The fact is, and as immodest as it may seem to say, independents were repeatedly ahead of the curve on covering the mortgage and real estate bubble and in connecting the dots between vital elements of the bigger story—especially the links between predatory and lending and the metastasizing mortgage-backed securities market.

In 2002, the Nation warned that the mortgage-backed securities market’s bottomless appetite for subprime mortgages was financing an epidemic of destructive lending. In 2003, Southern Exposure exhaustively documented Citigroup’s move into the mass production of high-interest loans designed to drain borrowers' meager wealth. In 2005, Mother Jones assigned me to find out why the streets of Cleveland were lined with vacant houses. A reasonable question, and I found the answers on the Wall Street credit securities market. Indeed, all through this period, alt-weeklies told tales found in living rooms and legal services offices of homeowners who had believed a mortgage broker’s misleading sales pitch and wound up facing foreclosure.

Examining "the fact" that "independent journalists exposed the dimensions of the problem with a depth and timeliness that mainstream news organizations simply and regrettably did not match," Katz thinks "it's not about being better journalists; it is about being tuned to a different audience and set of interests." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11–12/08) by Veronica Cassidy.

But as Lou has proved again and again, he can't help but resist. On radio the very next day, he slammed Obama for compiling "an enemies' list" (not true), and harrumphed mightily: "I'm moving from being an independent, sir, to being absolutely opposed to your, any policy you could conceive of!" As if he hadn't moved into outright opposition long ago.

So, as soon as Lou had completed all that extra homework--writing 100 times on the blackboard, "I will push opinion aside. I will push opinion aside"--he finally gets to bust out and mix it up with his guests. Only then do the familiar snide comments, appalled facial expressions, and twisted facts spill into a headlong attack on each and every aspect of Obama's healthcare plan--even the aspects resembling those he had just more or less commended in Europe.

That is, Dobbs can read all sorts of fair and balanced words from a script, but he is willfully deaf to their meaning.

"Anything that doesn't fit his worldview," Savan says, "he doesn't hear, it doesn't compute, and he goes blank."

After all, President Clinton and President Obama turned out all right. Most children of divorce do. There are plenty of countries where divorce and unmarried parenthood are common, but children do fine--Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands. Some of the measured bad effects on kids are more about the way we divorce than the divorce itself--unstable living arrangements, disappearance of the father into a new family, moves and changes of school, new parental partners who don't stick around, loss of income, less attention from a mother who is now working all the time. It may be ideal for kids to grow up in a loving, sane, happy, stable, two-parent home, but that is not the alternative for couples contemplating divorce, still less for most never-married single mothers....

If the concern is really with children, especially poor children, we could improve their lives tremendously by concentrating on the things we actually can achieve. Healthcare. Excellent schools with music and drama and art and gym and after-school programs. Neighborhoods safe enough for kids to play outdoors and air clean enough so they don't get asthma. Libraries. Summer camp. Counseling for kids in trouble--and their parents. Economic support for families, married or not. Housing for all. Free college. A public works job for anyone who wants one. All those necessities that, in America, are seen as the responsibility of individual families.

On such subjects, Pollitt has "noticed that conservatives express concern for low-income and especially black people--'the underclass'--only when they want to attack liberals." She writes that this actually is "a specialty of Flanagan's--the only time she writes about cleaning women is when she is blaming feminists for paying them too little."

Listen to the new edition of the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Katha Pollitt on Caitlin Flanagan in Time" (7/17/09).

CNN featured William Schneider, Sanjay Gupta and Bill Press. On Fox, Bill O'Reilly defended his use of "baby killer" and "death mill" to describe Dr. Tiller and his clinic. On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann--who the last time I checked in spent a whole segment making fun of Miss Anti-Gay Marriage California's breast implants with waspish misogynist Michael Musto--had only men: Slate's Will Saletan, who thinks we can "end" abortion by stigmatizing women with unwanted pregnancies, because right now everyone is just too kind....

In the more than three decades since Roe v. Wade, "the fetus" gradually became the star of the abortion drama, and the voices of women who had abortions, aka "the woman," leached out of the public discussion. How many embryos can dance on the head of a pin--now that's interesting! Off-the-cuff judgments about how late is too late and what kinds of health problems count as serious--everyone's a doctor!

Noticing that "the murder of Dr. Tiller has gotten more women telling their stories," Pollitt calls that "a crucial, good thing"--but "not so that panels of pundits can approve or disapprove but so that society can hear, firsthand, what girls and women go through." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Fred Clarkson on Tiller Murder" (6/5/09).