At his Beat the Press blog (4/23/11), Dean Baker caught this in the L.A. Times (4/23/11):

Congress is on its first recess since Republican leaders unveiled a plan to end the federal deficit by dramatically changing Medicare, cutting other government programs and reducing taxes.

As Baker points out, what the paper is referring to--the Paul Ryan budget proposal--does not "end the federal deficit." As he put it:

This is like saying they had a plan to fly to moon because they said they would build a rocket. The whole point is the specifics. How would they build a rocket? How would they raise taxes to meet their revenue targets?

But someone at the L.A. Times seems to like Paul Ryan's budget--at least judging by the unusually flattering (and misleading) descriptions of it that have appeared in the paper recently.

On April 11, the Times reported:

Ryan's 2012 budget proposed major changes to the longstanding federal programs.

For Medicare, seniors would receive a stipend to buy insurance on the private market. Analysts expect it would raise individual out-of-pocket health costs while making federal costs more stable and predictable.

Stabilizing costs--well, that's one way to put it. Making poor seniors pay much more for their healthcare in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy--that's another way.

About a week earlier (4/5/11), the L.A. Times debuted the Ryan budget this way:

The budget resolution unveiled Tuesday by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) would dramatically improve the nation's overall fiscal picture, reducing deficits projected in President Obama's budget and moving the federal government into surplus by 2040, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

As FAIR noted, one should be wary of claims about what the Congressional Budget Office is saying about the Ryan plan--Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post explained why:

The Post's Kessler, however, reports that this claim "seriously overstates the case," since the CBO analysis "reflects the scenarios that Ryan has concocted. There are, for instance, no real revenue estimates, just an assumption that federal revenues will remain at about 19 percent of GDP." The spending cuts imagined by Ryan are equally implausible--a "bare-bones government...not experienced since before the Great Depression."

Media blogger Eli Stephens (left i on the news, 7/2/09) has posted on a Washington Post lede claiming that "Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran." Stephens explains how, as "one of the major pieces of 'evidence' used to justify the invasion of Iraq at the time," this "repetition now, from the mouth of Saddam Hussein no less, would be an important post-facto justification for the invasion." There's just one problem:

The claim itself was bullshit at the time. The truth, as I wrote at the time, was that while Gen. Colin Powell was at the U.N. lying through his teeth (or spouting lies put in his mouth by others, if you prefer to be generous to Powell) about the "evidence" the U.S. had, Iraqi Gen. Amer Al-Saadi (still imprisoned, as far as we know) was saying clearly and quite publicly that Iraq had no WMD whatsoever. That's one funny way to "allow the world to believe that you have WMD."

And, guess what? No such statement from Saddam Hussein appears in the interviews, which are all online at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The interviews aren't even transcripts, they are all simply summaries of the conversations made by an FBI agent, with only a tiny amount of direct quotations embedded within them. But even in those summaries, no such claim appears.

Having "twice" read "every word of the five 'casual conversations'" the Post says Hussein's comments are drawn from, Stephens is compelled to "repeat--no such claim by Saddam Hussein appears (nor does it appear in the summary of the documents prepared by the NSA)--that is entirely a fiction created by the Post." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Saddam's 'Secret': Hussein Told CBS About WMDs--but CBS Wasn't Watching" (3–4/08) by Seth Ackerman.