One of the subplots to last week’s Herman Cain Bad-Press-A-Palooza (bad press that seems to have helped him) was his supposed gaffe in an interview with PBS’ Judy Woodruff on Monday night’s Newshour. The clip has widely been reported as demonstrating that Cain did not know that China has had nuclear weapons since 1964, and that he thinks they still don’t. For a week now, I’ve been waiting for someone to point out that Cain indicated no such thing.

There’s no better proof of how annoyed Glenn Beck gets with all the “conspiracy theorist” accusations he receives than seeing how happy he is when someone “respected” agrees with him. For example, take this clip from his radio show today in which he listens with absolute glee to the audio of Niall Ferguson debating Mika Brzezinski over Egypt from this morning’s Morning Joe. Beck happily describes it as a “spanking.” We’re pretty sure we haven’t heard him this giddy since SNL said he was right about the gold. Of course, this instance has more references to Mika’s “warm tushie” so…there’s that.

America’s reign as a world power is coming to an end, soon. This the latest from Newsweek, where Newsweek Poland correspondent Andrew Nagorski is warning that the collapse of the United States is imminent. “It’s harder now to shrug off the America-in-decline theories than ever before,” he notes, citing such rock-hard evidence as the fact that New York Times columnists are mopey, Greece is close to bankruptcy, and “There’s even something in the air.” Time to move to Canada!

“Niall Ferguson has many things: a position teaching at Harvard, a column in the Financial Times — and a child’s understanding of race.”

— Touré on MSNBC, in response to Niall Ferguson’s FT column where he likened Barack Obama to Felix the Cat because they were both “black and lucky.”

Blog fights are not just for the Tumblrs, even Nobel prize winning economists/columnists are susceptible! Behold NYT‘s Paul Krugman, who reacted harshly to Niall Ferguson‘s lede in a FT article last week, which compared Obama to Felix the (Black) Cat. Krugman has since referred to Ferguson as a whiner, and a now poseur. Who knew he had it in him.

How did a lede like the one in Niall Ferguson’s column today make it past the Financial Times editors? The Financial Times is British paper and so arguably not quite as sensitive to the historical racial nerves Ferguson’s lede touches on. But still! Are we supposed to conclude that Barack Obama is lucky because he is black?

Historians generally agree that Watergate was a great moment for the press – and for the Washington Post, which published the scoops of that would eventually take down a president. But the July 17th issue of the Economist points to a more unorthodox take: That the Washington Post was selfish, irresponsible, and directly responsible for thwarting the World Peace that Richard Nixon would certainly have won.