The Media Get Juiced

" 'Don't let nobody out this room. Mother---!' a crazed O.J. Simpson raged as he and his gun-toting cohorts burst into a hotel room to confront alleged sports-memorabilia thieves, according to tapes released yesterday.

"Simpson pal Thomas Riccio, who apparently set up the meeting-turned-wild melee, taped Simpson going berserk against collectors Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong. 'Think you can steal my [expletive] and sell it?' Simpson is heard screaming Thursday night in a room at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino as his armed pals menaced the two men."

Speaking of 1990s time warps: Hillary Clinton pushing a health-care plan? She's just unveiled "a $110 billion-a-year plan that would require all Americans to have insurance and give them a range of plan options . . .

"Mrs. Clinton said she would pay for the plan partially by ending Republican-backed tax cuts for people earning $250,000 or more, as well as by netting billions of dollars in savings by reorganizing the health care system," says the New York Times. "She also said she would press insurance companies and drug companies to focus on providing lower cost care -- while at the same time, she said, she would ban insurance companies from turning down people for insurance because of health status or pre-existing health conditions . . .

"Unlike her earlier attempt, Mrs. Clinton is not proposing a new government bureaucracy. Nor would her new plan strip people of their current health insurance -- a fear that helped sink her 1993 and 1994 endeavor."

Adds the L.A. Times: "Clinton went out of her way to say that she had learned the lessons of her earlier failure, pledging to do less mandating and more negotiating. And there was some evidence of that at work in Monday's presentation. Clinton repeatedly said that Americans who are satisfied with their current health insurance coverage need not make any change, something that the earlier Clinton plan did not promise . . . In addition, she and her aides left key elements open to bargaining."

So how is AG nominee Michael Mukasey going down with the right?

"Some of my fellow conservatives will be disappointed that the nominee won't be former Solicitor General Ted Olson," says Bill Kristol.

"While it's unfortunate that the first thing many conservatives will hear about Mukasey is that his home-state senator Chuck Schumer has praised him, that shouldn't disqualify him. Knowing Mukasey wasn't on Bush's Supreme Court short list, Schumer felt free to list him a few years ago as an acceptable 'consensus' candidate for the Court. And in fact, I for one don't know enough about Mukasey's constitutional views to be sure I'd recommend him for a lifetime Court appointment. Nor would he perhaps be the best pick for AG at the beginning of a term, with hundreds of court appointments and other personnel and policy decisions in a wide range of areas ahead. But this is an appointment for the last fifteen months of an administration whose basic policies are set and which has few judges left to appoint."

Captain Ed gets on the team:

"While an argument can be made for having an argument, an equal and better argument can be made for quietly working for a candidate who will not inspire immediate partisanship. For one thing, Justice is a mess, and a smooth transition will make its recovery more quick. Also, having these partisan fights for the sake of having them does damage to political discourse and in the end achieves little more than increased rancor -- especially if other candidates will push for the same policies and objectives. That's more a knock on Congress and the Democrats, whose knee-jerk opposition to Olson is both substanceless and insulting. In the present climate, and with the administration rightly focusing its political strength on keeping the mission going on Iraq, it makes more sense to give a little on this appointment as a balance."

The Nation's John Nichols sees a victory of sorts: