George Will's January 1 column in the Washington Post was a laundry list of familiar criticisms of progressives and Democrats--they worry too much about climate change, for instance.

Another non-problem, in Will's world, is student loan debt:

Political logic suggests that this year Obama will try to rekindle the love of young voters with some forgiveness of student debts. But one-third of students do not borrow to pay college tuition. The average debt for those who do borrow to attend a four-year public institution is $22,000, and the average difference between the per-year earnings of college graduates and those with only a high school diploma is . . . $22,000.

I guess one lesson is that 2/3 of college students should either get themselves full scholarships or wealthier parents. But in the event that this isn't possible, never fear--you'll make enough money in a hurry to pay off your debt.

The more important question might be how this level of debt has changed over time. According to this item from the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog (8/15/11), "There was $550 billion in student debt outstanding in the second quarter, up 25 percent from $440 billion in the third quarter of 2008."

And as the Project on Student Debt reports, the average debt load doubled from 1996 to 2008:

On Sunday George Will wrote a strong Washington Post column about Obama, the  Libya War and the law:

In a bipartisan cascade of hypocrisies, a liberal president, with the collaborative silence of most congressional conservatives, is traducing the War Powers Resolution.

Enacted in 1973 over President Nixon's veto, the WPR may or may not be wise. It is, however, unquestionably a law, and Barack Obama certainly is violating it.

"Liberals are situational ethicists regarding presidential warmaking," Will explained, going on to suggest that George W. Bush would have been treated much differently than Obama. And Will had harsh words for John McCain:

"No president," says Sen. John McCain, "has ever recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, and neither do I. So I don’t feel bound by any deadline." Oh? No law is actually a law if presidents and senators do not "recognize" it? Now, there is an interesting alternative to judicial review, and an indicator of how executive aggrandizement and legislative dereliction of duty degrade the rule of law.

So liberals are inconsistent, and John McCain is making an absurd argument about the Act being unconstitutional.

George Will's record on the War Powers Act, though, has been all over the map (not unlike his position--or positions--on the filibuster). Here's where he seems to have started:

September 15, 1983:

President Nixon was wrong to veto the War Powers Act, which Congress passed over his veto in 1973. A veto was too good for it. He should have mailed it back to Capitol Hill unsigned, with postage due, and with a note saying that although it always is entertaining to read Congress' opinions about constitutional construction, the Constitution clearly vests in the president the power to control the armed forces.

November 11, 1984:

Repeal of the War Powers Act. It is unwieldy, unclear and clearly unconstitutional as a derogation of the responsibilities of the commander in chief vested in the presidency and exercised by most occupants of that office. No president has yet quite complied with the act. Repeal would be the straightforward approach.

During the run up to the first Gulf War (11/15/90), Will seemed to be softening a bit, but his take still seemed pretty clear:

The War Powers Act is of dubious constitutionality and cumbersome formality, and the president's war of nerves with Iraq should not be undercut by a clock controlling when Congress must ratify or reject Desert Shield.

And then something seemed to switch. Under the headline "McCain's Honest Passion," Will expressed fondness (5/9/99) for McCain's anti-War Powers position during the Yugoslavia war, where he called on Bill Clinton to embrace his executive authority and wage as wide a war as he deemed necessary--including using U.S. ground forces.  The House of Representatives, on the other hand, wasn't so supportive--some Republicans cited the War Powers Act to oppose Clinton's bombing.

McCain was, in Will's estimation, getting things right:

McCain said he found himself in the "curious" but "not unexpected" position of defending the president's constitutional authority without the president's support. Although McCain thought his resolution constitutionally redundant, he offered it "in the forlorn hope that the president would take courage from it, and find the resolve to do his duty." Said McCain, "The president does not want the power he possesses by law because the risks inherent in its exercise have paralyzed him."

A week earlier the House, with an incoherence produced by the timidity of careerists, voted against declaring war, against supporting the air war, against withdrawal of U.S. forces, against use of ground troops without congressional approval and against stopping what they will not support. Many House Republicans embraced what McCain considers the War Powers Act's unconstitutional presumptions about the limits on presidential war-making.

Will went on to argue that "many House Republicans, claiming an authority Congress neither possesses constitutionally nor cares to exercise, embraced the Act."

Like George Will said, liberals need to figure out where they stand on the War Powers Act. Otherwise they just seem wildly inconsistent.

Richard Cohen recently (FAIR Blog, 2/15/11) took to the Washington Post to argue that Teach for America is wonderful because.... Well, it just is. He predicted that the "best teacher in America" is likely to be drawn from the ranks of the program, which draws recent graduates from elite universities into the teaching profession. His only evidence of the greatness of this scheme was that the program is very competitive.

On Sunday, George Will joined Cohen in praising Teach for America--more evidence, if any was needed, that TFA enjoys a great ride in the corporate media. In Will's column, was "Teach for America: Letting the Cream Rise," he explains:

Until recently--until, among other things, TFA--it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments--family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know exactly what to do.

Will says TFA is "a template for transformation." And the cream is, obviously, rising:

TFA has become a flourishing reproach to departments and schools of education. It pours talent into the educational system--80 percent of its teachers are in traditional public schools--talent that flows around the barriers of the credentialing process. Hence TFA works against the homogenization that discourages innovation and prevents the cream from rising.

As Bob Somerby noted at the Daily Howler, Will offers no evidence to back up his argument. And even Teach for America doesn't make such claims; Somerby points out that the TFA website offers this lukewarm assessment:

TEACH FOR AMERICA: Research over time has conclusively shown that Teach For America corps members' impact on their students' achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers.

So this program takes the best and brightest, the talented cream, and turns them into...average new teachers?

Somerby adds:

Indeed, in a new C-Span tape (click here), Malcolm Gladwell asks Kopp how well TFA teachers perform. To her credit, Kopp abandons her practice of making anecdotal miracle claims and seems to suggest that TFA teachers aren’t a whole lot better than everyone else. (This happens at 0:51. Rather typically, Gladwell shows no sign of having prepared for his session with Kopp, whom he describes as one of his heroes.) By the 1:05 mark, Kopp is back to making a miracle claim about a beginning teacher in Phoenix. But again: Will doesn’t cite any research about such miracles because it doesn't exist.

Luckily for Will and Cohen, tributes to TFA don't require any evidence. Call it faith-based punditry.

Right-wing pundits have come out vociferously against the idea that they, their colleagues and the political movement they identify with have anything to answer for in the wake of the Tucson massacre.

David Brooks (New York Times, 1/11/11) asserted that "the evidence before us suggests that [shooting suspect Jared] Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it," rejecting as "vicious charges" the notion that the gunman "unleashed his rampage because he was incited by the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party, the anti-immigrant movement and Sarah Palin." George Will (Washington Post, 1/11/11) bitterly denounced the "political opportunism" of "charlatans" who subscribe to the "superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment." Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 1/12/11) insisted that "there is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head," marveling that those who suggest otherwise would make a charge "so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence."

It's comforting to think that evil-doers exist in a vacuum, and the evil that they do has no relation to anyone else.  Dismissing Loughner as a lone nut, however, is much more difficult when one considers the startling number of incidents of political violence in the last few years. From a lengthy list of violent events and reckless rhetoric compiled by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, I've excerpted the cases that involved gunfire or other overtly deadly acts; the complete timeline includes numerous other episodes in which police disrupted violent plans before they were carried out:

July 27, 2008--Jim Adkisson shoots and kills two people at a progressive church in Knoxville, Tennessee, wounding two. Adkisson calls it "a symbolic killing" because he really "wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book," but was unable to gain access to them....

April 4, 2009--Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers responding to a 911 call to his home in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna stand by what his forefathers told him to do."...

April 25, 2009--Joshua Cartwright, 28, a member of the Florida National Guard, shoots and kills two Okaloosa County sheriff's deputies attempting to arrest him on a domestic abuse charge. Cartwright is killed in an enusing gun battle with police. Cartwright's wife reports that he was "severely disturbed" that Barack Obama had been elected president. Okaloosa County Sheriff Edward Spooner states that Cartrwight was "interested in militia groups and weapons training."...

May 31, 2009--Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group. In April 1996, he had been pulled over in Topeka, Kansas, for driving with a homemade license plate.  Police found a military-style rifle, ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries in his car....

June 10, 2009--James W. von Brunn, a convicted felon and a “hardcore Neo-Nazi,” walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a “ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENT” that would “confiscate private weapons” in order to accomplish its goals....

July 13, 2009--Gilbert Ortez, Jr. kills a police deputy in Chambers County, Texas, with an assault rifle. Police were responding to reports that Ortez or his wife had fired shots at utility workers in the area. Police searching Ortez's mobile home after a 10-hour standoff find more than 100 explosive devices; Nazi drawings and extremist literature; and several additional firearms....

December 23, 2009--Warren "Gator" Taylor takes three people hostage at a federal post office in Wytheville, Virginia. He is armed with four guns, including a .40-caliber Glock pistol, despite a criminal record that includes convictions for lewd and lascivious behavior with a 13-year-old and attempted second-degree murder (Taylor shot his ex-wife three times in a parking lot in 1993). Taylor fires at least three rounds before the stand-off ends, including one at the station's fleeing postmaster. One of Taylor's hostages reports that he was angry about taxes and "the government taking over the right to bear arms."...

February 18, 2010--Joseph Stack of Austin, Texas, flies a single-engine plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing one and wounding 13. In a suicide note, Stack lays out his grievances with the federal tax agency, stating, "The law 'requires' a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that's not 'duress' than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is ... Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer."...

March 4, 2010--John Patrick Bedell, a California resident, travels to Arlington, Virginia, and opens fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon. Bedell is armed with two semiautomatic firearms and "many [ammunition] magazines." Bedell injures two officers before he is killed by return fire. Reports reveal Bedell to be a Truther who believed that the U.S. government had been taken over by a criminal organization in a 1963 coup. In an Internet posting, he writes, "This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control."...

March 23, 2010--After Mike Troxel of the Lynchburg Tea Party and Nigel Coleman of the Danville Tea Party post the home address of the brother of Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) and urge supporters to "drop by," someone deliberately cuts a propane gas line at the house. Rep. Perriello is targeted by the Tea Party activists because of his vote in favor of health care reform. Perriello's brother and his wife have four children under the age of eight....

April 7, 2010--Brody James Whitaker, 37, is apprehended and arrested on charges including two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, aggravated fleeing, and attempting to elude. The charges stem from an incident on March 25, 2010 in which police attempted to pull Whitaker over for a traffic violation on I-75 in Sumter County, Florida. Whitaker led officers on a high-speed chase, fired shots at them from a 9mm handgun and escaped capture. During his arraignment hearing, Whitaker questions the authority of the judge and states, "I am a sovereign. I am not an American citizen." ...

May 20, 2010--Jerry Kane, Jr., 45, and his son Joseph Kane, 16, fatally shoot two Arkansas police officers with AK-47 assault rifles during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40 in West Memphis. The Kanes are killed during an exchange of gunfire with police in a Walmart parking lot 90 minutes later. Jerry Kane, an Ohio resident and anti-government activist, had a long history with police and had recently spent three days in jail for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt. Kane considered himself a "sovereign citizen" and ran a business that centered on debt-avoidance scams....

July 18, 2010--California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to "start a revolution" by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams' mother says her son was angry at "Left-wing politicians" and upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items."...

July 30, 2010--Camp Hill prison guard Raymond Peake, 64, is charged with robbery and the murder of Todd Getgen. Peake allegedly shot Getgen to death at a local shooting range and stole Getgen's custom, silenced AR-15 rifle. Investigators follow Peake to a storage unit when they find three firearms: Getgen's AR-15 rifle, a scoped Remington rifle that had been reported stolen from the range in May, and a second AR-15 rifle. Thomas Tuso is also arrested and charged with conspiracy, receiving stolen property and other crimes. Peake tells police that he and Tuso had been stealing guns "for the purpose of overthrowing the federal government."...

August 17, 2010--Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, opens fire on the Department of Public Safety in McKinney, Texas, and unsuccessfully attempts to ignite gasoline and ammonium nitrate in a trailer hitched to his truck. Sharp is armed with an assault rifle, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun. He is killed after an exchange of gunfire with police arriving on the scene. Miraculously, no one else is hurt. Sharp's roommate, Eric McClellan describes him as "a great guy" and states, "We're Texans. We have a right to bear arms."...

September 1, 2010--James Jay Lee, 43, takes hostages at the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, Maryland, while armed with two starter pistols and four improvised explosive devices. After pointing a gun at one of the hostages, he is shot and killed by police. Lee, a radical environmental activist, had previously issued 11 demands through a webpage that Discovery was to meet "immediately." The demands involved the content of programming on the Discovery Channel. Lee had also declared on his MySpace page, "It's time for REVOLUTION!!!"...

October 22, 2010--Texas Department of Corrections officers searching for a missing person, Gill Clements, 69, are confronted by a neighbor while on Clements' property in Henderson County. Howard Tod Granger, 46, points an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle at one of the officers, who recalls, "He told us to get off the property or he would kill us all." Later that afternoon, officers return to Granger's home with a search warrant and an armored vehicle filled with 13 SWAT members. Granger opens fire on the vehicle, discharging at least 30 rounds before authorities shoot and kill him. Police find guns and "many rounds of ammunition" in Granger's house. They also find the body of Clements, buried in a shallow grave on Granger's property....

January 8, 2011--Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shoots U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 others at a "Congress in Your Corner" event at a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. He kills six, including federal Judge John Roll, and wounds 14, including Giffords, who is shot in the head. Loughner has an extensive history of mental illness and substance abuse, yet is able to purchase two handguns and a high-capacity ammunition magazine legally at Sportsman's Warehouse on November 30, 2010. In a YouTube video posted in December 2010, Loughner states, "You don’t have to accept the federalist laws.... Nonetheless, read the United States of America's Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws."

These individuals no doubt have a range of relationships to reality, and their ideologies may likewise vary from Tea Party orthodoxy to idiosyncratic conspiracy mania. (One person on the list appears to be a genuine ecoterrorist.) But it's hard to deny that this seems like a remarkable amount of political violence in a little more than two-and-a-half years. (This impression is bolstered statistically by reports that the Secret Service has had to deal with a 400 percent increase in threats against the president, that U.S. Marshals are facing double the number of threats against judges and prosecutors, and that Capitol Police found that threats against congressmembers tripled in the first quarter of 2010.)

Even more strikingly, this violence corresponds to a period that has seen a major change in the boundaries of political rhetoric from both pundits and politicians. A major media figures like Glenn Beck (Fox News, 2/20/09) can now fantasize about "citizen militias in the South and West taking up arms against the U.S. government"--and he could declare that government officials bent on forcibly vaccinating his children are going to "meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson." People with regular slots on major networks didn't use to talk this way. Nor did major-party Senate candidates declare that "people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies." (See the Coalition's complete list for many other examples of media and political figures evoking violence in explicit, non-metaphorical statements.)

People who insist that the Tucson massacre has nothing to do with any of this are engaged in a desperate and dangerous denial.

In his Washington Post column yesterday (10/10/10), George Will offered the kind of analysis one has come to expect from George Will:

Today, Barack Obama, a chronic campaigner, is out and about trying to arouse the masses against the inequity of not raising taxes on "the rich." He opposes extending the Bush tax rates--they are due to expire December 31, when a higher rate is restored--for "millionaires and billionaires."

And for quarter-millionaires. Expiration would mean an increase for households with incomes of at least $250,000. Obama's $750,000 fudge sweeps many people into the plutocracy. In Obama's Chicago, a high school principal can earn $148,000. A police officer with 25 years on the force can earn $114,000--not counting overtime. If the principal and the officer are married, supposedly they are rich.

It's too bad the Post feels the need to print this kind of drivel.  A few weeks ago (8/12/10), the paper published a helpful table that explains, using data from the Joint Committee on Taxation, how the competing Democratic and Republican tax plans would impact different income groups.

For families making between $200-500K, the Democrats are looking to preserve an annual tax cut of $6,743 (compared to pre-Bush tax cut rates).  The Republicans are looking to save the same taxpayer $7,152.  So the difference for this category--which includes Will's principal-and-police officer married couple--amounts to about $400 a year. And Will's couple would presumably pay less than that, since their total income just barely crosses the $250,000 mark.

In the same Post graphic, you can see that actual millionaires are the ones that would get significantly different treatment under the competing tax plans. Under the Democrats' plan, those with incomes of $1 million and above would still see their taxes more than $6,000 lower when compared to pre-Bush tax rates--but they would not be allowed to extend, as the Republicans' tax plan does, the full $100,000 tax break that Bush gave them.

So  when Obama talks about a tax increase on "millionaires and billionaires," that's because that's what it would actually be. Will might say he's fighting for the Chicago beat cop, but what allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the wealthy would really mean is a hefty tax hike for George Will. "Save the tax cuts for people like me," though, would probably be a less compelling argument for the average newspaper reader.

There's a push for the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act before Congress adjourns for the season, which has sparked some pushback from right-wingers given prominent platforms in the corporate media. The Act, which already passed the House, would help enforce and close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963; under the law, women would actually be able to find out how much their male colleagues make without either of them facing retaliation. A September 22 New York Times op-ed by Christina Hoff Sommers of AEI and an October 4 George Will Newsweek column both attack it as unnecessary--in Will's words, "It is ludicrous to argue that women should be regarded as victims in patriarchal, phallocentric America and must be wards of government."

Sommers says the law "overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women," while Will--relying heavily on Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the conservative Hudson Institute--argues that "pay disparities largely reflect women's choices." As an example, Will says women hold so few science and technology jobs and faculty position because they just don't want those jobs--after all, hardly any women who go to all-women's colleges, where they're surely not discriminated against, study those things. At Bryn Mawr, for instance, only 4 percent major in chemistry and 2 percent in computer science. (Will also makes liberal use of irrelevant factoids, such as the fact that women live longer than men, now receive more doctoral degrees than men and may soon be a majority of the workforce.)

Heather Boushey has a good take-down of Sommers' op-ed on Slate--most of which applies to the Will column as well--in which she makes clear that "Sommers is the one overlooking mountains of research that demonstrate just the opposite." Both Sommers and Will compare groups of women who are better educated to groups of men who are less educated to "prove" that women sometimes even earn more than men. In an earlier critique, Boushey explained that

there are two ways to look at the gender pay gap. The first way is to ask whether equally skilled men and women in comparable jobs are paid the same. That's the way to gauge workplace fairness. Do women with similar credentials in similar jobs earn as much as the men they work with? It's in this context that the answer remains no.

Ten years out of college, women who went to the same kind of college, got the same kinds of grades, held the same kinds of jobs and made the same choices about marriage and number of kids as their male peers earn 12 percent less than those men. Boushey also cites a Cornell study that 40 percent of the total gender pay gap couldn't be explained by women's choices, the only culprit Sommers or Will blame.

As for Will's claim about the sciences, Bryn Mawr chemistry professor Michelle Francl points out in the comments section that nationally less than 1 percent of all students major in the physical sciences, and only 0.66 percent of women study chemistry--so Bryn Mawr''s 4 percent is actually astonishingly high: "I can do the math (and enjoy it, too)--women at Bryn Mawr are six times as likely to major in chem than in the population as a whole. Still think there's not a difference?"

George Will, defending Arizona's draconian new immigration law, concludes his column (Washington Post, 4/28/10) with this today:

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

There are 47 million Latinos in the United States.  Will's assumption that the only ones known to the readers he's addressing are likely to be waiting tables or mowing lawns is quite bizarre--and a testament to how homogeneous his world must be.

Equally strange is the contrast he draws between the "fine" individuals his readers know and the presumably more sinister types found in Arizona backyards.  Arizona is not the only state with many Latino residents, nor with numerous unauthorized immigrants. At the beginning of his column, Will mocks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco, but California has more undocumented workers per capita and eight times as many in total; shouldn't he stop judging her disdainfully from a distance?

In his Washington Post column today (2/25/10), George Will writes in defense of the filibuster, arguing that Democrats' talk of using budget reconciliation rules to pass a healthcare bill demonstrates their contempt for the Constitution.

He has been perfectly consistent on the question of minority rule--it depends on who the minority is. Back when Republicans filibustered a Clinton economic stimulus bill in 1993, he cheered them on in a column headlined "The Framers' Intent" (Washington Post, 4/25/93). Will defended "the right of a minority to use extended debate to obstruct Senate action" and praised "the generation that wrote and ratified the Constitution" for properly establishing "the Senate's permissive tradition regarding extended debates."

When the Democratic minority attempted to block a Bush judicial nominee, he was suddenly, without explanation, against the principle that the minority party should have such powers--in a piece headlined "Coup Against the Constitution" (Washington Post, 2/28/03). As Steve Rendall wrote in Extra! (9-10/03):

Concerned that "41 Senate Democrats" might succeed in stopping the confirmation of Miguel Estrada, nominated by George W. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Will wrote: "If Senate rules, exploited by an anti-constitutional minority, are allowed to trump the Constitution's text and two centuries of practice, the Senate's power to consent to judicial nominations will have become a Senate right to require a supermajority vote for confirmation."

Well, today, in a column headlined "For Liberals, the Filibuster Is Now the Enemy," Will sees it differently.  Now when he thinks back on Republicans attempts to junk the filibuster to confirm Bush's judicial nominees, he recalls that that was a bad idea:

In 2005, many Republicans, frustrated by Democrats blocking confirmation votes, wanted to ban filibusters of judicial nominees. They said such filibusters unconstitutionally prevent the president from doing his constitutional duty of staffing the judiciary. But this is not just the president's duty; the Senate has the constitutional role of consenting--or not--to nominations.

So the George  Will Constitutional Theory goes something like this: Filibusters are good when Republicans do them, and bad when Democrats do them. And he has the chutzpah to mock both parties as "situational ethicists regarding filibusters."

The Washington Post had another "Topic A" feature on August 31, headlined "Is the War in Afghanistan Worth Fighting?" A crucial debate, to be sure; the Post found one person (Andrew Bacevich) to argue that it is not, which is probably a position close to the majority view of the American public. That position is "balanced" by four contributors who argue the war is worth fighting, in different ways or for different reasons. This imbalance echoes the Post's previous presentation of the Afghanistan debate, showing once again that the paper seems to believe that a public that increasingly sees the war as a lost cause needs to be talked out of that position.

It's worth noting that conservative Post columnist George Will has written today against escalating the war (9/1/09)-- under the headline "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan." While Will calls the idea of a long occupation with increased troop levels "inconceivable," it's worth noting what he's actually for:

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

More bombing, drones and cruise missiles. That's the Post's peacenik.

The school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has been the subject of serious research, with opponents and supporters of vouchers using at as a test for whether the idea works in practice. Conservatives tend to insist that it's been a success, though the studies of the program don't seem to bear that out.

Washington Post columnist George Will (4/23/09), though, sees a new Education Department study bolstering the case for vouchers, which means the White House's decision to curtail the program is a horrible blow to children in the struggling D.C. schools:

After Congress debated the program, the Education Department released--on a Friday afternoon, a news cemetery--a congressionally mandated study showing that, measured by student improvement and parental satisfaction, the District's program works. The department could not suppress the Heritage Foundation's report that 38 percent of members of Congress sent or are sending their children to private schools.

Huh. Given all the attention paid to the D.C. voucher experiment, it's striking that this apparently significant news would pass with so little comment. But if you go to the Department of Education website to find this report proving that the "District's program works," you find this summary of the research (OSP stands for Opportunity Scholarship Program):

The evaluation found that the OSP improved reading, but not math, achievement overall and for 5 of 10 subgroups of students examined. The group designated as the highest priority by Congress--students applying from "schools in need of improvement" (SINI)--did not experience achievement impacts. Students offered scholarships did not report being more satisfied or feeling safer than those who were not offered scholarships, however the OSP did have a positive impact on parent satisfaction and perceptions of school safety. This same pattern of findings holds when the analysis is conducted to determine the impact of using a scholarship rather than being offered a scholarship.

So improved reading scores, but not math, and no discernable positive impact on the students most in need.  Maybe these results, which are in keeping with previous studies of the D.C. system, didn't get much attention because they actually aren't helpful to conservatives pushing to expand school vouchers--no matter what George Will seems to think.

Is it possible for the Washington Post to be embarrassed by George Will? After a series of erroneous claims in a column about climate change, Will is at it again today (4/2/09), laughing off the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs as a poor fix for a nonexistent problem:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Sigh.

This has been explained before; Will cherry picks the hottest year among other relatively hot years as his starting point. The 11 hottest years in the past century and half have all occurred in the last 13 years--but 1998 was the hottest year so far, so there's no such thing as global warming.

What's perhaps most interesting is that the Post ran a long letter (3/21/09) from the secretary General of the World Meteorological Association, spelling this out and explaining that Will just doesn't know what he's talking about:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record -- as was done in a recent Post column ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, February 15] -- and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit.

At this point it's obvious that George Will is not going to let a bunch of scientists tell him about climate science.  The real question is why the Post continues to print this stuff-- and give him cover when critics point out his inaccuracies.

The paper, it should be noted, did run a recent op-ed from Chris Mooney debunking some of Will's climate misinformation. But Will will still have his regular platform to write whatever he wants to write about climate science--no matter how wrong he is.

"I think the best journalism in America is business journalism precisely because they deal with real metrics. You can actually--they know things."
--George Will, ABC's This Week, 3/15/09

It's possible that Will actually believes this. Read Dean Starkman's piece in Mother Jones, "How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?," for another take. Or this piece from Extra!.

Or recall that, not too long ago, Will was lecturing us on how the economy was doing just fine, in spite of the gloomy message the media was delivering:

Conservative pundit George Will (ABC's This Week, 12/4/05) blamed media coverage for the public's failure to understand that "the economy is booming," attributing this misapprehension to "Will's two laws of economic journalism," one of which mandates that "there's no such thing as good news."

For the record, this was how Will described his "two laws of economic journalism:"

First law, all news is economic news. That is, all news either is a cause or a consequence of economic developments and can be given an economic spin. Second law, all economic news is bad. All economic news is bad. Housing prices go up. Housing bubble. Housing prices come down, slump in housing. Unemployment goes up. That's bad, 'cause unemployment is bad. Unemployment comes down, the labor market is overheating and inflation is coming back. There's no such thing as good news.

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for "standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is"--and then spreads some of the blame around:

Meanwhile, one of the Post's main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false-equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will's sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore's sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in the New York Times. Hm.

See Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff.

After eight years of George W. Bush's rule, popular disapproval of policies that had come to be regarded as grave mistakes--from the invasion of Iraq to the response to the economic crisis--drove the Republicans from power.

Unfortunately, the media system has no such built-in check on powerful pundits, as the unchallenged reign of another George W. with a long record of mistakes can attest.

The ongoing controversy over a recent error-plagued climate change column penned by George Will--a Washington Post syndicated columnist whose record of error spans decades--offers a good case study in the impunity of the punditocracy.

As bloggers, media activists and environmentalists were quick to point out, Will made three significant errors in his climate change column, which was published in the Post (2/15/09) and scores of daily newspapers nationwide last week. First, he misrepresented scientific research from the 1970s, claiming that global cooling was then the prevailing concern. Second, he claimed the University of Illinois had found global sea ice was increasing, when in fact the school's researchers found the opposite. Finally, he claimed that U.N. climate researchers have found "no recorded global warming for more than a decade."

In the wake of widespread refutations on blogs, and action alerts by FAIR and Media Matters, the Washington Post received floods of emails complaining about the inaccuracies in Will's column, and the Post's ombud Andy Alexander soon issued a response to a blogger at Think Progress.

Claiming that Will's column had been subject to multiple fact-checks, Alexander addressed only critics' concern about Will's misrepresentation of the University of Illinois's sea ice research, defending Will by citing a University of Illinois statement that, in fact, actually refuted Will's claim.

Given that the position of ombud (a person responsible for responding to reader complaints and upholding accuracy at a media outlet) is the closest thing to a system of accountability that exists at newspapers, the Post ombud's response aptly illustrated the bankruptcy of what passes for accountability at a leading newspaper.

Unfortunately, the erroneous climate change column is not a blip on Will's record. On the issue of climate change alone, FAIR's magazine Extra! documents that Will's history of misquoting data to distort the debate goes back nearly two decades. As FAIR's senior analyst Steve Rendall recently noted on the FAIR Blog, in 1992, Will so grossly misrepresented a Gallup poll on scientists' views on climate change that Gallup took the rare step of issuing a written correction to Will's column.  A decade before that, Will made such a glaring factual error in a column published in Newsweek that the magazine took the unusual step of agreeing to publish a letter by Noam Chomsky (Will managed to block the letter's publication by throwing a temper tantrum.)

And yet this serial distorter of the facts continues to published by more newspapers than any other columnist. In addition to the Post, 367 newspapers publish his column. Why? This is a question newspaper editors should have to answer.

As blogger Jonathan Schwarz recently pointed out, the internet has profoundly changed the landscape of pundit impunity since Will's 1982 temper tantrum. The Washington Post ombud's role in protecting Will's work from the facts may be highly reminiscent of Newsweek's decision to spike Chomsky's letter. However, with the proliferation of blogs devoted to correcting the media record, and the advent of online media activism campaigns that can in a matter of hours generate thousands of reader complaints to editors, concerned members of the public have more tools than ever before to publicly debunk media errors and to push for greater accountability.

In this context, the Post ombud's inadequate response simply added fuel to the campaigns challenging the Post on Will's climate distortions. Yesterday, the presidents of leading environmental groups joined Media Matters in issuing a letter to the newspaper, and FAIR issued a new call for its supporters to contact the Post's ombud (ombudsman@washpost.com)

And given that it is not just the Post but some 368 newspapers nationwide that carry Will's column, the challenge of holding Will accountable is one in which people across the nation have to play a vital role in writing to any newspapers in their own local communities that published Will's error-plagued climate change column.

Given the abundance of online media activism resources, it is not hard to take action to push for greater accountability in one's local newspaper. (Media Matters has a useful application on its website that allows users to easily find out if George Will's column is carried in their local newspaper, and tips on writing letters to the editor can be found in FAIR's media activism kit.)

Given that the corporate media have granted Will impunity for decades now, this accountability is long overdue.

George Will's history of misquoting data to distort the climate change debate goes back nearly two decades--that we know of. As Extra! reported in 2003, in 1992 Will trashed Al Gore (Washington Post, 9/3/92) for being "cavalier with the truth" in his "wastebasket worthy" book Earth in the Balance. More from Extra!:

Will confronted Gore on the issue of global warming: "Gore knows, or should know before pontificating, that a recent Gallup Poll of scientists concerned with global climate research shows that 53 percent do not believe warming has occurred, and another 30 percent are uncertain."

It was Will, however, who should have read the poll more carefully "before pontificating." Gallup actually reported that 66 percent of the scientists said that human-induced global warming was occurring, with only 10 percent disagreeing and the rest undecided. Gallup took the unusual step of issuing a written correction to Will's column (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/27/92): "Most scientists involved in research in this area believe that human-induced global warming is occurring now." Will never noted the error in his column.

Considering Will's history of distortion on climate change and his refusal to correct his errors, it may be time to stop blaming Will, who doesn't seem able to help himself, and to put the blame on his Washington Post enablers, who have their own history of covering for Will's disinformation binges.