Lead by Lilliputs

1. The President is a man of principle. The WaPo reports:Obama said he told House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) that his core goals — lowering health-care costs for businesses and individuals and expanding coverage to the uninsured — remained non-negotiable.Maybe he should pick “core goals” that are compatible instead of ones that in direct conflict with each other.

2. How could such smart people do so many stupid things?" asks Michael Barone. The "smart people" are President Obama and his men:The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far more money and attracted far more volunteers than any before it, have within a year come up with a legislative program that is crashing in ruins and that, to judge from recent polls, has left the Democratic party weaker than I have seen it in almost 50 years of closely following politics.

3. What exactly is the job that the FCC is looking to do under Waldman's charge? Mr. Waldman says: "We are looking at it in terms of preserving certain functions, in which I do include accountability journalism." Here's the rub. It is not really the FCC's job--or generally within its delegated jurisdiction--to preserve "accountability journalism," or even to define it. Indeed, despite Waldman's appropriate nods to First Amendment sensitivities, free speech concerns are necessarily implicated when the government categorizes different kinds of media content and worries about preserving some content and not other.That said, the term "accountability journalism" is somewhat tainted. As we have chronicled in many columns, the Associated Press adopted it as a slogan a few years ago. To the AP, what it has meant in practice is the injection of much more opinion into news stories, usually (though not always) reflecting a bias in favor of liberals and Democrats and against conservatives and Republicans.