Who's on first?

I know everyone in the known media on seven continents (and possibly on Moonbase Gingrich as well, for all I know) has pointed out the musical-chairs game of Who's the GOP Frontrunner This Week, but a picture is still worth a (few hundred) thousand words:

liberalcurmudgeon.com

Actually, "Don't Know" also had a commanding lead for a while.

The '60s made us do it

Paul Krugman's column today—noting that Charles Murray's new much ballyhooed book on the social divide is merely the latest example of a venerable conservative tactic to attribute all problems in American society to vague, unspecified things that Liberals Did in the Sixties—reminds me of my favorite anecdote from my days at the late and not-too-lamented weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report.

U.S. News, the root of all evil

Back in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings report.

Like all cash cows, however, the college guide was a sacred cow, so I just shut up about its obvious statistical absurdities and inherent mendacity. As a lesson in the evils of our times, it is perhaps inevitable that the college guide is now the only thing left of U.S. News.

A story in today's New York Times reports that Claremont McKenna college has now been caught red handed submitting phony data to the college guide to boost its rankings.

But the real scandal, as usual, is not the occasional flagrant instance of outright dishonesty but the routine corruption that is shot through the whole thing.