Yesterday, bloggers Peter Feld and John Carney had a heated back-and-forth about health care on their various Tumblrs. Among other points, they debated death panels, the relevance of police tasering to the discussion, and just how good the U.S. Postal Service is.
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It's not often that somebody dying makes me feel young. But the death of Walter Cronkite has inspired me with an overwhelming feeling of youthfulness. You see, I really know next to nothing about Walter Cronkite.  He means nothing at all to me. Hearing that he's dead was like a looking at a well-painted apartment wall. You get the feeling that a good job might have been done but that's the limit of the emotional or intellectual reaction. (more...)

For anyone whose political identity was formed during the poison years bracketed by Walter Cronkite's tenure as CBS evening anchor, the avuncular newsman was like the kindly, reassuring narrator of a political horror story. If, as CBS News president Sean McManus mourns, Cronkite's status "will never be duplicated again,” it's not only due to the modern fragmentation of the news audience -- it's also because, ideally, the country will never again go through such an extended trainwreck. The events reported by Cronkite during his 19 years as anchor -- a shorter tenure than his successor Dan Rather's, or Tom Brokaw's at NBC, but so much more influential -- are America's lasting scar tissue. (more...)