video It's hard to imagine worse timing. President Obama flew to Norway today (according to Mark Knoller he is only the second president to do so) to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, nine days after announcing to the nation that he was sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Has there ever been a more reluctant Nobel Prize recipient? And yet by most accounts Obama managed to pull it off. (more...)

James Fallows isn't being subtle about pointing the finger at Betsy McCaughey: A huge photo on his blog leaves no room for error about who's to blame for the "Death Panel" rumors. Neither is the New York Times, singling out McCaughey on the front page for derailing the health care debate with pernicious rumours. Again. (more...)

In October, 1991, James Fallows wrote a hilarious takedown of the Economist that ran in the Washington Post’s Outlook Section. The essay attempted to explain why perfectly intelligent people, like Harvard’s Robert Reich (who at the time was in the middle of a squabble with Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson), would say things like: “I, for one, don’t get my economics news from Newsweek. I rely on the Economist – published in London.” (more...)