With the economic crisis– particularly the dire jobs situation– paramount in the headlines of what is wrong with the nation today, last night Bill O’Reilly dedicated a segment of his program to debating the faults of our infrastructure and the likelihood of President Obama doing anything about it. O’Reilly faced off with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on the amount of spending necessary, the former concluding that “pouring more money” into problems was simply not the solution.

The Tea Party, the fiscally conservative movement that turned the House of Representatives over to the Republicans last November, has found itself in the eye of the debt crisis storm this week as Tea Party-backed legislators almost sank the House Speaker’s own bill. On last night’s O’Reilly Factor, Tea Party leader David Webb told host Laura Ingraham he was outraged his group was being labeled childish, as, in the debate, “we’re the adults in the room” who Americans listen to.

It’s coming down to the wire for Congress to pass a budget that will allow the nation to pay off enough of its debt to stay afloat, and with Cut, Cap and Balance unlikely to become law, the odds that America will have an even more serious economic problem on its hands next week keeps growing. But who will be to blame? On last night’s Follow the Money, Ann Coulter told host Eric Bolling she fully expects Republicans to take the blame when national parks and museums shut down.

Someone apparently designated this the weekend for liberal media types to come out against President Obama. And did they ever. And then there was Chris Matthews on Sunday questioning whether the President had been fiddling while Rome burned. Says Matthews: “He should have been focusing on the economy, instead he was focused on making history with health care.”

Is this going to result in further calls for drug tests from Robert Gibbs? I think it’s safe to say when one speaks of the “professional left” Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman are at the top of many people’s list. And if this morning’s This Week panel was anything to go by they are very, very angry.

The firing of Octavia Nasr has led to passionate responses from many in the media. Some have viewed the actions of the CNN as necessary while others see it as a sign that, in the age of Twitter and YouTube, journalists can no longer have a strong opinion. Tom Friedman fell in the latter camp, writing an op-ed in the NY Times saying as much. This op-ed drew a strongly-worded critique from Mediaite founder Dan Abrams in the comments section of this site.

Today’s New York Times op-ed pages are all fired up…in fact they’re almost bloggy. I was going to confine this post to Tom Friedman‘s assessment of CNN’s decision to fire Octavia Nasr, but how to resist Frank Rich who manages to connect Mel Gibson‘s abusive tirades with the current state of politics (and Fox News) in this country.

Newsweek and The New Republic recently published “America the Ungovernable” and “Is America Ungovernable?“, respectively, making the case that perhaps the recent political, economic, and social turmoil in the country is not a product of bad leadership, but the nature of the nation. If two major news and political publications run with the story, it’s officially a trend.

Luckily, Charles Krauthammer is around to nip this mildly insulting talking point – we’re ungovernable as a people? – in the bud.

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

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: