10)      It’s really, really hard to be President – people expect you to do things and stuff.

9)      America needs to be more like China.

8)      Five year plans: they’re not just for Stalin anymore.

7)      It’s still Bush’s fault.

6)      Equity demands that it should be ten times more expensive to go to college in order to do something productive than it should be to go to college in order to become a bureaucrat.

5)      Spending more public money on health care will still reduce the deficit. Really. It will.

4)      Ending the influence of lobbyists and operating transparent government remains as important a promise to make today as it was during the 2008 campaign.

3)      Joe Biden is very, very bored.

2)      The problem with Washington is that everyone is eternal campaign mode. Accordingly, everyone should follow the President’s example and limit themselves to no more than 158 interviews and 411 speeches per year. (more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)