What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

It is probably too late, but could someone tell Tom Delay to lose the beanie with the little propeller on top and grow up, New Columnist ‘War’: Marcus of ‘Wash Post’ vs. Krugman — As Tom DeLay Also Takes a Shot

And Krugman, on his Times’ blog, has quickly responded. He also quotes Tom DeLay, at a Washington party, referring to Krugman this week: “I’d like to bitch-slap him.”

One surmises that Tom thinks he’s a bitch would like to go around slapping people rather then stoop so low as to have something like a cogent rebuttal. Is Delay not so distantly related to Bill O’Reilly? Krugamn’s reply was civil and logical so it probably went right over Delay’s head,

Wow. Early in my tenure at the NYT, I was advised that it’s a bad idea to devote a column to attacking another columnist — not just at the Times, but anywhere. Why? Because it makes you look small — as if you have nothing better to do than snipe at other commentators, rather than trying to deal with real problems.

But I’ve obviously touched a nerve with my recent writing on Social Security. The Beltway crowd loves their Social Security crisis, and they won’t give it up without a fight.
I won’t waste scarce column inches on this, but I guess this needs a reply somewhere.

Part of Ruth Marcus’s attack involves selective quotation from my writings circa 2001. Mark Thoma has already done the spadework here. What I was arguing then was not that Social Security itself was in crisis, but that the rest of the government budget should be run responsibly — basically, that the lockbox should be honored….

As for what I wrote in 1996: the world looked very different then. On one side, Social Security projections were much more pessimistic than they are now, basically because the projections assumed that the 1973-1995 era of very slow productivity growth would go on forever. On the other side, the 90s were the era of the great pause in health expenditures, the (it turned out) brief era in which the rise of managed care stabilized health spending as a share of GDP. So Medicare and Medicaid looked less important as sources of fiscal problems than they do now.

John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said, “When circumstances change, I change my opinion. What do you do?”

Guilty or not of any wrong doing how does the Right, those flood wrecked car salesmen of respect for the law and tradition, justify defending detaining someone without formal charges for over a year or whats ya gonna do when they come for u, AP Fires Back, Says Its Probe Clears Iraqi Photog

“Despite the fact that Hussein has not been interrogated since May 2006, allegations have been dropped or modified over time, and new claims added, all without any explanation,” said the 48-page report compiled by lawyer and former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe.

Guilty because he hasn’t been proven innocent or even afforded the chance to do so. Kangaroo court meet Konservative Justice.

Oops, might have gone too far. Start damage control, Publisher: McClellan doesn’t believe Bush lied – Spokesman ‘did not intend to suggest’ the president purposely misled him

WASHINGTON – Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan does not believe President Bush lied to him about the role of White House aides I. Lewis Scooter Libby or Karl Rove in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, according to McClellan’s publisher.

Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan’s book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, “Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him.”

Osnos says when McClellan went before the White House press corps in 2003 to publicly exonerate Libby and Rove, the problem was that his statement was not true. Osnos said the president told McClellan what “he thought to be the case.” But, he says, McClellan believes, “the president didn’t know it was not true.”

The quote/excerpt from McClellan’s book is still up as I write this,

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, released Monday on the publisher’s web site, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were “not involved” in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.

“There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Monday. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

Let’s say that Bush didn’t know. That part of the narrative, means that Bush is out of the loop as far as making important national security decisions, contrary to claims that Cheney is not at least more co-president then vice-president. Or Bush has his finger on every little move that’s made and told McClellan to obfuscate and blow smoke up America’s backside. Neither scenario reflects well on the Kool-Kids that are the mighty A-Team of foreign policy and good governance; who also seem to think that ethics and morality are flys to be swatted.

Falling For The Myth Of The Liberal Media

But Rutten stumbled when he wrote that MSNBC has assumed a Democratic posture. The only support he gives for that view is the presence of Keith Olbermann. It doesn’t take much observation, however, to erase the image that Rutten is painting. Countdown is a one hour daily program. Conversely, Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman, hosts three hours every morning. Tucker Carlson, the conservative son of the director of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund has his own hour. Chris Matthews, although he was an aide to Tip O’Niell, has become a reliable basher of progressive policy. And the guests on all of these programs run the gamut from neo-caveman Pat Buchanan to Pat Buchanan (seriously, is he the only number in their Rolodex?). And there is nothing notably liberal in their handling of straight news.

I have fantasies about a broadcast media that is fair, rational, diligent and fulfills it’s public trust to truly inform the people. Like all fantasies that one is likely to remain just that.

“What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.” ~ Samuel Johnson

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