a medical school admissions system that set aside 16 "special admissions" places in the class, which invariably went to minorities. At Michigan, in both undergraduate and law school admissions, all applicants apply for all positions in the class. The university gives applicants extra points for belonging to an underrepresented racial or ethnic minority. But it also gives diversity points to applicants who come from an underrepresented part of the state, like Michigan's largely white Upper Peninsula, scholarship athletes, and men in the nursing program.

(Yesterday, Ron Fournier of the Associated Press made the same point in a question to Bush yesterday: "Sir, last week in this room, you came out against quotas, which have been unconstitutional for 25 years. You didn't answer the central question, and that is whether race can be used as a factor in admissions.")

This word choice is clearly politically motivated, as the Times claims. "The administration has fixed on the word 'quota' because it has long been political kryptonite," it writes. "Pollsters know that many Americans who say they favor 'affirmative action' flip sides when asked about 'racial quotas.'" Regardless of their position on the Michigan system, the Journal, Bush and other critics should accurately represent how it works.

Then, in an editorial Monday, the Journal pushed more nonsense, this time claiming to refute "critics of President Bush's new tax cut package" who call it "a sop to the rich." The truth, they claim, "is that the Bush proposals would make the tax code more progressive, not less." But the Treasury Department distribution table (Adobe PDF) the Journal cites omit the President's proposed elimination of taxes on dividend payments to shareholders, a major part of the package that would largely benefit people in the upper tax brackets. Again, one can make a legitimate point about how the Bush proposal would change the individual rate structure, but the Journal misleads when it claims that such an argument refutes critics of the plan.

(It's worth noting that the administration did the same thing in 2001, separating out the piece of its tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy -- in that case, the elimination of the estate tax and 2006 rate cuts for upper income taxpayers -- and then releasing partial distribution tables that purportedly refute the charge that the package was skewed toward upper-income taxpayers. In that case as well, credulous journalists gave them too much weight - see, for example, Somerby's dissection of a Washington Post article reporting these claims.)

A good editorial informs in the course of making a forceful argument. Unfortunately, the Journal is often all too willing to dispense with such niceties.

Update/correction 1/22 5:40 PM EST: A Newsweek article has a more detailed description of the non-academic factors that go into the Michigan point system:

Applicants can get up to 40 more points for such factors as residency in underrepresented states (2 points) or Michigan residency (10 points, with a 6-point bonus for living in an underrepresented county). Being from an underrepresented minority group or from a predominantly minority high school is worth 20 points. So is being from a low-income family‹even for white students. The same 20 points are awarded to athletes. Students also earn points for being related to an alumnus (up to 4 points), writing a good personal essay (up to 3 points) and participating in extracurricular activities (up to 5 points).

Also, as one reader points out, the Newsweek article states that "Awarding points could amount to a quota if it resulted in routinely filling a fixed number of places." This is a contested legal issue that I should not have dismissed as "politically motivated nonsense." Bush was more precise in his argument than I gave him credit for -- he actually stated that the Michigan case "amount[s] to a quota system" and made a case to that effect that the administration elaborated upon in its Supreme Court brief. We retract that portion of the piece and apologize for the error.

Correction 1/23 7:54 PM EST: The statement above that the Treasury table excludes the elimination of the dividend tax is incorrect. We sincerely regret the error.

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