Your one stop pundit shop.

Eugene Robinson, sad to say, joins the chorus of those misrepresenting what Janet Napolitano said after the attempted airline bombing on Christmas Day. Says Robinson:

Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano's initial assessment of the Christmas Day airliner attack -- that "the system worked" -- doesn't quite match the absurdity of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But only because she quickly took it back.

What Napolitano actually said:

Once this incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork, not only sharing throughout the air industry, but also sharing with state and local law enforcement. Products were going out on Christmas Day, they went out yesterday, and also to the [airline] industry to make sure that the traveling public remains safe. I would leave you with that message. The traveling public is safe. We have instituted some additional screening and security measures, in light of this incident, but, again, everyone reacted as they should. The system, once the incident occurred, the system worked.

Bob Herbert says that:

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care.

Opinion art of 2009.

Cal Thomas takes the lowest road possible:

This latest incident and the killings at Fort Hood, Texas, by a Muslim Army officer ought to be a verdict on the Obama administration's strategy of apologizing for America and reaching out to Muslim nations.

Fred Barnes joins the parade of conservatives who are suddenly concerned about public opinion -- something he and his ilk ignored during the past eight years of war.

Larry Tye on Lester Rodney:

He was not a welcome ally to many in America’s civil rights movement of the early 1900s, but none could deny the attention-getting power of Lester Rodney, the hot-blooded young sports editor of the paper published by the Communist Party USA.  [...]

In America that meant baseball. The Daily Worker hired as its first sports editor Rodney, a 25-year-old New York University night student from Brooklyn who knew as little about socialism as he did about journalism. Yet Rodney loved the national pastime, and he made ending Major League Baseball’s ban on blacks his passion for more than a decade ...

Rodney, who died Dec. 20 at the age of 98, understood that fireballer Leroy “Satchel’’ Paige, slugger Josh Gibson, and other stars of the Negro Leagues had proven they were the equals of the all-white major leaguers. For years, a cadre of crusading sportswriters had covered as many interracial barnstorming tours and Negro League games as their editors allowed, dropping in lines whenever they could pointing out the skill of black players and the stupidity of keeping them out of the majors.

But Rodney was one of the few to take on segregation point-blank.