According to Samuelson, the American federal government debt will (any minute now!!!!) lead to hyperinflation. This was in November of 2009. We’re all still waiting.

In fact, we should all be more like Latvia, the little country that could … gut its government budget and lay off 29 percent of government workers. That’s Samuelson’s dream, for America. Latvia’s unemployment rate is 20 percent and is not seriously expected to significantly fall any time soon.

Samuelson, a former business desk reporter who I am pretty sure is taken seriously on economic issues because people think he’s related to the late Paul Samuelson, is never hysterical or bigoted or racist or any of the myriad awful things that so many others on this list are. He’s just constantly, consistently wrong, because he believes in a series of stupid Reagan-era myths, like “Johnson’s economic policies caused stagflation” and “super rich people are in fact hard-working small business owning job creating Regular Americans.”

The last decade has repeatedly and gratuitously made Samuelson’s entire political philosophy look ridiculous. Instead of ever changing his tune, though, it’s the exact same bullshit, over and over again.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
When the relentless deficit hawk argued that we mustn’t ever cut a single dime of spending on the armed forces.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Then there’s the fact that one former Mirror reporter has said phone-hacking was an “accepted technique” at Morgan’s paper, and Morgan has written of listening to a celebrity’s voice-mail message that was most likely obtained through the practice that’s landed other British tabloids in serious legal trouble. Morgan has issued a series of increasingly carefully worded denials.

Of course, even if he never condoned the hacking of a single phone, he’d still be an unctuous, unpleasant misogynist.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:

Probably asking Condoleezza Rice, “What would you cook for me?”
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Allen’s love of the worst of American politics is sincere and heartfelt. Here he is in August 2010 revealing that “the dream of every reporter” is endless legislative gridlock enabling even more grandstanding by self-righteous “centrists”:

MA: (laughing) I don’t know, but I can tell you the press loves the fact that Ken Buck, he’ll definitely be covered. Very colorful, he definitely will be good copy. It’s just like the dream of every reporter is that the Republicans will pick up nine seats, and that Marco Rubio wins in Florida, because Hugh, you know what that means?

It means … an absolute nightmare for people who don’t get off on Senate bickering.

Allen, who notoriously talks in the same canned talking points as the politicians he covers, is one of those political reporters who brags of never voting and professes to have no ideology to betray. Certain things are generally true of reporters who adopt that hoary no-ideology line: One, these reporters tend to treat national politics as a thrilling sporting event, caring much more about strategy and “victories” than policy and the impact of political decisions on actual Americans’ lives. This is why Mike Allen can “analyze” a big political fight before it even happens, judging the Republican and Democratic arguments over a Supreme Court nomination as if it were a figure-skating competition, instead of a … Supreme Court nomination.

Two, these guys worship power and consider themselves peers of the very serious and wise people in the D.C. political class. This is why Allen pointlessly extends anonymity to former Bush officials who send him sniping emails about the Obama administration, and then defends his decision to grant them anonymity by attacking liberals who criticized him.

And three, inasmuch as they’re basically all well-off white dudes who live in nice neighborhoods and socialize with other well-off white guys, they’re mostly moderate Republicans, even if they don’t recognize that fact. And that is why, when Allen and VandeHei launched “The Politico Primary,” a project designed solely to spur me to write something about how awful they are, their idea of unconventional outsider candidates included deficit hawk <strike>former Sen.</strike> Erskine Bowles, a randomly selected CEO and Condoleezza Rice.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Let’s say this entire “endorsement” of Erskine Bowles for pretend president, co-written with Jim VandeHei. “The most depressing reality of modern governance is this: The current system seems incapable of dealing with our debt addiction before it becomes a crippling crisis.” When Allen published that, the American unemployment rate was 9 percent, the American prison population was the highest in the world, and the endless war on terror had just begun its 10th expensive, deadly year.

Correction: This piece formerly incorrectly referred to Erskine Bowles as a former senator, which he is not. I apologize for the error.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Here’s Wolf’s version of events:

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab. Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That’s what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

Here’s what those alleged victims say happened:

Her account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she “tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again”. Miss A told police that she didn’t want to go any further “but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far”, and so she allowed him to undress her.

According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had “done something” with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.

That seems a bit less than consensual! And:

The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when “he agreed unwillingly to use a condom”.

Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. “According to her statement, she said: ‘You better not have HIV’ and he answered: ‘Of course not,’ ” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.”

And that seems like rape.

Whether or not Assange’s case was taken more seriously by authorities than other typical rape cases for nakedly political reasons — and it very probably was — the fact remains that Assange was accused of serious sexual crimes by two separate women. And Wolf joined the chorus of people who defended Assange from those charges based solely on the fact that Assange was a guy whose work they liked. He was important and did good deeds, so the two separate women accusing him of violent non-consensual sexual encounters must be wrong. (And, indeed, Wolf went on to argue that they should be named.)

Since publishing that vile Huffington Post piece a year ago, Wolf has continued to defend herself, claiming that the Huffington Post piece was “satirical.” It was, as I said, sarcastic, but the aim of the satire was to lampoon Interpol as “the dating police,” which necessarily means pretending a rape charge is a simple complaint that the sex was bad.

I dunno, I leave it to you to try to parse the myriad arguments she makes in her account of a heated discussion with Salon’s Irin Carmon. How about this closer:

Wolf concluded, “I don’t think that it helps for the feminist establishment to not recognize that there is nuance in this situation. And that doesn’t mean that ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘no,’ but that we need to evolve a legal concept where ‘yes’ is acknowledged, too.” Though, she added, “The ‘yes’ shouldn’t dilute the ‘no.’”

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Wolf’s need to prove that Assange is the victim of a politically motivated investigation has her continuing to distort the nature of the accusations in order to make them seem like something other than rape. Like: “(There is one point at which Miss W asserts she was asleep – in which case it would indeed have been illegal to have sex with her – but her deleted tweets show that she was not asleep, and subsequent discussion indicates consent.)” Oh, deleted tweets, you say? Drop all the charges!
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

So it probably would’ve been best for Keller to have retired to, say, write an unread memoir and join the Council on Foreign Relations instead of deciding to return to the place where his obvious, obnoxious hackishness is most apparent: The opinion page.

Oh, but while holding what could be the most powerful job in international media, what Keller really wanted to do was go back to writing! This is why, while editing the paper, he’d occasionally parachute into war zones (or early primary states) to file utterly useless news analysis pieces, which, of course, ended up on the front page of the paper, no matter the unoriginality of the observations or the tiredness of the topics.

And, fine, as I said, he was once a fine foreign reporter. What he was never, though, was a good opinion columnist. He’s got a bland style coupled with a smug voice, and absolutely no original thoughts on the major issues of the day. When Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren hired Keller to pen a front-of-the-book column, it was perhaps supposed to be full of banal lessons from his old days in the field, but it very quickly became “obtuse old man yells at cloud computing.”

His early, silly column on how Twitter is making us stupid was a rather blatant example of trolling, which isn’t the sort of thing the editor of the Times should be doing. Then, of course, there was the column he spent relentlessly trashing the Huffington Post for being — ugh — “aggregators,” comparing bloggers to Somalian pirates. This was an argument straight out of breathless media columns from about five to 10 years earlier, but Keller had been too busy doing his newspaper editing job at the time to share his opinion, and I guess he felt left out. He needn’t have — it turns out his opinion was shared by every single other hidebound old-school newspaper dude in the nation.

His reporters began trying to express to him how embarrassing he was being and how difficult he was making their jobs (“Times media editor Bruce Headlam and media columnist David Carr had an intervention with Keller to explain how his columns were hurting their ability to cover the industry,” New York says), which Keller, in classic hack style, took to mean that his columns had sparked “conversation,” making his efforts worthwhile and provocative instead of just stupid.

When Keller finally ended his Times Magazine gig, his 12 columns had received five corrections. “Keller’s correction rate on the column works out to 41.6 percent,” John Koblin noted. Jayson Blair’s rate “ranged from 5 to 6.3 percent.”

Keller left the Times Magazine, of course, for the Times opinion page. He has recently argued that economic recovery has been impeded by the “proliferation of blogs and social media” and written this rambling, pointless entry, which seemed like he wrote it in a half-hour while paging through the international news-briefs in the Economist. (It is, I think, supposed to be ironic? He does the stupid Maureen Dowd “edgy pop culture reference” thing and everything.)

And let us never forget Keller’s dozens of pre-editorship columns in support of the invasion of Iraq, written with the sureness of all the other morons who wrote very serious columns about how important it was that we invade Iraq to punish them for not having WMD that they weren’t going to ever be able to potentially use against us. Here are some fun lines from Bill Keller columns from before he took over as editor:

February 8, 2003: “Thanks to all these grudging allies, Mr. Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for.”
Ibid.: “Let’s imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage to rouse the Arab world against us. In fact, Al Jazeera shows American soldiers being welcomed by Iraqis as liberators. The illicit toxins are unearthed and destroyed. Persecuted Kurds and Shiites suppress the urge for clan vengeance.”
December 14, 2002: “How will Iraqis react to an invasion? (Many of them with an outpouring of relief, wouldn’t you think?)”

Hm, I wouldn’t think, but you did, apparently!

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
His pseudo-mea culpa for being perhaps the single most prominent member of the “Liberal Hawks in Favor of Invading Iraq in Order to Make Us Feel Better About 9/11″ club, which he picked a slightly different name for when he opened its first chapter in his old Times Op-Ed column. Like other former war cheerleaders, he essentially claims to have been swallowed up by a sort of temporary mass hysteria. Keller’s sorta-apology basically proves that every antiwar thinker who said the liberal hawks were just drunk on the pathological need to lash out irrationally in order to prove that America had the biggest balls in the world was correct. “By the time of Alice’s birth I had already turned my attention to Iraq, a place that had, in the literal sense, almost nothing to do with 9/11, but which would be its most contentious consequence,” he now writes. Oh, “almost,” you still say?
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)