Plenty of good friends show up, from Eric Boehlert (who in honor of the late Andrew Breitbart I insist on thinking of as “Earache Boehlert”) to the New Yorker’s second-grade-math dropout John Cassidy to Ezra “Orthodox economics proves the accepted theory is correct because Top Men say so” Klein to the unsinkable E.J. Dionne, who helps me understand what Joyce meant when he described a bespectacled character with the phrase, “Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet.”

It’s also heartening to see the New York Times pushing the argument that the threat of action alone has already gotten the insurance companies to reform. This is exactly the case the Grey Lady made in 1993, when it was becoming clear that the Hillary Clinton/Ira Magaziner health care reform was in trouble. At that time, the paper ran a series of articles claiming that even if the bill failed it would be a success because HMOs (that era’s villains) were already cleaning up their acts. You can see how well that worked.