New York Times

NBC journalist Chuck Todd reportedly asked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney whether he’d release his tax returns this election cycle. “I never say never,” Romney responded, according to the New York Times. “I don't intend to do so.”

The New York Times asked Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to write a piece for its op-ed page. Ron Dermer, an adviser to Netanyahu, "respectfully decline[d]." Here's Dermer's full letter to the Times editor who reached out: 

Thankfully, most Americans were probably too busy with the holiday to read the preposterous editorial yesterday in the New York Times. The Grey Lady examined the Solyndra scandal and concluded Republicans are really off base for having the temerity to complain about throwing taxpayer dollars down a rathole in the name of enriching big Democratic donors:

Have you heard about this? Obama's on Leno tonight.

Elizabeth Warren says she's the intellectual leader of Occupy Wall Street.

Behold her intellectual progeny.

Yesterday’s New York Times published an A-section article actually highlighting that, about 50 years before Rick Perry’s birth, his alma mater, Texas A&M, had Klansmen on campus: “In 1968, Mr. Perry left home for Texas A&M, a deeply conservative university whose yearbooks early in the century included Ku Klux Klan-robed students.”

Ace of Spades: "Bill Keller Of The NY Times Wants His Readers To Know Most Of The GOP Candidates Are Crazy Religious Nuts"

Dave Weigel: "Why Tea Party candidates won't win any elections next year: because mainstream Republicans now spout the same ideas."

First Read: "Primary calendar chaos?"

Apparently, there was a kerfuffle earlier today because Rick Perry said the following: "If this guy [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke] prints more money between now and the election ... I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we -- we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous -- or treasonous in my opinion.”

While the New York Times can barely conceal its glee at the phone-hacking scandal embroiling the rival Murdoch empire, The Scrapbook confesses to a certain schadenfreude of its own at the Gray Lady’s latest embarrassment. The Times’s slanted coverage of the natural gas industry continues to generate radioactive fallout.

With the debt ceiling thing done, the scribes are now straining for the illuminating metaphor and “terrorism,” it seems, is the preferred choice. One New York Times columnist writes that “the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people,” and you had to wonder if he would have accused even Osama bin Laden of that. Another Times columnist describes the Tea Party as “the Hezbollah faction” of the Republican Party. Maureen Dowd, the Times’s diva columnist went with a different, idiosyncratic metaphor. The whole thing, she writes, was like a horror movie, a “gory, Gothic melodrama on the Potomac … without the catharsis.”

Looking at Washington these days, one suspects that this is the way things will be for a long time to come. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day (and all that), the massive tangle of dependencies, entitlements, political payoffs, and perpetual pork barrel schemes that is our national government cannot be either taken down or rebuilt along rational lines – if, indeed, it is possible at all – in much less than the 50 years it took to create it.

By now just about everyone has jumped on board the natural gas bandwagon (see “The Gas Revolution,” April 18, 2011). Its newfound abundance inside the four corners of the United States is proving to be a disruptive factor in the nation’s energy mix. Cheap natural gas adds to the pressure on coal-fired electricity, but also makes wind and solar power much less feasible, even with massive subsidies.

"Pair of votes shows House divided on Libya"

But the White House says we're not engaged in "hostilities"! "Exclusive: Top U.S. admiral admits we are trying to kill Qaddafi"

"Romney Goes Classic"