Michael Massing has an excellent, long article in The New York Review of Books about the state of the news media, in which he heaps a lot of praise on Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall in particular: This image of the Internet as parasite has some foundation. Without the vital news-gathering performed by established institutions, many Web sites would sputter and die. In their sweep and scorn, however, such statements seem as outdated as they are defensive.

Lee Atwater on the crushing weight of political correctness and how it put a crimp in Republican Party messaging efforts: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.