The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman told The McLaughlin Group host John McLaughlin that he gives President Barack Obama high marks… for following through on a certain previous president’s foreign policy plans.

On Thursday’s edition of Squawk Box, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and CNBC’s Rick Santelli traded epithets over whether Social Security was a Ponzi scheme as Governor Rick Perry has argued. “Your question is idiotic,” fumed Friedman, when asked whether Social Security was a type of pyramid scheme. “You’re idiotic!” responded Santelli. The heated [...]

The rhetoric against the Tea Party movement has escalated in extremism during the debt ceiling debate, partially because many on the left and in the center considered the Tea Party members of Congress the only thing standing between America maintaining its credit rating and defaulting on the debt. On tonight’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg differed on the level of outrage about that, but both took the time to chuckle about their aversion to labeling “real terrorists” but quickness to drop the word on domestic opponents.

During an interview on Meet The Press today, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg discussed American innovation and leadership. In particular, he made an interesting suggestion that we should “make sure anybody who gets a graduate degree in America, from overseas, gets a green card attached to their diploma.”

If that sentence sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve heard it already. From the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman, in a 2007 column.

In the mind of comic-book author Benjamin Marra, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is basically a snarky Clark Kent. He’s given the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist the superhero treatment with his bizarre new comic,
The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd. In it, his redheaded heroine breaks national stories, battles bad guys, and parades around in racy underwear, all while maintaining journalistic integrity.

In his latest New York Times column, Thomas Friedman takes semi-comedic offense at the fact that the Russians still want to spy on the United States, noting that there are plenty of other countries who’s educational systems, bureaucracies, financial markets, and internet resources are outperforming ours. Russia isn’t one of them.

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman often makes valid points on climate change and clean energy, but for a variety of reasons, he’s the paper’s most vehemently-ridiculed columnist. Unfortunately, his latest column, which appeared today in the NYT print edition, will do little to quiet such criticism.

“Our biggest scoop? Probably when we discovered that the anagram for “New York Times” was “Write, Monkeys.”

Maureen Dowd is weighing in on President Obama’s habit of surrounding himself with men on the golf course (and elsewhere). And you know what, I suspect this may be one topic that Dowd, who has been circulating in powerful political spheres for much of her professional life, could actually shed some light on. And low and behold she does.

News reporters like to catch readers’ attention with a few zingy lines at the start of an article. Sometimes, these so-called “ledes” go horribly wrong. But sometimes, they’re great! In Today’s Best News Ledes, we highlight the cream of the crop: