Fox host Bill O'Reilly laughs off any calls for increasing government spending to help create jobs. Last week he derided Paul Krugman for

demanding more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? Unbelievable.

People like Bill O'Reilly don't pay any mind to the fancy pants Nobel Prize committee that gave Krugman one of their liberal awards. Why should he? He knows how the economy really works, as he explained last night (8/8/11):

Raising income taxes is not the way out of this. In 2001 and again in 2003, President Bush cut individual tax rates. And what happened? Well, from 2004 until 2008, tax revenue increased from about $800 billion to almost $1.2 trillion. That blows away the liberal argument that tax cuts starve the government of revenue. They don't.

This has been, at times, a talking point among conservatives. But you don't really get a sense of tax revenue without comparing it to something-- as FactCheck.org noted in a piece in 2007 (when John McCain was saying much the same about the Bush tax cuts), revenues tend to increase every year as the economy grows.

A more useful measure would be how tax revenue looks relative to the size of the economy. As the Economic Policy Institute put it in a recent report (6/1/11) on the 10-year anniversary of the Bush cuts:

• Federal tax revenue fell from 20.6 percent of GDP in FY2000 (the last year of the 1991-2000 expansion and reflective of
Clinton-era tax rates) to 18.5 percent of GDP in FY2007 (the last year of the Bush economic expansion and reflective of
Bush-era tax rates).

• From 2001 through 2010, the cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt, nearly 50 percent of the total debt accrued
during this period.

• The decade of the Bush tax cuts had, on average, lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous
decade since the 1950s.

That would be (part of) the "liberal argument" against the Bush tax cuts--and it doesn't appear to be "blown away" by O'Reilly's too-good-for-Princeton economic analysis.

August 6, 2011, when 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, were killed when their helicopter was shot down, was the "deadliest day" of the Afghan War, several media outlets told us:

• David Muir (ABC World News Saturday, 8/6/11): "It was the deadliest day of the war in Afghanistan, 30 Americans, 22 Navy SEALs lost."

• David Gregory (NBC Meet the Press, 8/7/11): "This was the single deadliest day of the war."

• Chicago Tribune headline (8/7/11): "Taliban Says It Downed Copter in Deadliest Day of War in Afghanistan"

• ABC This Week graphic (8/7/11): "DEADLIEST DAY IN AFGHANISTAN"

• Terrell Brown, CBS Morning News (8/8/11): "America mourns the loss of 30 warriors killed in Afghanistan on the war's deadliest day."

• AP (8/9/11): "Troops killed in the deadliest day of the Afghan War are coming home today."

But, of course, it wasn't the war's deadliest day--that unhappy distinction goes to May 4, 2009, when the U.S. military attacked the village of Granai, killing 140 people, 93 of them children, according to an Afghan government investigation (Reuters, 5/16/09). (The U.S. government says it does not know how many people it killed that day.)

Other deadlier days in Afghanistan include July 6, 2008, when U.S. bombing killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, attending a wedding in Nangarhar province (Guardian, 7/11/08); August 22, 2008, when a U.S. airstrike killed at least 90 civilians, including 60 children, in the village of Azizabad (UN News Centre, 8/26/08); and July 23, 2010, when the U.S. killed 39 civilians in the village of Sangin (RTTNews, 8/5/10).

To be sure, many U.S. news reports, unlike those cited above, remembered to add "for Americans" to their descriptions of August 6 as the "deadliest day." But there's little evidence that anyone in U.S. media remembers the village of Granai.

There is no shortage of pundits like Robert Samuelson who demand cuts to Social Security and Medicare, usually in the name of balancing the budget. These political decisions are usually labeled "hard choices" in media discussions--as if politicians who favor making people pay more for their healthcare or cutting their retirement funds are only bravely doing what needs to be done.

Rarely discussed in the corporate media is what to do about the military budget, which has grown enormously over the past decade. Part of the debt deal requires some military cuts, though there is less there than meets the eye. (Listen to Bill Hartung explain it on CounterSpin.) And nonetheless polls have shown pretty consistently that military spending is an area where the public favors rather drastic cuts.

If cutting government spending is a political necessity, then surely cutting a bloated military budget is a no-brainer, right? Not for Samuelson, who recently wrote that even modest cuts to the Pentagon budget are unwise.

But to get a sense of what could be possible, consider this from Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer:

In 2000, we spent 3.7 percent of GDP on the military. The Pentagon didn't have to hold bake sales. We're now spending 5.4 percent. Merely going back to 2000 would save 1.7 percent of GDP, or $255 billion. If over the next decade we spent 3.7 percent of GDP instead of 5.4 percent, we'd save $3.6 trillion. That's close to what many of the deficit hawks are aiming for. Let the Bush tax cuts expire and bump up the top rate a few points and everyone could have free childcare and free college tuition!

Of course to do that would be un-American.

TalkingPointsMemo's Brian Beutler observes that Obama has basically announced that the military cuts on the table right now are as far as he's willing to go--better to cut Medicare benefits than the military budget.  And it is only a matter of time before some pundit somewhere uses this to illustrate Obama's "bravery" in tacking "entitlements" by tacking to the center in order to impress "independent" voters.

Time's Michael Crowley deserves some credit for saying this about the Tea Party movement, in his piece about how they largely won the debt standoff:

The Tea Party movement has proved not only that people can have their own facts but also that they can use them to vast tactical advantage, crashing through the taboos of political convention and changing the game along the way.

But in explaining the political origins of the movement, he writes:

It is an article of faith in Tea Party circles that Washington and Wall Street are in bed together, colluding for power and profit at the expense of the little guy.

We've seen this before; that is, attempts to brand the Tea Party movement--which is in no small part bankrolled by wealthy corporate interests-- as anti-corporate populism. He writes:

Indeed, for some Tea Party activists, the summer of 2011 has been all too reminiscent of the fall of 2008, when the movement truly took root. After the financial world crashed, Washington insisted that a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks was necessary to avert a depression. To the Tea Party, however, this was yet another scare tactic to justify transferring taxpayer money to the bankers who helped cause the mess in the first place.

There are probably some Tea Party activists who opposed the TARP bailout, but it's a stretch to suggest this is where the movement "took root." Glenn Beck, as much as an intellectual godfather to the movement as there is, supported the bailout, only to later recant and wish he hadn't.

The Tea Party movement was really energized by a rant from CNBC host Rick Santelli--the one where he called for a Tea Party based on some class resentment directed at  people in expensive homes who were all getting bailed out while hard-earning stockbrokers were making their payments. Or something like that--read this piece from CJR to get a sense of what Santelli was upset about, which was a modest mortgage modification program directed at people who were, in Santell's words, "losers." His call for Tea Party protests led to, well, actual Tea Party protests.

This happened in February 2009, months after the TARP bailout. Very little of his rant was based on bashing Wall Street--it would have been rather remarkable for an anti-Wall Street movement to be birthed on CNBC, a network whose target audience is people who trade stocks. And, of course, the movement began to really find political success during the health care debate--when it was mostly concerned with portraying Obama's plan as some sort of Communist killing machine.

Crowley adds:

In Tea Party doctrine, both major parties are complicit with an elite Washington--New York establishment that lies to the public to cover for policies that enrich the wealthy and strengthen the powerful.

If this were really what was motivating Tea Party activists, you'd see more evidence to that effect--and it'd be more ideologically diverse than it is. The truth is that there are such activist mobilizations--US Uncut, the One Nation march on Washington--but they're hardly given the media platform granted to the Tea Party.

There are plenty of thoughtful pieces--Drew Westen's in the New York Times over the weekend being the most recent one--that try to figure out what's going on with Barack Obama.

Then there's Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (8/9/11), who begins by retelling a story about FDR:

In her autobiography, Helen Gahagan Douglas recalled telling President Franklin D. Roosevelt about her visits to the camps of migrant workers. She was especially poignant about the children and their lack of Christmas toys when the president tried to stop her. "Don't tell me any more, Helen," FDR told the woman who is probably best known for losing a dirty Senate race to Richard Nixon. She was stunned. Roosevelt was crying.

Cohen asks: "Can anyone imagine Barack Obama doing anything similar?"  I haven't a clue, but Cohen does--he's seen the evidence:

The answer--at least my answer--is no. And this is quite amazing when you think about it. FDR was a Hudson River squire--down to his cigarette holder and cape. Nonetheless, he could connect to the less fortunate. Obama, in contrast, was raised in the great American muddle, not rich and not poor. Yet when the stock market fell more than 500 points last week and the image that night was of the president whooping it up at his birthday party, the juxtaposition--just bad timing, of course--seemed appropriate. He does not seem to care.

FDR cried when he heard the stories of children living in poverty. Obama didn't even cry when the Dow lost 500 points. What an uncaring monster.

Labor disputes are often about compensation-- salary and/or benefits. Management claims its employees are actually doing just fine, workers say otherwise. 45,000 Verizon workers are on strike on the East Coast over salary, pension and health benefits and collective bargaining rights.

One would hope that reporters would try to referee such disputes over compensation.  In the New York Times, Steven Greenhouse prints the claims side by side.

Yesterday:

Verizon called its unionized employees well paid, saying that many field technicians earn more than $100,000 a year, including overtime, with an additional $50,000 in benefits. But union officials say that the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 before overtime and that benefits come to well under $50,000 a year.

Today:

Verizon says its unionized employees are well paid, with many field technicians earning more than $90,000 a year, including overtime, with an additional $50,000 in benefits. Union officials say the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 a year before overtime and that benefits come to far less than $50,000 a year.

Now a careful reader might figure out the difference between Verizon saying that "many" tech workers earn more than $90,000, and the union saying the same workers "generally" earn about 1/3 less.  It's the same as saying  "many" Americans are millionaires;  generally Americans are not.

If the company is wildly overstating what its employees are making, news accounts should get to the bottom of it.

UPDATE: Greenhouse digs into these compensation figures a bit more today,  and it's hard not to conclude that Verizon's doing some funny math:

The financials of Verizon’s landline business are not the only set of numbers that company and union are fighting over. Union officials dispute the company’s estimate that each employee receives $50,000 worth of benefits each year. In that number, the company includes $14,700 for medical and dental insurance, $10,900 for retiree health care and life insurance, $10,800 for pension and $7,500 for time off.

Union officials say total benefits average $25,000 a year. Mr. Kohl, the union official, disputed the $10,800 yearly figure for pensions, noting that Verizon’s annual report said the company’s 2010 contributions to the union’s defined benefit plans “were not significant.” Verizon officials said the $10,800 was an average annual amount.

Mr. Kohl also said the $10,900 retiree health care figure was greatly exaggerated, asserting that many retirees had worked years to pay for that care so the cost should not be attributed to current employees.

Mr. Kohl also quarreled with Verizon saying the value of time off — vacation, sick days and personal days — was $7,500. He dismissed that as double-counting because that number was already counted in wages.

So the company's counting sick days and vacation as paid compensation? We've seen companies claim retiree healthcare as part of current workers benefits before. In any case, Greenhouse is doing today what reporters should be doing when covering this kind of dispute.

The right is apparently up in arms over this photo of Michele Bachmann that appears on the cover of this week's Newsweek:

If someone wants to say this is an unflattering picture, fine.

But Bachmann's supporters are unlikely to find much in Lois Romano's article to complain about. On the campaign trail, Bachmann's "simple, black-and-white distillations of complex problems are cheered as refreshing and tough." A campaign speech is a "folksy assault on a bloated federal government."

Explaining Bachmann's apparent surge, Romano writes:

Just months ago, Bachmann was the butt of jokes on late-night TV for her flawed grasp of U.S. history. But all that changed one night this spring when she took the stage at the first major GOP presidential debate with the middle-aged, drab men running for the nomination, and set herself apart with poise and precision. When others meandered or waffled, she shot back with answers that reduced Washington's dysfunctional gridlock to understandable soundbites.

I'm not sure comedians have stopped writing jokes about her-- or that her "grasp" of U.S. history has changed much since the spring. So much of the corporate media's enthusiasm for Bachmann comes down to cheering her performance at that one debate. People who watched it, or read the transcript afterwards, might have a hard time reconciling the upbeat characterizations of Bachmann's performance with the actual words she spoke from the stage.

As we pointed out, her  answer on jobs, the biggest political question of the moment, was a call to close down the Environmental Protection Agency, which she said should be called  the "Job-Killing Organization of America." Was that "poise and precision?"

But it's not just Newsweek. In the Washington Post, former Bush adviser Nicolle Wallace wrote that at the debate, "Bachmann's answers were crisp, strategic and smoothly delivered."

The press have set the bar for Bachmann somewhere near the floor--which means she'll almost always be exceeding expectations. This is one of the defining features of the coverage of her presidential campaign.

If the White House encouraged Americans to prevent colds by wearing sweaters, one would hope that media outlets would point out that there's no evidence that being chilly has anything to do with catching a cold.

Likewise, if the Interior Department green-lights a plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean in order to demonstrate "a willingness by President Obama to approve expanded domestic oil and gas exploration in response to high gasoline prices," as John Broder and Clifford Krauss wrote in the New York Times today (8/5/11), then reporters really ought to point out that expanded offshore drilling can only have the tiniest impact on the price of gasoline, since oil is  a global commodity and the United States does not have enough offshore oil to meaningfully increase the world supply.

But don't hold your breath.

U.S. officials seem to be making progress in convincing Iraqi politicians to let some troops stay in Iraq beyond the December withdrawal deadline. The Washington Post weighs in today (8/4/11) and gets some anonymous straight talk:

"There seems to be broad partnerships and political coalitions emerging that take tough decisions," said a senior U.S. Embassy official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue frankly.

Of course, one way of reading that justification for anonymity is that an official speaking on the record would be less than frank. If that's worth granting a source anonymity, then it might be worth it. So bring on the frank talk! The rest of the paragraph:

"This is very good, because we don't want to be the security partner to a dictatorship or to a one-party regime, but rather, we believe we should have acceptance by a broad range of political forces in this country."

The "frank" talk is that the United States does not want to partner with a dictatorship? Perhaps the source needed to remain anonymous because he or she was aware of the absurdity of this.

There's an interesting piece by Alexander Bolton in the Hill (8/3/11) that suggests Senate Democrats are frustrated by the Beltway media's tendency to cover political standoffs between the parties as situations where everyone's to blame.

Bolton writes:

This frustration boiled over during a Wednesday press conference on the partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration and what Democrats call the GOP’s extortionist tactics.

The FAA had to temporarily lay off 4,000 workers because Senate Democrats and Republicans cannot agree to a reauthorization of the agency.

Democrats are angry that members of the media appear to be accepting the GOP argument that Democrats are to blame for the temporary shutdown.

Consider this moment with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and California's Sen. Barbara Boxer:

"The fact is that you’ve got to dig a little bit behind the surface here of what this is really about,” said Boxer. "Whatever the issue is, this is about government by threats, government by one side making its demands.…"

"And these folks falling for it," Reid interjected, gesturing to the reporters in the Senate radio and television gallery.

The only reporter singled out is Jonathan Karl from ABC:

When Jonathan Karl, a correspondent for ABC News, asked why Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) had blocked a short-term FAA extension offered by Republicans on the Senate floor Tuesday, Democrats lost their patience.

"There’s a certain naivety that comes with your question," said Boxer. "The story here today is the fact that our leader is reaching out to [House Speaker John] Boehner [R-Ohio] to say, 'If we want to resolve a particular issue, whatever it might be, let’s talk about it,' but not have one side say, 'Take it or leave it or people will be out of work.' And the essence of your question doesn't understand that."

If the criticism is that some reporters "accept GOP arguments," then Jonathan Karl is one of the strongest examples--see this July Extra! piece about his history of parroting GOP talking points. Or his disgraceful "false balance" report likening Tea Party activists to a USAID administrator's claim that cuts in humanitarian aid would cause deaths--a conclusion that led Karl to label him a "hothead."

New York Times reporter Dan Barry has an "outsider visiting the Capitol" piece (8/3/11) about the strange things one encounters in the legislative sausage factory. In some rooms you are required to wear a necktie; others have no such rules. The place is confusing in other ways, too: "To reach the third level from the first, walk down, not up."

Barry watches the behavior of reporters, scrambling around to get a quote from this or that lawmaker. Not that they're interested in all lawmakers equally. After John Boehner spoke at one lectern, for instance:

A few minutes later, representatives of the Congressional Progressive Caucus appeared at the Boehner-warm lectern to deplore the plan as an assault on working families and the result of a hostage situation created by Tea Party Republicans. But fewer reporters remained to listen.

Whatever the strange rituals of the Beltway, this is one that isn't surprising at all.

I  suspect one of the reporters who stuck around was Dana Milbank--because he had to write a column making fun of the complaining leftists, who apparently should be grateful that budget cuts aren't as deep as they might have been:

Republicans received only a third of the $6 trillion in cuts over 10 years that they proposed in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. But liberal lawmakers are convinced that Obama gave away everything--big spending cuts, probably including Medicare, without any tax increases--all because of a few dozen tea party House members who, defying even House GOP leaders, were perfectly willing to see the government default. In essence, the progressives had been out-crazied by ideologues on the other side--and that drove them mad.

"Oooh!" Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) screamed when asked about the compromise. "Oooh!" she cried again, as if witnessing a ghastly accident scene.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) reported a crime by the Republicans. "A minority within the Congress of the United States has held up the president," he told reporters.

"You have this small element," added Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), "which is basically willing to hold Congress and the nation hostage." Cummings read a complaint he received from a constituent calling the deal "a total capitulation."

Democratic leaders made no attempt to calm their pitchfork-wielding backbenchers, such as Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who described the deal on TV as a" Satan sandwich."

"It probably is--with some Satan fries on the side," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told ABC News.

That left nobody to counter the likes of Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), who called the deal "bizarre" and said it would lead to old folks in his state losing medical care. "It’s all about cutting, cutting, cutting!" he shouted at reporters.

Mocking left-wing members of Congress is a staple of Milbank's columns; one of the few pieces about the People's Budget of the Progressive Caucus was Milbank's red-baiting mockery of their press conference. Perhaps that's the choice in the corporate media: Ignore progressives--or laugh at them.

Amid tough competition from his corporate media colleagues, Meet the Press host David Gregory has stood out as a journalist who has consistently misinformed the public about the impact of Social Security and other entitlement programs on the deficit. To find out how he's been wrong and to tell him to correct his errors, see FAIR latest Action Alert.

Please use the comments thread of this blog post to leave copies of your messages, or to discuss the alert.

There's been plenty written about how reporters skew reality by treating "both sides" as equally intransigent or inflexible when it comes to the budget deficit battle.

Another example, from the L.A. Times today (8/2/11):

For Republicans, it was preventing any tax increase to upper-income families.

For Democrats, it was ensuring no cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and a handful of other programs that aid the elderly and the poor.

And for Obama, it was getting a deal that would end the threat of an economy-shaking default until after the 2012 presidential election.

None of the key players was willing to go all out to actually solve the nation's long-term financial problems. As a result, the deal doesn't.

The implication of course, is that opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare is in some way comparable to opposing any tax increases anywhere under any circumstances. This glosses over the fact that the Bush tax cuts played a large role in creating the current deficit problem. And it evades the fact that it is certainly possible to fix the budget problem without cutting Social Security and Medicare. It is much more difficult to imagine how to do the same without raising revenues.

But the real lesson we must be taught over and over again is that both sides are to blame for not fixing the nation's problems.

Or consider this exchange from the July 31 NBC Nightly News:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Andrea, you've seen them come and seen them go. This has hardly been a profile in courage. Have you ever seen anything like this?

ANDREA MITCHELL: I actually never have. We've had crises before, political crises. We've had in our lifetime 9/11, Katrina, other national emergencies, tragedies. And in one case or another, in all of those cases one branch of government at least, if one failed, the other would step in. In this case, all branches of government, our entire government seems to be dysfunctional. And it's even questioning in people's minds the checks and balances that was the genius of the framers because now it's stalemate, it's gridlock.

It's hard to know what to make of this. On one level, you sense that Beltway fixtures like Andrea Mitchell have so much invested in the status quo that they cannot fathom how or why the system cannot produce even the appearance of 'bipartisan compromise' they find so important to a functioning democracy. That's the crisis.

More concretely, one has to wonder what she thinks should have been done differently by one of the branches of government. The White House backed a "compromise" that gave Republicans much of what they wanted. They balked and demanded more--which they got. If she means that the Republicans were unusually resistant to compromise, she should just say that--and not blame it on "checks and balances."

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday (8/1/11) by Elizabeth Jensen about plans to ship PBS programming across the pond. It's a hard concept to get your head around, especially if you're under the impression that Britain's public broadcasting system is superior to our own.

That might not be the strangest part, though:

W. David Lyons, chairman and chief executive of the Orca Exploration Group, which operates a Tanzanian natural gas field, is backing the PBS UK project financially. PBS described him as "a Canadian-born entrepreneur and venture philanthropist" who "grew up on PBS programming and is interested in bringing such content to the U.K."

There's something perfect about this. PBS--long criticized for being  too cozy with giant energy industry sponsors--is trying to get into Britain with the backing of an energy company CEO. British viewers might not understand that the word "Public" in the name is intended to be ironic.

Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton weighed in yesterday (7/31/11) on the criticisms of right-wing Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. She was among a handful of media personalities who declared the Norway terror attacks to be the work of Muslim jihadists. As she put it (7/22/11): "In all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra.... As the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of Al-Qaeda allies still operating."

This would seem to be an easy call for an ombud--news outlets should try to shy away from baseless, bigoted speculation. But that's not Pexton's point; right from the start, he expressed sympathy with Rubin:

When I received my Post e-mail alert about the bombing in Norway, my first thought was that it was Al-Qaeda.

Pexton wonders why he got so much mail about Rubin, attributing that fact to "her style, her faith, how the liberal and conservative blogospheres work on the news cycle, and, finally, a certain American insensitivity toward mass casualties in other lands."

Well, maybe. Or perhaps some people are bothered by outlets that publish vicious, baseless  innuendo.

In discussing why Rubin didn't modify her post after the news that the suspect Anders Breivik was not a Muslim terrorist at all, Pexton explains:

Rubin has a good defense. She is Jewish. She generally observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday; she doesn't blog, doesn't tweet, doesn't respond to reader e-mails.

OK. But then it's hard to fathom what she wrote when she did check in-- one of the only criticisms Pexton seems to think is legitimate:

When she went online at 8 p.m. Saturday, her mea culpa post on Norway was the first thing she posted, although its tone also hurt her, particularly this sentence, which struck many readers as borderline racist: "There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West."

Pexton goes on offers some mush about the ideological divide:

Liberals and conservatives don't talk to each other much anymore.... If your politics are liberal and you don't generally read Rubin, but you read her Norway posts, you probably would be pretty offended. But if you are a conservative, or someone who reads Rubin regularly, you'll know that this is what she does and who she is.

Is that supposed to be a defense of her writing--that she regularly publishes ill-informed speculation?  Pexton had a chat with Rubin and decided that

she is not an ogre or a racist. And she does not deserve some of the calumny she got. Some of the e-mail she received was way over the line--ugly, obscene, vile and, worst, containing threats of physical harm.

You can sense that Pexton's conclusion is drifting in that direction--the real problem is her critics. But I was surprised at how far he went:

This brings us back to the shootings in Norway, an act committed by a disturbed man who drew some of his inspiration from extremist websites. A blogosphere given to vitriol and hasty judgments ought to consider the possible consequences of its own online attacks.

Pexton's point seems to be that liberal-left critics of Rubin are like the Islamophobic blogs were cited in the manifesto Breivik wrote to explain his murderous terrorism; it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that Rubin's original post resembled Breivik's actual inspirations, not only in tone but in content.

So, according to the Post ombud, the writers who pointed out the inaccurate, bigoted punditry of someone with a perch on a major newspaper's website are like hatemongers, and may just inspire a killing spree. Wow.