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Howard Kurtz had a bad day yesterday. He wrote this whole column calling out Jason Collins, the NBA player who this week came out as gay, breaking a major American sports barrier and quickly becoming a widely celebrated and admired figure, for not telling readers of his Sports Illustrated piece that he once had a (female) fiancée. Except, one little problem with the entire concept of the piece: Collins explicitly wrote that he'd once been engaged in his Sports Illustrated piece. It took a few minutes for the Internet to point out this titanic error. Then, the the column was altered, without a correction, to say that Collins "downplayed one detail" instead of "left one little part out." Finally, a proper correction was appended.

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Like Politico's Glenn Thrush, who was mad that the press conference was announced only 90 minutes before it happened. Thrush said the whole game is rigged.

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Then he got in a funny argument with Dan Pfeiffer.

So the president, in his first term, did fewer press conferences than Bush did in his first term, and Bush was famous for not doing press conferences so that he didn't have to explain or defend himself. Obama, though, is capable of defending himself without a script, even if he frequently falls back on increasingly grating clichés. He simply skips them because they really are a waste of everyone's time.

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The New York Times charitably says that "Friday’s speech was not the first time Mr. Cruz may have acted counter to some of the Senate’s norms," before bringing up Cruz's decidedly McCarthyite take on Chuck Hagel.

Cruz is at the FreedomWorks Texas Summit, and the news here is that he calls most of his colleagues "squishes" and gives a (quite self-aggrandizing) account of off-the-record Senate Republican caucus luncheons, which apparently involved a lot of people yelling at Cruz and Rand Paul and the other guy who also promised to filibuster the entire gun deal from start to finish. In this version of events, the three filibustering amigos were responsible for the failure of the entire proposal. As Dave Weigel points out, that's not really how it happened. The bill failed -- and was probably doomed to begin with -- because a lot more than three senators opposed it, and the Cruz/Paul filibuster threat was worse politics for the party than allowing debate to proceed and then watching red-state Democrats cave. Which is what actually happened.

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Simpson and Bowles have been speaking to the people, and the people agree with them!

No matter our audience, those we spoke with shared two things: a thirst for the truth about what it will take to right our fiscal ship and a willingness to be part of the solution so long as everyone is in it together.

Basically these two are nostalgic for December when it seemed like a "grand bargain" might actually happen:

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After presidents are done being presidents, they get to build big museums about themselves, because a tradition that originally involved simply making the documents and papers and records of a president available to researchers and the public obviously became this giant, expensive, pseudo-regal tribute thing, because this is America and we're really weird about presidents.

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This is at this point pretty thin. "Talks" doesn't mean much. Gingrich and Cutter might be part of a whole bench of hosts. But it does suggest that CNN is going about a "Crossfire" launch in just about the worst way possible. Those hoping for a smarter version of the old show will definitely be disappointed.

Stephanie Cutter has spent her entire career as a campaign flack. Her job has been, for years, to spin reporters. (This job leads to becoming a political news media professional strangely often.) Regardless of her intelligence and her ability to speak extemporaneously on camera, she has never demonstrated an ability to be an interesting, independent thinker, and it is fair to predict that as a TV pundit she'd be representing "The Democratic Party" and not "liberalism."

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I am guessing that over the next few days a lot of Americans are going to hear about these delays, or be personally inconvenienced by them, and think to themselves, wait, the sequester thing is still happening? Well, yes, it is, because so far it hasn't been that bad, for certain Americans. Other Americans, though, have been aware of the cuts since they went into effect.

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Murdoch defended his paper on Twitter, because it is 2013 and stuff is weird:

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Hm. Here's how Col Allan defended his story to Salon: "The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men ..." So "distributed by the FBI" might be technically accurate (not that we have any way of knowing) but it is not a great defense. The photos were not distributed to the press or to the public, as the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers would be the same day that Post cover ran. The photo was never intended to be put on the front of a newspaper with copy asserting that the people pictured were responsible. There's also no way to "withdraw" a physical newspaper printed and distributed all over New York City. I saw copies of the paper at bodegas in Brooklyn well into the evening.

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Yesterday, a Reddit user posted a new, startlingly clear image of the aftermath of the explosion, that shows, on the far left, what looks very much like one of the FBI's suspects fleeing the scene. After Philip Bump, an Atlantic Wire writer and Photoshop expert, explained why he believed the image was genuine the New York Times confirmed the photo's authenticity.

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Those Democrats were Heidi Heitkamp (N.D. -- a state that should not be a separate state from South Dakota), Max Baucus (Mont.), Mark Begich (big icy pool of oil by Canada) and Mark Pryor (Ark.). Baucus, Begich and Pryor are up for reelectiion next year. Heitkamp's excuse is that the entire population of her state is old white gun nuts. Liberals may call for those senators to be punished. Democrats will respond, correctly, that if those senators lose primaries to more liberal candidates, Republicans will win those seats.  The correct response, as always, is to eliminate the U.S. Senate.

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But! Whoops, turns out they were wrong, about that one central fact that has been repeated as the gospel truth by purveyors of Tough Talk on debt the world over for the last three years. They screwed up their spreadsheet. Turns out average GDP growth in countries with debt-GDP ratios 90 percent and higher is positive, not negative.

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That horrible situation, though, led to a great deal of examples of how Boston, and much of the U.S., is a pretty damn nice place full of impressive and great people. There was amazing journalism from Boston journalists, and a heroic response from Boston first responders, paramedics, doctors and surgeons. Boston blood banks filled up immediately and the Red Cross and Google both helped people find their loved ones. The Internet and the press even acquitted themselves reasonably well. It was amazing to see, within hours of the attack, eyewitness video from amateurs and professionals. The live stream of WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, was compelling, restrained and informative. Fox News' Shepard Smith was incredibly composed and also very careful not to speculate irresponsibly. The Boston Globe dropped its pay wall and put its heartbreaking and useful liveblog on the front page.

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McConnell's very good week might not end up meaning very much, though, if the United States Senate manages, somehow, to pass major legislation on gun control and immigration any time soon. Because whenever the United States Senate manages to accomplish anything, conservatives get very irate with Mitch McConnell for allowing it to happen.

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So what are you to do if, say, you spent years working as a hedge fund attorney, and all your friends and colleagues are in the finance industry, but you really, really want to get elected to something in a liberal city as a Democrat? If you're Reshma Saujani, you just pretend you never had anything to do with Wall Street and hope no one digs too deep.

Saujani is running for New York City public advocate. New York's public advocate, one of only three city-wide elected offices, is sort of like the city's "ombudsman." The advocate's job is essentially to annoy the mayor as much as possible, and then run for that office. The advocate is expected, to put it broadly, to look out for "the little guy," against the city's bureaucracy and police department and so on. The job, thus far, has always gone to liberal, populist figures; Democrats have held the post since it was created in 1994, even as the city repeatedly elected Republican mayors.

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But the point isn't really to catch the perpetrator. The point is this ridiculous splash on his campaign website, in which visitors are told that McConnell's office was "wiretapped" by "liberals" and are encouraged to respond by sending all of their contact information, along with some money, to Mitch McConnell's reelection campaign.

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Despite their quaint maintenance of a monarchy, British politics are less respectful than ours, and the prime minister is afforded much less regal deference than our president -- though by the end of her reign Thatcher was always using the royal "we" -- so the death of Thatcher has and will be debated in the United Kingdom much more critically than the death of her comrade-in-arms against the postwar liberal consensus Ronald Reagan was in the United States. The more cowardly American press, though, calls her time in office "controversial" and then moves on to the much more comfortable territory of her extraordinary ambition, forceful personality and skill with a cutting remark. (Our weird class of privileged British expat media leeches have also guided the discussion of the Iron Lady along those lines.)

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The NRCC also hired 20 writers (the GOP will save publishing!) to create conservative versions of the soul-deadening crap BuzzFeed's list-generators are forced to compile. While it may sound like the aim is to appeal to a new demo -- kids who remember the '90s and who also believe that balancing the federal budget with deep domestic spending cuts will also somehow spur economic growth -- it's actually not quite that ambitious: The point is to boost traffic to the NRCC website, and therefore to increase donations to the NRCC. It appeared to be working, too, even before the entire liberal Internet stopped to point and laugh at the notion of a "conservative BuzzFeed," giving the project a massive amount of attention.

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