Based on information from a court affidavit, WaPo details how the government surveilled Rosen's every interaction with the State Department, suspecting that classified information about North Korea had been leaked to the reporter from State Department adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.

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In the previous century, there was a brief Golden Age of American journalism, though what glittered like gold leaf sometimes turned out to be tinsel.  Then came regression to the mean.  Since 2000, we have seen the titans of the news presuming that Bush was the victor over Gore, hustling us into war with Iraq, obscuring climate change, and turning blind eyes to derivatives, mortgage-based securities, collateralized debt obligations, and the other flimsy creations with which a vast, showy, ramshackle international financial house of cards was built.  When you think about the crisis of journalism, including the loss of advertising and the shriveled newsrooms -- there were fewer newsroom employees in 2010 than in 1978, when records were first kept -- also think of anesthetized watchdogs snoring on Wall Street while the Arctic ice cap melts.

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The comment is a sarcastic reference to the Kermit Gosnell controversy, in which conservatives claim that the mainstream media has been covering up the horrific crimes of the Philadelphia doctor accused of performing illegal abortions. Her colleague at the Post, health policy reporter Sarah Kliff, tweeted last week that she wasn't writing about the case because, "I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime." The tweet prompted outrage among pro-lifers.

Responding to Rubin on Twitter, numerous people criticized her for politicizing the tragedy in Boston and dismissing its importance, even sarcastically. "Pathetic," conservative writer Justin Green responded.

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Without the view from Liberia, it's hard to understand yesterday's headlines about the General Assembly's approval of the treaty. Which is why during two weeks of negotiations last month, African delegations could often be seen chatting with media from around the world. On the last day of the conference especially, the North Lawn building buzzed with reporters seeking perspectives. There were Russian and Arab TV crews, Japanese magazine journalists, and writers from at least half a dozen African publications. The U.S. media presence, hailing from the world's largest arms exporter, was harder to find. Which is to say, it was nearly impossible to find.

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The Post reports that almost immediately after his re-election, Obama began working behind the scenes to win back the lower chamber and attempt to secure his legacy. The plan, the paper suggests, is to nationalize the 2014 race around issues which have popular public appeal -- gun control, immigration reform, the minimum wage, climate change and others -- but little chance of moving through the House.

Obama used his State of the Union to begin to build support for his agenda, and has continued in campaign mode over recent weeks to illustrate the effects of the sequester cuts on the economy. The Post says he'll continue to voice his frustration that popular legislation can't move through the House.

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OK, it's a bit more complicated than that. The Post's ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, ran a column with a classic ombud headline, "Is the Post 'pro-gay'?" A reader got into a "vigorous three-way e-mail dialogue" with Pexton and a Post reporter, with the reader claiming the Post "caters slavishly to Dupont Circle," a reference to a wealthy Washington, D.C., neighborhood known for its many LGBT residents and also a claim that I bet the Post's advertising team would be happy to add to its pitches.

The reporter and the reader had an argument about the purpose of journalism:

Replied the reporter: “The reason that legitimate media outlets routinely cover gays is because it is the civil rights issue of our time. Journalism, at its core, is about justice and fairness, and that’s the ‘view of the world’ that we espouse; therefore, journalists are going to cover the segment of society that is still not treated equally under the law.”

The reader: “Contrary to what you say, the mission of journalism is not justice. Defining justice is a political matter, not journalistic. Journalism should be about accuracy and fairness.

“Good journalism also means not demeaning conservatives as ‘haters.’ ”

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In previous reports about the proposed Manual, the Post's Miller noted that the codification of kill lists and other current counterterror practices into a manual illustrates that programs once considered emergency post-9/11 measures have been crystallized as permanent fixtures of our national security apparatus. Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Karen DeYoung repeated this point Saturday:

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It was the GRS who were swift to the scene to fend off a second attack by militants on the U.S. consulate in Libya in September. Largely constituted of contractors working part of the year for substantial fees (up to $140,000), the GRS is one of the most dangerous assignments in the CIA's increasingly far-reaching tentacles. At any one time, around 125 GRS contractors are assigned around the world and, as the Post noted, "Of the 14 CIA employees killed since 2009, five worked for the GRS, all as contractors. They include two killed at Benghazi, as well as three others who were within the blast radius on Dec. 31, 2009, when a Jordanian double agent detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA compound in Khost, Afghanistan."

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Watch:

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The Pentagon awarded $667.2 million in contracts in 2012, and more than $1 billion during Barack Obama’s first term in office for construction projects in largely autocratic Middle Eastern nations, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Middle East District (USACE-MED).  More than $178 million in similar funding is already anticipated for 2013.  These contracts represent a mix of projects, including expanding and upgrading military bases used by U.S. troops in the region, building facilities for indigenous security forces, and launching infrastructure projects meant to improve the lives of local populations.

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But what Romney can’t do—under any remotely plausible scenario—is win the White House without Florida. Take Florida away from Romney, and he doesn’t have a path to 270 electoral votes that doesn’t involve winning a traditional blue state. Mitt Romney could run the table, win New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Colorado, and still fall short of 270 electoral votes. To win, he’d have to overcome a year-long, seven-point deficit in Nevada, which—on top of everything else—is not something I’d bet money on.

For most of the year, Florida has been a toss-up, with both candidates claiming short-lived leads. Since the conventions, however, the state has begun to slip out of reach for the former Massachusetts governor. In the 15 polls taken before the conventions, Romney led in six:

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When you, the major daily newspaper, get to the point where your official in-house fact checker is not just calling one of your columnists dishonest but also practically mocking his arguments as ridiculous, maybe you should reconsider some of your hiring strategies. (Knowing the Post it will probably choose more dishonest former presidential speechwriters and fewer "fact checkers.") This is different from being taken to task by an ombudsman or public editor; they're quasi-independent entities hired specifically to criticize the paper. This is the newspaper's official arbiter of truthfulness saying a paid Washington Post columnist is not just a liar but a shitty one.

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This summer, despite (or because of) the clichéd cover image of a toddler stuffed into a woman’s briefcase, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” was an instant sensation, attracting 1.7 million visitors to The Atlantic’s website and generating an all-time high of 200,000 Facebook recommendations. Other attention getters: Kate Bolick’s “All the Single Ladies” (November 2011), an exploration of the current state of unmarried womanhood; Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him!” (March 2008), an argument that women should settle for Mr. So-So lest they end up like Kate Bolick; Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men” (July/August 2010), which presented evidence that women are outstripping men in higher education and on the job market; Rosin’s self-explanatory “The Case Against Breast-Feeding” (April 2009); and Gottlieb’s “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” (July/August 2011), an indictment of so-called helicopter parenting. These stories have sparked lively and sometimes anguished responses in other magazines, newspapers, and popular blogs, as well as on Facebook, over lunches, and during book-group get-togethers. Four of them have sparked book deals (for Gottlieb, Rosin, Bolick, and Slaughter), and CBS has purchased a sitcom based on Bolick’s meditation on the single life.

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According to a Kaplan press release, KAPx (which seems to be just Google+ Hangouts meant to be sold to learning institutions at a high markup):

“The KAPx™ platform is designed to help schools, organizations, businesses, and individuals who want to share information and knowledge in an exciting, interactive, and highly participatory manner that is aligned with the best instructional practices,” said Edward Hanapole, Kaplan Inc.’s Chief Information Officer. “We will continue to refine the platform to reflect our leadership in learning science and how to marry technological innovation with educational achievement.”

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Here in reality, Mitt Romney seized on a misleading right-wing talking point about an obscure TANF policy change from Barack Obama's Department of Health and Human Services and used it to create a blatantly dishonest attack ad (and stump speech attack line). Then, still in this reality, Bill Clinton, whose name and image were invoked in the Romney attack ad, released a statement saying plainly that Romney's ad was dishonest. Bill Clinton remains broadly popular nationally, because his time as president was a time of relative prosperity for many Americans, which is why the Democrats have given him a prime speaking slot at their upcoming convention. The last Republican president, by the way, won't be speaking at the Republican convention. In fact, he won't even attend.

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