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Freud 1, Zombies 0: When it comes to ghosts, "the line between believing and not believing is not so firm." Ellen Ladowsky searches for paranormal activity in London. ... 2:21 P.M.
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Howie's Choice: WaPo ombudsperson Andrew Alexander looks up from his desk and notices that East German figure skating judge press critic Howie Kurtz, who is paid by CNN and covers CNN, has
an inescapable conflict that is at odds with Post rules.
Who knew? ... Next question: Does a weakened WaPo Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have the ... um, clout to make Kurtz change his beat? Maybe--CNN fame isn't what it used to be! Meaning the chances that Kurtz would quit are probably lower. ...
P.S.: Kurtz says
"My track record makes clear that I've been as aggressive toward CNN -- and The Washington Post, for that matter -- as I would be if I didn't host a weekly program there ... "
BS, BS [several items], BS [4th item], BS, BS, BS [4th item]. ... 12:39 A.M.
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I realized the other day that I don't really like President Obama. I try to explain here. Maybe it will pass. ... Lack of 'likeability' isn't necessarily a big problem in a President. But if a President thinks he's more or less beloved, it could be. ... 12:35 P.M.
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Castro: Penn, Si! Hitchens, No! Ann Bardach on how Hitch got bumped while a useful celebrity got the story. ... She also reports that stars like Jack Nicholson and Leonardo DiCaprio are routinely spied on "with sophisticated listening devices and hidden video cameras" when they visit Havana. Do they know? Bardach sees potential blackmail: "Be careful what you say; we may have compromising data on you." ...12:35 P.M.
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Walter Shapiro: "John Corzine by all estimation is going to be reelected Governor of New Jersey." Really? "By all estimation"? You giving odds with that? I'll take them. Depends on the Daggett vote, no? And the night is young. ... P.S.: Don't forget the Incumbent Rule. ... Update: Maybe Daggett's vote won't fade. Could he pull a Ventura and actually win? Mark Blumenthal clinically examines on this non-crazy possibility. Andy Pettitte's arm is in the algorithm! ... Backfill: Shapiro made the case for betting on Corzine here. .. I may be biased by memories of an incident recounted by Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo:
Supporters of public sector union power have developed a rationale for the government employees' gold-plated perks. The argument is that public employees are the vanguard of the working class. As such, the benefits they achieve will eventually have to be matched by private sector employers. As Carla Katz, the leader of New Jersey's Communications Workers of America, explained to Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger, reformers embrace "the progressive theory that unless you create a substantial wage and benefits package that reflects good jobs and the ability to have a middle-class life style, there will be a perpetual race to the bottom."
Katz not only represents thousands of state employees, she is also the richly rewarded former girlfriend of New Jersey governor Jon Corzine. Katz's influence on Corzine became clear in 2006 when the impassioned governor spoke to a Trenton rally of roughly 10,000 public workers and shouted out: "We will fight for a fair contract." Corzine was of course management in that situation, not labor. [E.A.]
New Jersey taxpayers, who now have to pay for the resulting union pay and benefit packages, must be unusually forgiving. ... .4:15 P.M.
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How to Fill the Empty Hours After Health Care? Nate Silver writes:
It's becoming increasingly likely that regulation of the banking and financial sector is liable to be the issue that dominates the first half of 2010. Why? Well in the first place, it's badly needed ... [snip] In the second place, it's not clear what else the Obama administration will do on the domestic policy front, once the health care issue gets resolved. Although the unpopularity of the cap-and-trade program is greatly exaggerated -- most polls in fact show it receiving a plurality or narrow majority of support -- the swing districts in 2010 tend to be big carbon emitters. Immigration reform, likewise, is liable to be a less favorable issue for the Democrats in 2010 than it will be in 2012, when we'll have a younger, more diverse electorate in which Hispanics play a larger role as swing voters. EFCA -- the White House's support for which has always been questionable -- almost certainly isn't going anywhere. Movement on gay rights issues is a possibility, but is more dependent on the White House's willpower than its bandwidth. A second omnibus stimulus bill is probably out of the question, although certainly there will be piecemeal efforts -- extended unemployment benefits, greater investments in transportation infrastructure -- that the White House will pursue. Still, for a hard-working White House, that leaves plenty of time on the table for a big-ticket item, and that item will probably be banking reform. [E.A.]
Banking reform. Not "card check" (EFCA). Not "comprehensive" illegal immigrant legalization. Not even "cap and trade." Banking reform. ... And the more time it takes up, the better! ... I'm less worried about my vote for Obama every day. ...
P.S.: But will immigration really be a more "favorable" issue for the Dems in 2012, when they will probably have a smaller margin in the House? Maybe Silver is saying they'll have more incentive to bring it up--their swing district freshmen will already have lost--even if passage will still be difficult. ... Card check, on the other hand, will be both harder to pass and less advantageous to bring up, no? ...
P.P.S.: I still think the issue that "dominates the first half of 2010" is likely to be ... health care. At least the first half of the first half of 2010. We're talking about what happens after that. ... 4:15 P.M.
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National Review Not Guilty So Fox Not Guilty Too! National Review 's Stephen Spruiell defends Fox against the charge that it is an instrument, not of conservatism but of the Republican Party and (for much of the past decade) the Bushes.
I grow so tired of this smear. National Review gets this kind of thing all the time. Last year, Jonah compiled a nice summary of our dissents from the Bush White House. One could compile a similar dossier in defense of Fox News, but I'm afraid it wouldn't matter. [E.A.]
Oh, go ahead! ... It will be a mighty thin dossier, at least if it doesn't include issues (like Harriet Miers and immigration) where Roger Ailes' network initially, and disconcertingly, appeared to toe and try to hold the Bush line before eventually acceding to its viewers' opinions and allowing dissenting conservatives to express themselves. ... 4:15 P.M.
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"Howard Kurtz, Missing in Action:" The Left is now on the case of the Biggest Conflict of Interest in Journalism. Writes Michael Massing:
Young people have embraced [Jon Stewart's] show precisely because he’s willing to take on cable news in a way our top media reporters are not. And not just Fox. Last week, “The Daily Show” offered a brilliant expose of the superficiality and hollowness of the journalism practiced on CNN, showing how its anchors allow partisan spokesmen to make all kinds of ridiculous claims without challenge. “We’ll have to leave it there” was the stock response of CNN interviewers to the ludicrous talking points of their guests.
You’ll almost never see Howard Kurtz scrutinize CNN in that way. Of course, he’s employed by the network.
4:58 P.M.
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Creepy on so many levels. ... 1) He just died; 2) He wasn't that important. This isn't Winston Churchill. (The vacuity of David Gregory just makes him seem like Winston Churchill); 3) They've recreated the way his office looked on the day he died. Morbid! 4) It's like they're trying to build some kind of cult of the personality, with the family willingly invading its own privacy to help out ('Look, there's Luke's childhood drawing'); 5) Making a big deal of Russert's I-love-the-Bills schtick assumes it's shocking that a high-level Washington news guy would be an ordinary middle class American. Bureau chiefs, they're just like us! 6) Does the exhibit include an animatronic NBC butler?** 7) Will it include Lloyd Grove's famous, damning profile of Russert-on-the-make? 8) Self-important, dying industry attempts to fetishize its prominent members before it is completely forgotten. 9) NBC News in particular seems to be living in the past. ...
Coming soon: Luke Ford's Grotto! Kids will love it. ...
P.S.: I'm sure Gawker goes to town on this, but I haven't read Gawker yet. Update: They do. Jack Shafer beat me to mockery too. By hours. Lucky for me speed isn't important in this business. [The contrarian thing would be to defend the exhibit--ed Defending Russert can't be contrarian. That violates a law of physics.]
**--Ali. Maybe he gets a whole new wing! ... 3:15 P.M.
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Dan Kennedy and Oliver Willis have never heard of absentee ballots (not to mention the fun you can have with same-day registration). ... 3:16 P.M.
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The most striking statistic in Mark Kleiman's terrific Zocalo crime lecture (about his new book, When Brute Force Fails) concerned the benefits of sending nurses "into the homes of poor and undereducated first-time teenage mothers to coach them through their children's difficult first two years." From the book:
In a well-evaluated experiment in upsate New York, nurse home visitation for expectant mothers whose demographic profiles put their children at high risk of poor outcomes reduced the arrests among the children of those mothers by 69 percent compared to the matched control group. If that result is even close to correct, nurse home visitation focused on high risk mothers is surely cost-effective as crime control ... [emphasis added; footnote omitted]
This is one of those social science advocacy stats that sets off too-good-to-be-true alarm bells, as Kleiman's own reaction suggests. The number's so spectacular, though, that he thinks its clearly worth a large scale trial. "Given how important parenting is, and given how intensive the intervention is, and given how rocky some of the moms are to start out, I don't find the big numbers implausible," he writes in an email to kf. Even James Q. "Lock-'Em-Up" Wilson is on board. ... Call it something like Pinpoint Liberalism, in which a consensus forms for at least going after what looks like low-hanging fruit, while avoiding a general subsidy for, say, "community development" (which won't be as easy as you'd think). ... Lead reduction, which Kleiman (a bit surprisingly) thinks helped contribute to the recent crime drop, is another obvious targeted effort. ...
P.S.: I'd link to Kleiman's book on Amazon, but then the I might be putting myself at the mercy of a man named Richard Cleland, or someone like him. [I have no idea what, if any, arrangement Slate has with Amazon these days. **] ... Oh, all right. It's here. Come and get me, copper! [That's the lead talking-ed] ...
**-- My previous elaborate conflict-of-interest disclosures have already failed to pass muster even with Howie Kurtz, the man with the biggest conflict of interest in all of journalism, so I'd better be careful where the FTC is concerned. ...
P.P.S.--Still Digging: I just linked to Zocalo, which is kind of doing them a favor. I like their lectures, which fill a local civic need. Unfortunately, they also invited me to their fundraiser on Saturday, which I think means free dinner. Yikes. ... And now I've linked to their fundraiser. That must be worth millions. I'm a cesspool of corruption today. ... 4:50 P.M.
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More: The FTC's new blog disclosure regs seem to be governed by the established First Amendment principle of "Oh, don't worry, we'll never go after you. We like you." Don't Olson, Shafer, Althouse, et al. realize this?. ... P.S.: I don't think blogging or twittering is like talking at Denny's (Jeff Jarvis' analogy). At Denny's you talk to the guys across the table. You blog or twitter to the whole world. That means something. What it means, I think, is that bloggers are on the same constitutional footing as conventional MSM journalists. They're all publishers. That's why it's so absurd and self-contradictory for the FTC to then exempt the most important, powerful (and occasionally corrupt publishers)--the MSM itself. ... P.P.S.: These regs are so doomed. ...
Backfill: Years ago, Michael Kinsley wrote an eerily prescient reductio ad absurdum of what an actual, full conflict-of-interest disclosure would look like. I haven't been able to find it. Think it was in his Curse of the Giant Muffins. ... Update: Kinsley suggests it's this 2000 piece, which is very funny. But I remember another one. What does he know? ... 6:49 P.M.
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But they got Car of the Year! BA/Merrill Lynch predicts GM will lose 3 more points of market share--down to 15% from 22% last year--largely because there are so few new products** in the pipeline. That means the company is heading for another federal bailout, says The Truth About Cars. ... Rattner got out just in time. (Reason #5) ...
**--Though GM has demonstrated the ability to introduce new products and still not make up much ground. See the recent history of Saturn. ... 4:52 P.M.
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Obama v. Kurtz: [From Just One Minute] Obama implies that, not only did he never formally nominate CNN's on-camera medic Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General, but he never offered him the job:
Obama: Could I say, I have great respect for Sanjay Gupta, but I never nominated him.
The press nominated him. I never — you know, that was not — there were people who had suggested that he might make a good surgeon general. And I think, in fact, he could have made a good surgeon general. He's a very well-spoken person and a lot of the job of the surgeon general is to get a message out. [E.A.]
It's the press' fault! Is Obama dissembling (so as not to insult his actual nominee, Regina Benjamin) or did CNN's Howie Kurtz get it wrong when he disclosed, on January 6, that:
President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.
I have no dog in this fight. I trust Marmolite will get to the bottom of it. ... 4:50 P.M.
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Tim Noah has what seems like a very good suggestion regarding the public plan
[The House bill says the] public health insurance option "shall offer basic, enhanced, and premium plans" and may also offer "premium-plus plans," presumably at escalating levels of cost. This is to make it conform to the private plans also offered within the new, strictly regulated health insurance exchange created under the bill. ... [snip]
Rather than provide a menu of four public-option plans, I'd prefer to see the government establish a single, reasonably generous public-option plan and leave the gold plating to private insurers. Doing so would allow the government to take a more egalitarian approach and at the same time would turn over to private insurers a decent-sized potential market for nonbasic health care. It wouldn't stop their squawking, but it might reduce it. [E.A.]
Would Medicare offer tiered service? It wouldn't. ... Tiered service also threatens to undermine the social-egalitarian benefits of universal health insurance. Instead of everyone waiting in the same waiting room, there might be a different waiting room for every purse and purpose. ... 4:48 P.M.
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One good thing the Presidental Task Force on Autos did--force some UAW patronage desk workers to actually start building cars again:
Unlike their nonunion rivals, the Detroit Three have paid for a small union bureaucracy at each plant to handle grievances, conduct union elections and support labor-management initiatives. Those people didn't work in the plant.
Now in the leaner post-bankruptcy environment, the UAW is eliminating at least 300 positions across its 23 Chrysler locals, according to several local officials. General Motors expects the initiative will affect less than 1% of its 52,000 U.S. hourly employees, according to Childers Arb.
This would fit with Rattner Departure Reason # 8. .... But note the fine print at the end of the story, disclosing that GM will not eliminate useless patronage positions where they are "required under the local labor contract." Oh. How many of them are there? ... P.S.: So the brother in law of some union official has been sitting behind a desk for 20 years. Now he's on the line, and pissed off about it. Do you want to buy the car that he'll build? ... [via TTAC] 4:46 P.M
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Matt Yglesias on the road not taken in health care reform. ... 4:44 P.M.
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Marc Lynch of FP suggests that Joe Biden committed "the worst foreign policy blunder of the Obama administration" in seeming to give the green light to an Israeli air strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. "Aggressive pushback" is called for, declares Lynch. Biden needs to "issue a strong clarification immediately"! ... But when you think about it, if you wanted to scare the Iranians without credibly committing the United States, isn't Biden the perfect person for the job? I mean, it's just Joe Biden! He could be actually enunciating Obama administration policy. Or he could be winging it! Or it could be just another gaffe. Who knows? The Iranians don't. They can't dismiss the threat, and have to be worried, but can't be sure whether to expect a strike or not. Meanwhile, no credible U.S. spokesman has said anything especially bellicose. That's exactly what we want, no? ...
Strategic ambiguity, I think they call it. Everything Biden says is by definition ambiguous! He's an unreliable narrator. The trick is making it strategic. But the Obama brahmins would be crazy not to try to use this asset. When you've got lemons ....
P.S.: Lynch worries that the Israelis might "[take] up the offer" and attack. But presumably the U.S. has ways of directly communicating to Israel that it doesn't have the green light, or that it does. ...
Update: Obama says the U.S. has "absolutely not" given Israel a green light to attack Iran. Guess it's just that crazy Biden! ... Or is it? ... And Obama didn't rule out a "green light" in the future. ... Maybe Biden was on to something? ... Iran still doesn't know for sure, do they? Which is the point. ... 6:30 P.M.
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Admit it, Mediaite is a lot better than you thought it would be. ... P.S.: I'm a Dan Abrams skeptic--he seems in love with himself, and I don't trust him--but on a bad day his conflict of interest in using journalists to advise corporate clients on how to work the media isn't as bad as Howie Kurtz's (covering CNN, which not only pays him an ongoing second salary but is what makes him famous). ... 6:28 P.M.
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I can see 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Palin theories ... and counting: 1) She's running for president; 2) She's undergoing fame withdrawal and plans to get more attention in the lower 48; 3) She wants to cash in ($); 4) There's another shoe about to drop; 5) She'll now run against Murkowski for Senate. 6) She needs to tend to her family. 7) She's bonkers. 8) She's preggers. 9) She wants to "effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities." 10) Actually being a governor in a recession is no fun. Gives you ulcers. 11) She worried she wasn't giving "Alaska's issues" the attention they deserve, and was being criticized for that; 12) She's "fed up with politics ... the personal garbage" etc.. 13) She wants to fight back without one hand tied behind her back. 14) The Alaska legislature now hates her; ... These theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ... I have no fish in this hunt. ... Update: Mediaite has an intravenous drip. ... see also HuffPo ... and NRO ... Murphy is morphing! ... The Daily Beast has a mere 11 theories. ...
P.S.: Kurtz is sure! "No way Palin can run for president now." ... Update: Now he asks, "How can these talking heads pop off about the meaning of Palin's resignation when not one of them saw it coming?" ... It's the return of Kurtz vs. Kurtz! ...
P.P.S.: I'm waiting for someone to claim it was all the Scientologists' idea. So far, no one. But the night is young. ...
15) She's in a paranoid sulk! ... 4:35 P.M.
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Like CNN, Twitter seems like a pretty joyless place--but like CNN used to be, it's good in a crisis. ("CNN's Shocking Suck-Up to Iran's Fascists"? Marcus Brauchli: Get Howie Kurtz on the story stat! Oh wait). ... Even good writers turn into bad writers on Twitter. But after following the #iranelection feed (and Sullivan and Pitney) until bleary, I find it hard to have a thought much longer than seven score characters.
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Hillary Was So Well-Behaved Until Now: Sid Blumenthal to State? He may know things [raised eybrow] about Ahmadinejad that you don't .... But if I were Obama I might think twice. ... 10:37 P.M.
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Reza Aslan praises as "absolutely brilliant" a Chris Dickey Khamenei profile that seems to conclude "Ahmadinejad would have won anyway" (notwithstanding "indications of fraud"). Yet Aslan has claimed the election "was stolen by Ahmadinejad’s supporters," specifically the Revolutionary Guard, in what amounted to a "military coup." Which is it? ...10:38 P.M.
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NYT buries story that Sonia Sotomayor pushed for more very-low-income units in Harlem and Bronx housing developments--deeply misguided when the goal is to recreate a class mix and end concentration of poverty. She's also exercised by affirmative action contracting numbers. "'Extreme partisan' on questions of class and ethnicity." Yikes. ... Are conservatives banking too much on her being such a b----- that she won't convince other justices? ... 11:09 P.M.
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"Don't believe what you've heard about a GOP in disarray." The Republicans have
history on their side. There are only a handful of times in our nation's past when the party that won the White House hasn't lost big the following midterm election. That would spell disaster for President Obama's agenda. [E.A.]
Who said that? The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in a fundraising email I just got. It will come as news to the GOPs. ... 11:10 P.M.
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If John Edwards were alive today ... : The "New GM" tries to slough off product liability claims. ... 11:14 P.M.
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Super-filtered kaus feed! Meanwhile, my own actual twitter feed is such a fire-hose-like stream of apercus that they can only be highlighted here. The highlights: ... OK, there are no highlights. ... Except maybe the Mr. Bubble item which has not been lawyered (and which was stolen from a friend). ... 11:22 P.M.
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Stimulus Bill Race Quotas? Did you know** that CalTrans, the huge state agency that spends billions in federal highway construction funds, "sets a quota of having 6.75 percent of contracts go to women or members of [a] targeted group--African American, Asian-Pacific American, and Native America, but not Latinos or other groups." Not a "goal"--a quota. They are being sued. But why is a lawsuit even required? Stimulus money appears to be involved. And aren't "quotas" are what every poll-tested politician says he or she is against? Don't you think if the GOPs (or anyone) made a big stink about the stimulus bill's race quotas, Obama would back off? ... Plus it's another bone he could toss to Latinos! ... P.S.: If "quotas" have always tested badly in polls, the words "affirmative action" has often tested much better. But not in the recent Quinnipiac poll, which found that
American voters say 55 - 36 percent that affirmative action should be abolished
Backfill: Jennifer Rubin explains how explicit race quotas in contracting survived the Supreme Court's 1995 Adarand decision, which many people (me too) thought had killed the practice. "Strict scrutiny" isn't what it used to be. ... No doubt Justice Sotomayor will clean up this mess.
**--You wouldn't know if you relied on the L.A. Times, which apparently hasn't covered the CalTrans quota controversy (though its competitors have). ... 1:40 A.M.
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Why was Pennsylvania relatively unscathed by foreclosures in 2008 while neighboring Ohio was hammered? A friend at a conference I recently attended pointed out the contrast. I don't know the answer, but it might be instructive. ... Update: Thanks to Tom Maguire, who forwards a newspaper article and a summary of three Fed studies on the topic. Regulatory differences are suspected. ... 1:54 A.M.
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Los Angeles Democrats have succeeded in using the state's fiscal crisis to recreate welfare, some thirteen years after the hated federal AFDC entitlement was abolished. The local Dem-controlled Board of Supervisors is proposing to pay mothers for "caring for their own children"--which was the original idea of the welfare program when it was inserted into the New Deal's cash-granting structure in 1935. It seemed to make sense--caring for children is a type of work, after all. Except that subsidizing non-working parenthood--especially single motherhood--turned out to be a recipe for epic social disaster (something that was predicted by not a few dissenting antipoverty activists back in FDR's day). In 1996, Congress finally decided the better policy was to require mothers receiving welfare to work, outside the home, even if that was more expensive than just mailing them checks. At the time, the favored liberal Democratic battle cry was a demand for more day care. But now the Dem Board of Supervisors' proposes to cut the day care and just mail out the checks again, at least to all mothers with two children under age 6. (Message: Have a second kid and you don't have to go to work!).
Doesn't Obama's HHS Department have some say in this? Does he really want to resume subsidizing the culture of dependent single motherhood? ... P.S.: If he plays his cards right he could come out for both welfare and quotas in the same week, and give the GOPs a fair shot. ... [via Drudge] 2:07 A.M.
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WaPo media critic Howard "I'm A Star--The Rules Don't Apply to Me" Kurtz, who failed to disclose that he is paid by CNN when he defended CNN in an online chat this week, promises to disclose in the future:
"That was an oversight and won’t be repeated."
We've heard that tune before! ... P.S.: My beef with Kurtz isn't so much that he has a giant crippling conflict of interest (one that would never be tolerated for a Post reporter writing about, say, GM). It's that he has a giant crippling conflict of interest while he runs around chastising other journalists for minor conflicts of interest. Franklin Foer called him an "East German figure skating judge." He once tried to zing me for an Amazon Associates payment of $1.92 (which I'd overzealously disclosed). ... P.P.S.: The Post's Omblogger Andy Alexander produces a laboriously crafted corporate PR-style paragraph defending his employer--
An archival examination of his writings for The Post shows that when CNN has received a significant mention in his columns or stories, they typically end with this disclosure: "Howard Kurtz hosts's CNN's weekly media program, ‘Reliable Sources.'" [Weasel-word emphasis added.]
a) BS; b) What about stories trashing CNN's competitors (without 'significantly' mentioning CNN)? c) This isn't the sort of conflict--getting a paycheck from one of the companies you are covering--that disclosure is held to cure, according to the normal rules of journalism. ...
Update: Bill Wyman argues--and he has a good example--that what Kurtz doesn't write about matters just as much. ... 2:36 A.M.
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Imagine how cool President McCain would be in the Iran crisis. ... Would he go on TV to declare "we are all Moussavists now," or suspend all government activities while he parachuted into Tehran? ... 3:08 A.M.
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Let the Boomers Die? II: Reader D emails:
When I worked in the healthcare industry several years ago there was a study that found a large percentage of Medicare costs were incurred in the last six months of life. This is not about whether you get your hip replaced or your cataracts removed. It is more about heroic efforts to keep you alive. I'm a baby boomer also. So I want the healthcare available but I don't want to languish in an ICU on a ventilator with IV drips with no hope!
My answer: Fair enough. But I want to make the decision to cut off treatment, not have it made by a cost-watching health board. Choice! The resonance with the abortion debate seems obvious. ... Both are life/death decisions. Are they both best handled by individuals and their families in consultation with their doctors? You'd think the case for "choice" at the end of life might be stronger, since the life at stake is likely to be able to participate in making that choice. ...
Update: Prof. Althouse distinguishes this kind of choice from "right to die" cases. "It's one thing to deny the choice to die, quite another to deny the choice to live." Lively comments ensue, some of them quite moving. This isn't an issue people haven't thought about. ... 11:19 P.M.
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CNN's coverage of the chaos immediately following the Iranian vote--or lack of coverage--is now a big story. Luckily, the Washington Post can put its crack media critic on it. You know, the one who works for CNN! ... He's already defending the network on Twitter. ... [via Andrew Sullivan] 10:55 P.M.
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