BYRON YORK: Before banning ‘crosshairs,’ CNN used it to refer to Palin, Bachmann. I blame the network for creating a climate of hatred and violence. There’s blood on your hands, CNN!

Well, there’s some sort of bodily substance involved, anyway.

CHANGE: Obama’s SEC hires Goldman Sachs asset manager to regulate asset managers.

CIVILITY CAMPAIGN NOT CATCHING ON: “Cheney’s heart transplant. Wouldn’t that be the worst day ever? Not only are you dead but they’ve given your heart to THAT prick!”

Plus, from the comments: “Obama ends up adopting half these policies in his continuance of his war on terror. And yet, whereas these policies made Cheney Darth Vader and the Emperor rolled into one, under Obama these policies are not even worth mentioning.” That Obama adopted them too only makes Cheney more evil — for undermining the fierce moral urgency of change. And then mocking The One for going along.

INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS: Darrell Issa Investigates the GAO over its for-profit schools shenanigans. Fawn Johnson of the National Journal, however, seems rather non-neutral in her description of what’s going on. “Counteracting the ad hype?” Easy to see who’s side she’s on.

Here’s some background on what went on, which involved more than mere “revisions.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Where Are All The Sick People Who Can’t Get Insurance?

Approximately 300 million Americans face a serious risk of being killed in an auto accident. Which is to say, there are auto accidents, and the entire population of the country is at risk of being one of the thousands of people every year who are killed on our nation’s highways.

That statement is about as useful as a new report from HHS, presumably timed to undercut the GOP as they debate their fruitless attempt to repeal the health care bill. HHS says that millions of people–about half the country, in fact–either has, or has a loved one with, a condition that could cause them to have difficulty securing insurance.

As with the catchy opening sentence on auto deaths, this turns out to be much less interesting when you examine it. I don’t really want to know who could be conceivably affected by a problem–after all, even someone with no medical conditions now could presumably develop one. What I want to know is, how many people this problem affects.

Shockingly, not nearly as many as you’re meant to think. “I’m not saying that they don’t exist, but if they do, we should really be trying to find them. We’re not talking about a program that isn’t serving quite as many people as expected. We’re talking about a program that was supposed to serve almost 400,000 people, and is instead serving around 2% of that number. Nor have these people been turned away due to budget constraints; they don’t seem to have applied in the first place.”

JENNIFER RUBIN: The Tale Of Two Retirements. Kay Bailey Hutchison vs. Kent Conrad.

CHANGE: All-Seeing Blimp Could Be Afghanistan’s Biggest Brain.

TRIGGER HIPPIE: Jared Loughner: Reefer Madness?

HARPER’S divided by union fight. “The Harper’s union has been locked in a bitter dispute with MacArthur since July. And now he’s trying to lay off Harper’s’ literary editor, Ben Metcalf, who’s worked at the magazine since the mid-nineties and who played a key role in the union drive — a move the union says is pure retaliation. The current crisis began a year ago, when MacArthur fired the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Roger Hodge. The two men had once been close, but their relationship had frayed as the red ink mounted: Newsstand sales dropped, MacArthur’s appetite for losses waned, and Hodge tried to defend the staff from cuts.” Plus, bashing the Internet.

THEY’RE COLLECTING SIGNATURES to recall Sheriff Dupnik. To correct the record, however, I didn’t actually call for Dupnik’s recall in this post, which merely linked an item about the possibility. That said, I’m okay with the idea.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on cordless power tools.

THE ANGER IS PLENTIFUL, the generosity not so much.

PERSPECTIVELESS DOPES: It’s come to this: CNN apologizes … after guest uses “crosshairs” metaphor.

Am I hallucinating or didn’t this same network once have an entire show devoted to heated political debate called … “Crossfire”? With a crosshairs logo? How did the republic survive while it was on the air?

And in six weeks, they’ll be doing that sort of thing again as if this moment had never occurred.

UPDATE: Reader Steven Jens writes: “Did CNN ever apologize for Anderson Cooper’s use of the term ‘teabagger’?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: CNN didn’t apologize, but Anderson Cooper did.

MORE: Don Surber is not buying it.

MORE STILL: John Nolte writes:

CNN apologizing for a guest using the word crosshairs is more devious than hypcritical.

Its a way for them to keep the focus on Palin, to insinuate without outright saying so that “crosshairs” and therefore Palin was wrong.

“We weren’t criticizing Palin, we were criticizing ourselves.”

But in doing so… Devious.

Good point. And another viewer emails: “By the way, both viewers accepted John King’s apology.” Which is big of ’em, since they were both right-leaning bloggers looking for something to snark about.

JAMES TARANTO: Leave Kate Zernike Alone: She is a good reporter. The New York Times is a corrupt institution. “How corrupt? So corrupt that the Hulse-Zernike piece was, by the standards of the Times last week, a relatively minor case of journalistic malpractice. Even the editors who assigned it at least have the excuse of having been under deadline pressure at a time when the facts were not yet in about the suspect’s motives. The same cannot be said for the Times editorial board and Paul Krugman, who on Jan. 10, as we noted last Tuesday, were still linking the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to ‘uncivil rhetoric’ from the right, even after the facts had disproved any connection. The Times has made no acknowledgment yet of this gross journalistic wrong.”

Plus this: “The moral degeneration of the New York Times is a study in the corrupting effects of power. Over the years, the men who run the paper came to view the preservation of their authority as agenda-setter or gatekeeper or ‘mediator’ as their primary mission. On Jan. 10, 2011, they made it clear that they are willing to go so far in the pursuit of that goal as to contravene the real purpose of journalism, which is to tell the truth.”

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes: “Taranto’s justification for calling the Times a corrupt institution could be applied more broadly to include a disagreeably large portion of Codevilla’s Ruling Class. An intuitive recognition of this as fact has no doubt motivated many, if not all, in the Tea Party movement.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Eric Pobirs emails: “What moral degeneration? This is the paper that gave us the Walter Duranty view of the Soviet Union. They arguably have an ocean of blood on their hands but point the finger at conservatives?”

THE WORLD’S STRANGEST MOVIE SETS.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

REASON TV: The Week in Stupid: Cable Pundits on the Giffords Shooting.

GLENN GREENWALD IS APPALLED AT OBAMA’S CHENEYESQUE STANCE ON THE WAR ON TERROR, and Tom Maguire is gloating. I told you that all that fierce moral urgency of change crap was. . . well, crap. And I was right!

REUSING PAST EXAM QUESTIONS LEADS TO TROUBLE. I would hesitate to say “too lazy” here, though — writing multiple-choice questions for exams is hard, and you have to write a lot of them, and it’s easy to write one that’s more ambiguous than it seems to the writer. (That’s one reason why I don’t use them; another is that the actual practice of law doesn’t involve many multiple-choice questions.) But I was warned very early in my career that reusing exam questions often leads to trouble, and the growth of the Internet only makes that problem worse.

Ilya Somin has further thoughts.

A PROBLEM WITH SENILE FEDERAL JUDGES? I’m prepared to believe it’s a problem. I just note that it’s a problem we seem to hear about more often when there’s a Democratic President . . . .

IN SEARCH OF the Year Zero Face. Well, given that we prize women for sex rather than childbearing nowadays, maybe it makes sense that women want to look at what’s supposed to be their sexual, rather than reproductive, peak — age 36!

WOULD YOU BUY YOUR NEPHEW AN EASY-BAKE OVEN? No. With the incandescent ban coming, it would be cruel to get him hooked on 100-watt bulbs.

A NICE CHART FROM THE ECONOMIST: U.S. Equivalents: Comparing other nations with U.S. states.

REPORT: Joe Lieberman won’t run in 2012.

LOW-COST RECIPES at the Hillbilly Housewife blog.