Wyoming

New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, now a regular on the paper’s op-ed page, equated congressional oversight with Anthony Weiner’s sexual peccadillos in Saturday’s “Blocking  Elizabeth Warren.”  Warren, a Harvard law professor, bankruptcy “expert,” and liberal crusader, is special advisor to the White House and a favorite among liberals and the Times for pushing the creation of a federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

It’s official: Elizabeth Warren will return to the torture chamber known as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 14. Earlier this week, Darrell Issa, the California Republican who is chairman of the committee, tweeted the news. Apparently, Democrats aren’t the only ones who use Twitter to harass women.

The New York Times continues to argue against spending cuts, no matter how silly or trivial the program may be. Reporter Adam Nagourney rode to the defense of Sen. Harry Reid’s beleaguered cowboy poets on Monday: “For Cowboy Poets, Unwelcome Spotlight In Battle Over Spending.” Reporting from the small Nevada town of Elko, Nagourney’s tone suggested critics who consider funding cowboy poetry a waste of tax money simply don’t know enough about the program.

This isolated town in the northeast Nevada mountains is known for gold mines, ranches, casinos, bordellos and J. M. Capriola, a destination store with two floors of saddles, boots, spurs and chaps. It is also the birthplace of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of range song and poetry that draws thousands of cowboys and their fans every January and receives some money from the federal government.

That once-obscure gathering became a target in the budget battle a world away in Washington last week, employed by conservatives as a symbol of fiscal waste. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, invoked the event in arguing against Republican cuts in arts financing in the budget debate, setting off a conflagration of conservative scorn.

If you're going to accuse a president of lying and committing crimes, it might be nice to provide some particulars. But Frank Rich sees no need for such niceties in his New York Times column of today.

The putative topic is the McClellan book, but the real subject is Rich's abject Bush hatred. After referring to Pres. Bush as "the loathed lame duck," Rich writes:

Americans don’t like being lied to by their leaders, especially if there are casualties involved and especially if there’s no accountability. We view it as a crime story, and we won’t be satisfied until there’s a resolution.

So Bush lied and people died, is that it? What was the lie, where was the crime? Is Rich referencing WMD here, the same WMD that President Clinton, every major Dem leader at the time, and countries from France to Russia also said Saddam had? Rich doesn't say. If not WMD, something else? If so, what? And just what is the "resolution" Rich demands? Even Keith Olbermann recently, regretfully, recognized it's probably too late for impeachment.

In science, it’s called the “observer effect” — the very act of observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. And if journalists are simply supposed to “observe” and report on our presidential elections, they are in fact exerting a tremendous effect over the entire process.

For example, imagine two small states, both holding caucuses to pick their delegates to the presidential nominating convention this summer. Because they are so small, neither state delegation will be especially meaningful to the actual outcome, but the caucuses in State A are given saturation attention by the world’s media, while the caucuses in State B are ignored by the media.

Well, no need to imagine. Yesterday, the Iowa caucuses chose a relatively inconsequential 40 delegates to the GOP convention, but the tremendous media attention given to those results has already scrambled the Republican presidential race. Tomorrow, Wyoming Republicans will pick 12 delegates — but the media won’t be there. So it’s essentially a non-event.

Indeed, today’s Wyoming Tribune-Eagle notes how state Republicans “want the event to end by 3 p.m. so the state can get a mention in the Sunday New York Times.”