Timothy Noah conducted a short reader poll and established the relative value of NY Times columnists as follows ($3.13 being the line separating “above normal” from “below normal”:

Paul Krugman: $6.90
Thomas L. Friedman: $4.10
Frank Rich: $3.92
Maureen Dowd: $3.42
Nicholas Kristof: $2.35
Bob Herbert: $1.42
David Brooks: $1.39
John Tierney: $0.31

It’s notable that an economist tops the unscientific survey, since most people don’t think of economics as being that interesting. I know he doesn’t just write about that, but it does illustrate that interesting writing can come from virtually any field.

Ouch.

Heh.

The Volunteer State embarrassment continues:

The Republican leader, Bill Frist (Tenn.), was asked why he, the head of the anti-filibuster movement, had voted to uphold the filibuster of a judge in 2000. Frist at first stammered — “Mr. President, the, in response, the Paez nomination, we’ll come back and discuss it” — and then settled on an answer: “It’s not the cloture votes, per se,” he said, using the term for filibuster-breaking votes. “It’s the partisan leadership-led use of cloture to kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees.”

Kill? Assassinate? My, what language! Did Dr. Frank Luntz recommend this talk to woo the religious rightists as we march toward 2008?

As some of you may have noticed, my website account was suspended last night–the second time that’s happened in a month. No, I haven’t be storing a bunch of illegal music or porn–I’ve been the apparent victim of comment spam attacks.
After the last shutdown, I upgraded to MT 3.15 and installed an updated MT Blacklist. I thought that was sufficient protection; apparently it’s not.
Currently, commenting is disabled for “unregistered” users while I try to sort through this issue. So if you aren’t registered at TypeKey, or whatever it is, you may not be able to comment. Sorry.