Watchdog Blog

Archive for November, 2006

Gilbert Cranberg: Want a Better Medicare Part D Deal? Ha!

The good news for the millions of seniors who signed up for Part D prescription drug coverage under Medicare is that they have between Nov. 15 and Dec. 31 to shop around for a better deal from insurers. The bad news is the same as the good news, but outweighs it because seniors who thought, [...]

Geneva Overholser: Moving Beyond the Lament: The Villains — and Us

Dean Baquet’s departure from the Los Angeles Times is sad and worrisome — and all the more so because we’re likely to misdirect the passion it stirs in us. We’ll conclude, quite logically, that the Tribune Co., the paper’s corporate owner, is the villain in Baquet’s story, as it was in the John Carroll story [...]

Morton Mintz: ‘The Executive Branch Is Undergoing a Brain Transplant’

The “relentless GOP attack” on the federal bureaucracy “amounts to an assault on the very idea of professional government,” Dan Zegart writes in The Nation (subscription required) after an eight-month investigation. “It would alter a cornerstone belief of American governance, dating to the Pendleton Act of 1883, that it is essential to insulate public servants [...]

Saul Friedman: There We Go Again

It didn’t take long for the conventional wise guys of the media to jump on Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) for speaking the truth, however awkwardly. But the media types didn’t bother looking where they were jumping. Kerry, addressing a crowd of students, told them something they very well understand: “Education, if you make the most [...]

Gilbert Cranberg: Des Moines Register Puts Some Zing in Its Candidate Endorsements

This is the time of year when the press opens itself to the charge of playing partisan politics by endorsing candidates for office. The Des Moines Register invited the charge with a vengeance Oct. 29 with a remarkable editorial that began, “If ever there was a time to vote the rascals out, this is it.” [...]