For many months, the Washington Post has been running as “news” front page editorials and propaganda fed by Pete Peterson deficit hawks/vultures attempting to terrorize the Beltway over the federal deficit. But the Post’s David Broder seems unaware of this misinformation when he lectures Democrats, but not Blue Dogs and Republicans, about not funding school teachers.

It is reassuring to learn that the President is both listening to serious policy advisers while taking advantage of experienced, successful political advisers to get those policies enacted. So they must be succeeding, right?

Did Dan Froomkin sneak into the Washington Post building the other night and drop some truth serum into Matlock’s Metamucil? Because that’s the only way I can envision David Broder writing a column that gets so much right for a change.

Why not give “ordinary Americans” a real voice in the media discourse instead of blathering about Sarah Palin’s phony populism?

Despite Republican’s overconfidence, will people fall for it?

One of the most vexing revelations to come from last night’s Senatorial contest in Massachusetts was the fact there were NO EXIT POLLS. NONE! Not a single news organization conducted exit polls to ascertain a “why?” for such a huge, significant upset.

All this excitement over budgetary responsibility is most impressive, a real display of maturity, realism, moral rectitude, and tough love for the citizens of the United States. It would be even more impressive if the legislators and commentator involved were poor or middle class people who stood to lose out from this insistence on fiscal responsibility after 8 years of funding of George Bush’s tax cuts, wars, giveaways to the health insurance industry, oil companies, and pharmaceutical companies, and bank bailouts. However, since that’s not the case, I hope I will be forgiven for asking whether all this fiscal responsibility is really necessary, or even desirable, until we reach the point where we can forecast likely inflation due to excessive demand for scarce goods? Right now, we can do no such thing. In fact, all we can forecast, as far as the eye can see, is high unemployment rates, ruined careers and lives, and inadequate demand relative to both inventory and productive capacity — precisely the conditions that deficit reduction will only exacerbate.

The frequent calls for fiscal responsibility are justified only by fairy stories propounded by the old-time religion, which are in no way in accord with the way our modern economy and monetary system works. Indeed, an outbreak of fiscal responsibility in the foreseeable future will only promote a much more rapid decline in the economic capacity and prosperity of the United States, will lead to much more open class warfare, and to our de-evolution to the condition of some third world nations. Taking any serious action to reduce Federal Budget deficits in the foreseeable future is a form of slow national suicide, and is entirely inappropriate for Democrats, the so-called party of the people, to even be contemplating, much less agitating for. In my next diary, I will lay out the reasons why, by analyzing the assertions of both Bayh and his compatriots and David Broder, and showing that they are arrant nonsense.

David Broder replied to Robinson, saying he thinks that Robinson was wrong and contending that the danger of seeking accountability for the actions of higher-ups in enabling torture and prisoner abuse is too great, as is the risk of extreme stress and damage to the US political system that we would take if we prosecuted, convicted, and punished those responsible for torture.

Broder’s views received strong reactions very quickly. Marcy Wheeler, Glenn Greenwald, and Brad De Long all weighed in with very critical comments, and Congressman John Conyers also wrote a very persuasive critique of Broder’s position in the Huffington Post. I’ll leave it to my readers to review all of these excellent critiques of Broder’s argument. What I want to talk about here, however, is only one of Broder’s points. His point that President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was good for the country.

Broder’s op-ed analyzed through principles of journalism