They treat politics like high school gossip and get on the bandwagon for whomever they perceive to be the coolest. How else can you explain that the same media elites who were so horrified by Clinton's dalliance still worship the ground that the much more promiscuous JFK walked on? They also appease bullies who mock them. After all, their image as the in crowd is what matters.

This treatment is not limited to only Democrats. Campaign reporters covering JFK joined with his staff in singing songs mocking Nixon, hardly professional behavior. No matter how much we oppose a politician this kind of "journalism" is bad for our democracy. Citizens depend on accurate, substantive information to make informed decisions, not entertaining gossip.

This is not necessarily

At least that is what I have read. I have also read that non-profit health insurance providers pay taxes the way for-profits do. If that is true there advantage is greatly lessened.

Still, many Eurpeans countries with great systems have no public option, but rather a choice among many private non-profits. Of course they are heavily regulated and cannot discriminate and have caps on their charges.

The "liberal" New Republic willing touted her as non partisan and printed her screed even though her bogus facts were easily disproved since the detailed proposed plan was publicly available. George Will joined in the chorus and the rest of the MSM fell in line. The Clinton White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal which the New Republic refused to print. The cowardly Democrats caved, hanging the Clintons out to dry.

The highly regarded journalist, James Fallows, wrote and article "A Triumph of Misinformation" in the January '95 Atlantic Monthly (available online). Of course, being part of the insider media crowd, he only did this after the bill had been roundly defeated, and then only at the request of his old grad school chum, Ira Magaziner. (Magaziner and Hilllary had headed up Clinton's Task Force to Reform Health Care.)

According to Fallows "These conversations began at Magaziner's request. As Fallows so tellingly put it " He and I were friends in graduate school, more than twenty years ago, and he was obviously betting that I'd listen to him more sympathetically than other reporters would..........until these meetings I had had no contact with him during his time as health czar." Guess Fallows was too busy being the WASHINGTON EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY to call up his old buddy when it really could have made a difference.

If someone obsesses over facebook that is there problem but it is coming from the individual, not the internet. All the whining over how email is ruining writing is just plain stupid.

I remember spending a lot of time in class surreptitiously writing notes to my friends. This was back in the sixties. After school we spent a lot of time on the phone talking about the same thing we wrote about in the notes. (Mainly what boys we liked.) We knew the difference between the informal style used in those communications and the formal style appropriate for school work. The only thing that seems different to me now is that we were a lot more careful about privacy, even developing a secret codes so adults - and rivals could not read our private communications.

If teachers don't want emotions in book reports, or too informal a style, they just need to teach that explicitly instead of demonizing the more personal style. Kids can easily learn what is appropriate in different situations, but need direct instruction in those styles as well as when to use it.

The biggest problem I see is that even more information is available on the internet than before so the need to teach kids how to evaluate the reliability of what they read is needed now more than ever. (Of course it would help if teachers and parents knew how to do this but most don't.) Required courses in logical argument which emphasize recognizing logical fallacies is desperately needed in order to help kids identify ways that truth can be manipulated. Using multiple, independent sources and developing a healthy scepticism is also critical as is basic scientific and math literacy if people are to recognize bogus information and think for themselves.

Obama is finally fighting back. He not only called the bizarre charges about proposed health care reforms LIES, he asked the people spreading them what they propose to do to fix our broken system. It's about time someone did!!

Obama seems to believe that he won on his magical ability to charm people - not because the media was in love with him after Bush proved how bad there judgment was for preferring him over Gore. He needs to read Mr. Lyons"Fools for Scandal" and "The Hunting of the President"(With Joe Conason)yesterday to understand what he is up against, both in terms of the right's willingness to say and do almost anything to regain power and the media's willingness to play along with the bullies.

He should throw in James Fallows' "A Triumph of Misinformation" in the Jan 95 Atlantic Monthly to get the specifics about the tactics used to defeat Clinton's health care plan. That article makes it clear just how misled the public was about what was proposed and how the plan was formulated (not in secret, for one thing).

Maybe this would disabuse him of the notion that he can just smooze the opposition. He should start pressuring the media to get the facts out and stop there he said/she said reporting which allows them to repeat Republican lies without having to bother to get the facts out. Too bad that is not as easy or fun. Bet if they were in danger of losing their health insurance reporters and pundits would find a way to do their job.