Morning Roundup

The most interesting thing on the web these days is this: John Solomon of the AP has been writing a series of articles about Harry Reid---Democratic Congressional Leader!---accepting boxing tickets from the Nevada Boxing Commission, which was trying to sway his vote on boxing regulations. Quelle scandale! Well, it would be a scandal, except that, a. the tickets were legal for him to accept, and b. he voted against the Commission right afterward. So between its legality and its ineffectiveness, I'm not sure you can call it a "bribe." An "unwise long-shot cheap campaign contribution," maybe, but not a bribe.

But John Solomon, desperate perhaps to be able to nail some Democrat higher up than Jefferson in a scandal so the whole media world can finally call this crap "bipartisan," has routinely and deliberately misrepresented the situation to make the story sound more salacious than it is. And CNN and MSNBC have followed the AP's lead in covering the story: lots of innuendo, no actual accuracy. It's maddening. Fortunately, Talking Points Memo has been doing protective police work---and the AP actually felt the need to respond---and the details of the story are here.

And speaking of scandal, a reporter went back over the blogs to see who predicted what about the Bush presidency, and Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum nailed it. He said, "In a word: scandal." Back when everyone else was saying, "Bush may be in over his head, but he's got good people and he has noble intentions," Drum looked at his tendencies in Texas---most especially his tendency to ignore inconvenient rules and his obsessive need for secrecy---and predicted the scenario we're seeing unfold now. The link is here.