Molly Ivins’s column yesterday snidely criticizes President Bush for, among other things, “choosing Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to announce his administration would oppose affirmative action in the University of Michigan case ….” Not for the first time, Ivins is recycling a common line—Kerry has used it, too–but it is a silly one. Bush’s announcement on January 15, 2003 (King’s actual birthday, by the way, not the day on which Americans celebrated it that year) was driven by the fact that the administration’s Supreme Court brief had to be filed the next day, and of course that date was a result of Court rules, not the administration’s choice. Anyhow, what’s wrong with announcing on that day that student applicants should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin?