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Margaret Sullivan, the Times public editor, took that paper to task yesterday for not having a reporter at the trial of Bradley Manning:
The newspaper's absence was noticed, and criticized, by many media watchers. Beyond the story itself, The Times, which considers itself the paper of record, had an obligation to be there — to bear witness — because, in a very real sense, Private Manning was one of its most important sources of the past decade.
The Wikileaks story was a huge one for the Times, but they always seemed to be resentful and sullen about how they got that story (Bill Keller's recounting of Julian Assange's B.O. is a prime example). The reason is simple: the Times thinks, as the paper of record, that it should have gotten Manning's leak directly, not via Wikileaks. So even though he's a key source, the best English-language coverage of the Manning trial is at the Guardian.
Pride only hurts, it never helps.
The tea party-backed lawmaker announced last week that he would be resigning from the Senate to head the Heritage Foundation because "the conservative movement needs strong leadership in the battle of ideas."
During a Sunday panel discussion on ABC, Republican strategist Mary Matalin sarcastically noted that her "hero," British economist John Maynard Keynes, had said that "ideas drive history, ideas drive progress and Heritage has long been the fount of so many great ideas."
"As a conservative, as a constitutionalist, that was a brilliant move -- a good move for us, a brilliant move for him," she insisted.
"The actual Keynes quote was he said, it's ideas 'which are dangerous for good or evil,'" Krugman pointed out. "I guess I've got a view in this case."
"I'm more interested in what does this do to Heritage?" the liberal economist continued. "I mean, this is somebody who has no sense that he's a researcher or an academic, anything like that. This is sort of taking the think out of the think tank, right? This is turning into a purely political institution."
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Files on accused LA priests could soon be public
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"The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history. Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from, and what happened to it.
The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney's shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the 'gifts' they got. Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count." - Maureen Dowd, writing for the New York Times.
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Tom Coburn repeated the newly minted GOP line about rolling back the Bush tax cuts — but only if it's accompanied by "significant entitlement reform":
"Will I accept a tax increase as a part of a deal to actually solve our problems? Yes."
This is kind of a peek behind the curtain: the Republicans hate Social Security and Medicare more than they hate raising taxes.
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A 7-year-old boy died on Saturday when he was shot by his father in an apparent accident outside a Mercer County gun shop, state police said. Joseph V. Loughrey, 44, was getting into his truck holding a .9mm Taurus handgun when it discharged. The bullet struck his son, Craig Allen Loughrey, 7, in the chest, state police said. The boy died at the scene.
"I know that little kid was everything to him," said Mark McLaughlin of Fredonia, a friend and co-worker of Loughrey's at Superior Well Services in Fredonia.
State police said Loughrey told them he had emptied the magazine of the gun, but had no idea a bullet was still in the chamber.
The common denominator in all of these cases is a gun. I can't help but to think that if they had been walking out of a Baskin-Robbins with ice cream cones, this wouldn't have happened.
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In 1983, 50 corporations controlled a majority of American media. Now that number is six. And big media may get even bigger, thanks to the FCCs consideration of ending a rule preventing companies from owning a newspaper and radio and tv stations in the same city. Such a move — which they've tried in 2003 and 2007 as well –would give these massive media companies free rein to devour more of the competition, control the public message, and also limit diversity across the media landscape. Bernie Sanders, one of several senators who have written FCC chairman Julius Genachowski asking him to suspend the plan, discusses with Bill why big media is a threat to democracy, and what citizens can do to fight back. - bill moyers
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