Yeah, and what about the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes romance?

Yeah, and what about the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes romance? Where are People magazine and Us Weekly on

that one? Dining on Matt Drudge’s dust, that’s where.

Byron Williams shares this gem from a recent Condoleezza Rice speech:

And when you think they [NIKE SHOXis] aren’t going to make it — when you want to criticize what they

’re doing and it’s taking a long time and this and that — just remember, not to this date, have they

made a compromise as bad as the one in 1789 that made my ancestors three-fifths of a man. So let’s be

humble about what they’re going through.

I was just revving myself up for a blistering denunciation of Secretary Rice’s (apparently frequent)

misreading of the 3/5 Compromise when I came across this perfect rebuttal – on the rabidly pro-war

Powerlineblog, of all places!!!

Secretary Rice’s point about the “three-fifths” clause of the Constitution is a frequently repeated

canard. The constitutional provision reduced slaves from counting in full for the purpose of allocating

congressional representation. As Thomas West explains:

“[T]he Constitution allowed Southern States to count three-fifths of their slaves toward the

population that would determine numbers of representatives in the federal legislature. This clause is

often singled out today as a sign of black dehumanization: they are only three-fifths human. But the

provision applied to slaves, not blacks. That meant that free blacks-–and there were many, North as

well as South–-counted the same as whites. More important, the fact that slaves were counted at all was

a concession to slave owners. Southerners would have been glad to count their slaves as whole persons.

It was the Northerners who did not want them counted, for why should the South be rewarded with more

representatives, the more slaves they held?”