No more Thin Mints for you: Girls are dropping out of the Scouts in record numbers“Defy conformity” declares a new ad for the Girl Scouts—an odd slogan for a group that requires its members to wear matching outfits. The Scouts, according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, are floundering. Young girls no longer want to earn badges or sell cookies, and the organization has lost 1-2% of its numbers every year for a decade now.

Sound familiar? In fact, you could swap “the organized Jewish community” for “the Girl Scouts” in pretty much every paragraph of the piece and come up with a pretty accurate trend piece on Judaism today. Something like this:

Laurel Richie will be in charge of modernizing the image of the Girl Scouts, which is viewed by many as a rigid, old-fashioned organization focused on cookie fund-raisers and campouts. "Girls think of us as outdated," says Kathy Cloninger, chief executive of Girl Scouts of the USA. "They have stereotypes of who we are that are not right."

could so easily be this:

Laurel Richie will be in charge of modernizing the image of [Judaism], which is viewed by many as a rigid, old-fashioned organization focused on [Israel] and [intermarriage]. "[Kids] think of us as outdated," says Kathy Cloninger, chief executive of [Hillel]. "They have stereotypes of who we are that are not right."

OK, now it’s your turn! See what you can do with the passage below. Hey, if your tagline is good enough, you could probably parlay it into some kind of major job with the JCC:

Advertising efforts over the past two years also reflect the group's new direction, including public-service announcements in publications such as Entertainment Weekly and Girls Life that highlight girls' independence, and the tagline: "It's a Girl's Life. Lead it."

Repositioning the organization "isn't about us trying to be cool," says Ms. Richie. "We've seen jeans, sneakers and soft drinks try to do that and you just cringe."

Related: Hipster Judaism Mad-Libs

That's the rumor, according to UK magazine The Business (not to be confused with The Bidness, a Rasta triphop zine out of Staines). Purchase price: $5 billion.

According to sources acting for Dow Jones in the negotiations, the deal was delayed until agreement was reached on a legally-binding undertaking by Murdoch to preserve the Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence.

Under the terms of this agreement, News Corporation will have the ability to hire and fire the top editors and publishers (a matter on which Murdoch would not budge); but a nominally independent five-person committee will have the right of veto on these decisions.

Full disclosure: I've written for both the NY Post and The Weekly Standard and I've been to the News Corp. Christmas party (the food in "Australia" last year was tops), so take whatever I say in the vein of corporate obeisance. What sort of difference, hypothetically speaking, would non-independence make on the Journal's editorial page?

Ben Smith at Politico puts it best: “[P]erhaps the China bureau shouldn't be the only ones worrying. What will become of the Clintons' long-time persecutors on the editorial board? Will their anti-Clinton posture go the way of the New York Post's?”

Of course, Dow Jones says it's all untrue, the only agreement that has been struck is the editorial independence one, begging the question of why such a deal is necessary if a sale is not imminent.

By a member of the 9/11 Commission and a vocal opponent of the current administration: 

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Had he never decided, in the late 1970's, that Saddam Hussein was a menace worth removing for humanitarian and strategic reasons, Paul Wolfowitz would have still been known as the man most responsible, as ambassador to Indonesia between 1986-89, for facilitating the end of the Suharto dictatorship. So should it come as any surprise that a stooge and profiteer of that dictatorship tops the list of functionaries at the World Bank agitating for Wolfowitz's resignation? Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal reports:

In Mr. de Tray's case, it may seem strange that a man who was willing to countenance the theft of the bank's money by Suharto & Co. as the inevitable price of "helping people" (which people?) should now wax indignant about the damage Mr. Wolfowitz has supposedly done to the bank's "credibility as the international community's trustee of resources for fighting poverty," in the words of the FT letter. Yet Mr. de Tray is nothing if not consistent: Since leaving the bank last year, he has publicly objected to the "Puritan overtone in the current debate on corruption" and argued that Suharto's corruption "created value for Indonesia . . . just as Sam Walton created value for the U.S."--comments that nicely capture the quality of economic analysis at the bank as well as the prevailing in-house view regarding Mr. Wolfowitz's anti-corruption campaign.

And I'm positive that those who think it unethical to occupy a high managerial post at the Bank while your girlfriend moves up a paygrade will be demanding this guy's desk cleaned out by the end of the week:

Now consider the case of Shengman Zhang, a former No. 2 at the bank who is currently a vice chairman for the global banking division at Citigroup. Mr. Zhang, whose name appears third on the list of signatories, is the husband of Lingzhi Xu, a World Bank employee who began her career as an assistant working in procurement issues--a "Level D" position with a "market-reference point" of $52,000--and was ultimately promoted to her current job--a "Level G-G" high-level staff position with a reference point of $123,000.

Since Mr. Zhang was a managing director of the bank, his wife's employment presented significant similarities to the conflict-of-interest problem that required Mr. Wolfowitz to seek a new job for Ms. Riza, yet it never seems to have raised an eyebrow within the bank's management. Even more remarkable was the relative speed and ease of Ms. Xu's ascent.