Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Saturday at last! Here are today's abbreviations:

Gail Collins:

One woman at a Sarah Palin rally told The Times’s Robbie Brown that she was terrified that Obama was "going to push a socialist agenda" but that she was sure "Saxby Chambliss can stop him."

Now Chambliss has been a senator for six years, and his greatest achievement was getting ranked the 33rd best golfer in Washington by Golf Digest. It is highly unlikely that he could stop the president from doing anything beyond making a putt.

You gotta love Sarah Palin rallies.

Peggy Noonan: Allow me to play revisionist, and try and make the claim that Bush deserves credit for not allowing 9/11 (and the Katrina response) to happen a second time. Americans, otoh, will not forget he allowed either one to happen for the first time.

Hey, I know it's not much but that's all he has.

Peter Robinson: Jeb!

Gerald Seib:

You've got to give Barack Obama credit: The man knows how to read.

Read the results of an election, and the mood of a country, that is. The team the president-elect is assembling around him is strikingly centrist in nature, a group of people known more for competence than for ideology.

That seems to reflect what the nation ordered up this year. The campaign that brought Mr. Obama to power wasn't one that was dominated by policy positions or ideological debates, though both surely were present.

Charlie Cook:

Arguably the most important development that will shape the direction of public policy over the next few years wasn't the November 4 election but the economic calamity that hit in September. The seizing up of the credit markets, the plummet in the stock market, and the realization that the economy was in big trouble changed everything.

Deborah Howell:

The job of science reporters is to take complicated subjects and translate them for readers who are not scientifically sophisticated. Critics say that the news media oversimplify and aren't skeptical enough of financing by special interests.

That led me to review papers that are to be published soon as part of a project sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on how the media cover science and technology, and to interview a half-dozen experts, from scientists to teachers of science writing. Here's my take:

· Look for the evidence. News organizations should give weight to scientific evidence, whether it is about global warming or what the medical establishment says about Lyme disease.

Why stop with science? Imagine if that were applied to the runup to the Iraq war, or if we read our own polling prior to the 2008 election? Why, we might have noticed that Obama was ahead, or that Bush was running this country off a cliff, and that everyone wanted him to just go away (and they still do - co-presidency my ass.) And we might have reported it.