Politics

In other words, a little from column A and a little from column B. By stubbornly resisting the possibility that one faction's prescription (even a liberal Democratic or a Tea Party Republican one) can sometimes be correct to the exclusion of all other options, formula replaces reporting.

Get ready for spending cuts beyond the debt ceiling agreement. That deal only calls for spending caps, not spending floors. The regular appropriations process must be completed by Oct. 1, or else government operations shut down. The GOP will insist that those bills impose additional cuts. Any Democratic assertion of resistance will have no credibility in face of documented pattern of surrender. Oops. Turns out that costs and benefits of giving in to debt-ceiling hostage-taking were hopelessly miscalculated.

Oregon legislator: “We get these benchmarks, great, but it’s not doing enough to inform our policy choices.” Can "benchmarks" and "indicators" be implemented in a way to have a real impact? A key question: do indicator systems work by attempting to “insulate” them from politics, or by attempting to have them do battle in the political arena?

Can "benchmarks" and "indicators" be implemented in a way to have a real impact on public policy?

Governor Andrew Cuomo — who just played a historic role in securing marriage rights for gay and lesbian New Yorkers — is already being referred to as a presidential candidate for 2016, and is being touted as an "aggressive pragmatist" or "dynamic centrist." Why won’t the press pin him down on what specific outcome he sought in the battle pitting the need of millions of New Yorkers for affordable and secure housing against the desire of landlords and free market ideologues to continue to dismantle the rent regulation system?

Cuomo left the trigger points at which apartments are deregulated worse for tenants than they were 14 years ago, when then-Governor George Pataki first orchestrated legislative changes designed to destroy rent regulation.

A majority of Senators supports a bill to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies and opposes a bill that would expand the areas open to oil and gas exploration. Is the presence or absence of majority support really irrelevant to the reporting of the stories? A continuation of our ongoing feature on limitations of the paper's reporting (the feature also includes examples of reporter opinions and assumptions getting tucked in to national political stories as though they were facts).

Even as reporter opinions and assumptions get neatly tucked in to national political stories as though they were facts, those stories are still being billed as hard news. For those not gripped by centrism-mania, it is clear how powerfully those reportorial assumptions warp and limit coverage. This edition presents the first entries in what, sadly, promises to be a continuing feature.