I've concluded that the recent hits from the New York TImes and SPLC had to be coordinated. The NYT editorial sounded as if it had been ghostwritten by an SPLCer. So I set about looking for the middleman. Politically, any number of board members fit the bill: Francis X. Clines, Robert B. Semple Jr., (deputy op-ed editor David Shipley is certainly capable of such a piece, but is he permitted to write editorials?). For reasons that should become obvious, here's my candidate:

ADAM COHEN, Assistant Editor

Adam Cohen is a lawyer and author, with a particular interest in legal issues, politics and technology. Before joining the Times editorial board in 2002, he was a senior writer at Time, where he wrote about the Supreme Court, Internet privacy and the Microsoft antitrust case, among other topics.

Prior to entering journalism, he was an education-reform lawyer, and a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. He is the author of "The Perfect Store: Inside eBay" and co-author of "American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation." A native of Manhattan, he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

hat doesn't necessarily mean that Cohen wrote the piece, though he well could have, but he was very likely involved in arranging it.