Jack in the Box

How important is Kos? The Washington Monthly's Benjamin Wallace-Wells says he raised $500,000 for Dems in the last cycle and talks regularly with Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel.

If you missed this column by NYT Public Editor Byron Calame , he is accusing the paper of "stonewalling":

"The New York Times's explanation of its decision to report, after what it said was a one-year delay, that the National Security Agency is eavesdropping domestically without court-approved warrants was woefully inadequate. And I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

"I e-mailed a list of 28 questions to Bill Keller, the executive editor, on Dec. 19, three days after the article appeared. He promptly declined to respond to them. I then sent the same questions to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, who also declined to respond. They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future."

Editor & Publisher chats up Calame:

"He told E&P he could still do his job despite the stonewalling, but appeared frustrated by it. 'I believe last week's column shows the public editor can function in the absence of cooperation in some cases,' he said. 'I am going to keep doing it one day at a time.' "

Glenn Reynolds is unhappy with the paper:

"The Times' behavior on this story, and the Plame story, has undermined the unwritten "National Security Constitution" regarding leaks and classified information. Since the Pentagon Papers, at least, the rule has been that papers could publish classified information in a whistleblowing mode, but that they would be sensitive to national security concerns. In return, the federal government would tread lightly in investigating where the leaks came from. But the politicization of the coverage, and the outright partisanship of the Times, has put paid to that arrangement. It's not clear to me that the country is better served by the new arrangement, but unwritten constitutions require a lot of self-discipline on the part of the various players, and that sort of discipline is no longer to be found in America's leadership circles.

"If the Times decided that its job was to tell its readers everything it knew, when it knew it, then it would have a good argument for publishing this sort of thing. But since the Times has made clear that it's happy to keep its readers in the dark when doing so serves its institutional interests, it doesn't have that defense for publishing stuff that's bad for national security."

Rand Simberg wonders why Times editors didn't pop the story during the '04 campaign when they had the chance:

"At first glance, given their partisan behavior in general at least since the beginning of the Bush administration, one would have thought that it would be a slam-dunk decision, just as Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' tilting at the AWOL windmill occurred a few weeks before the election.

"But perhaps they had the political acumen to realize that it might backfire on them. Consider--the Democrats were trying (however pathetically), by nominating an anti-war (and anti-military) protester who picked up some medals in Vietnam for three months, to indicate that they were finally serious about national security, an issue that has dogged them since the era of said protester--1972. Did they really want, in wartime, to be seen as criticizing the president for intercepting enemy communications, warrantless or otherwise? Was there someone in charge then who was prescient as to the potential blowback of this story, who is no longer?

"If so, he (or, of course, she) has certainly been shown to be right in retrospect, and if they had pulled this stunt during the campaign, given his recent surge in approval and the Dems corresponding drop, Bush's victory margin would likely have been even larger."

Um, what exactly did Bill O'Reilly mean when, in complaining about unspecified personal attacks by the New York Times, he said the following?

"If they continue, those people continue to attack people personally, as Frank Rich does almost every week, and Keller allows it, then we'll just have to get into their lives . . . And if they want to attack people personally, Rich in print and Keller allowing it, then we're going to have to just show everybody about their lives."

Joel Stein says he just keeps on apologizing to Maureen Dowd.

Say it ain't so, Wonkette! The Wall Street Journal's new law blog , along with the New York Observer, breaks the story that she's bailing out of her Web site, to be succeeded by "David Lat, the federal prosecutor who revealed himself to the New Yorker magazine in November as the author of the popular 'Underneath Their Robes' judicial blog."

Cox tells The Post's gossips : "What can I say? My [butt] is tired from all that sitting."