Wall Street Journal

It's inevitable: Whenever a president runs into trouble, the Washington establishment counsels him to hire one of their own. In 2005, as the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, the Fitzgerald probe, and a worsening situation in Iraq harmed the Bush presidency, Republican fixers David Gergen and Ken Duberstein urged the president to fire Karl Rove, apologize for his mistakes, and move toward the Democrats.

A few months ago the Wall Street Journal ran a splendid essay by Allen Barra that could only be described as therapeutic. Entitled “What ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Isn’t,” it was a calm, clear-headed, even humorous, evisceration of a novel that seems to be universally admired, required reading in every classroom--and a sickening repository of every enlightened cliché about American life, with particular emphasis on the segregated South.

Travel writing can be tough, despite what you might think. You're jotting down notes about the beautiful sunset, rather than just watching it. Coming up with the right words is a constant struggle. And still I wonder with great envy how Toni Bentley, a ballerina and author, landed the plum assignment of reviewing the Royal Mansour hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, for the Wall Street Journal, which, according to her description, sounds like the most opulent and extravagant hotel in the world.

As the Legal Times's Tony Mauro reports today, both the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Judicial Crisis Network are asking whether Elena Kagan would, if appointed the Supreme Court, be required to recuse herself from cases involving the Obamacare litigation.

My eyebrow rose last week when I read that GM CEO Ed Whitacre's Wall Street Journal op-ed was titled "The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full." This isn't true--GM may have paid off loans from the federal government, but the Treasury is still GM's majority shareholder, at a cost of about $50 billion. That money won't be recouped (at a probable loss) until GM goes public. Wall Street Journal headline writers: The GM bailout is not paid back!

The Democrats' race to pass health care reform is getting exhausting. It's not only the constant rush of developments to the story. The poor undecided congressmen are also tuckered out:

Rep. Jason Altmire has met with President Obama twice this month and received a phone call from Air Force One. Two planes circled his western Pennsylvania district, trailing banners urging him to vote against the health-care bill. And conservative "tea party" activists confronted him at his office, trying to force him to answer: "Are you for or against the bill?"

The pressure has been extreme over the past two weeks on Altmire and the few dozen House Democrats who say they still have not decidedhow they will vote on ambitious legislation designed to remake the nation's health-care system.

Says Bart Stupak: “All the phones are unplugged at our house — tired of the obscene calls and threats. [My wife] won’t watch TV,” Stupak said during an hourlong interview with The Hill in his Rayburn office. “People saying they’re going to spit on you and all this. That’s just not fun.”

From the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll:

The survey found that opinions have solidified around the health-care legislation, with 48% calling it a "bad idea" and 36% viewing it as a "good idea" when presented with a choice between those two. That gap is consistent with surveys dating to the fall.

Forty-eight percent is actually an all-time high:

There's a new crowd-sourced site dedicated to keeping track of all of Google's privacy, anti-trust, bias concerns--it's called Google Monitor.