Journalist of the Day: Robert Barnes

Even before I have read the article, this award is for the first sentence of As Stevens retires from court, one final duel with Scalia:

It is fitting that the last duel between the old ink-slingers at the Marble Palace was over guns.

Journalist of the day: Helen Thomas

Dana Milbank - Washington Sketch - washingtonpost.com:

Helen Thomas is 89 years old and requires some assistance to get to and from the daily White House briefing. Yet her backbone has proved stronger than that of the president she covers....

"Has the president given up on the public option?" she inquired from her front-row-middle seat....

"...[W]hy do you keep asking me?" Gibbs inquired.

"Because I want your conscience to bother you," Thomas replied.

Let's just give her a lifetime achievement Best Journalist award, come to think of it.

Journalist of the Day: Roger Cohen

A Jewish journalist from Brooklyn toughs it out in Tehran, writing an unforgettable piece published in today's NY Times while simultaneously protecting his own hide and helping those around him. Strong stuff.

Journalist of the Day: re Mr Smith goes to Washington

The best article I've seen thus far explaining McCain's decision to land in D.C. (one can see the orange jumpsuit, the deck of the aircraft carrier, the Mission Accomplished banner ... oh, wait, that was that other macho American) and then pretend to have been acting in the interest of The People ...

Frank Rich in today's NYT. Warning, Rich is pissed. Perhaps not appropriate material for folks who prefer their politics air-brushed. Here's a sample:

The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.

To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)