God bless the New York Times Editorial Board and their new $50 Firewall of Sanity. The new paid service called Times Select keeps compulsive readers like me from accidentally reading Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and other nonsense routinely featured in the Paper of Record. Whenever I read the RSS headers from the locked-out articles from these "stars" of punditry, it gladdens my heart to know that the Times has found it necessary to give us a $50 excuse not to pay attention to them.

Today's Dowd column provides an excellent example of this dynamic. Her column, titled "Woman of Mass Destruction", gets this one-line summary:

Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, Judy Miller was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers.

Excuse me, but Maureen Dowd wrote this about Judy Miller? With Dowd's deliberate and chronic quote-mangling and irrelevancies, it hardly stretches the imagination that a reader could easily substitute Dowd for Miller in that sentence -- and probably improve its accuracy. Ditto for Krugman, whose editors had to go public with his outright lies in order to get a half-assed retraction.

Times Select. It's there for your protection.

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» "Firewall of Sanity" from what if?
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