ERIC FULLER BECOMES an unperson on Morning Joe. “How can these people actually justify this omission and is there anyone other than naive old me who expected better of them, that is actually surprised?” Nope, not really.

FIVE YEARS LATER, Salon yanks article on vaccine/autism link. “Maybe it’s not such a hot idea to get your science reports from politicians and former politicians even if ‘fact checked’ by Rolling Stone, but Salon doesn’t concede that.”

DON SURBER: The Law Of Unintended Disaster.

BRYAN PRESTON: “Just remember, amid all these new calls for civility, no one on the left thought this ad was over the top — even though it advocated murdering global warming skeptics.”

TRANSPARENCY: House Panel Wants Homeland Security Documents: “A House committee has asked the Homeland Security Department to provide documents about an agency policy that required political appointees to review many Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a letter obtained Sunday by The Associated Press. . . . The political appointees wanted information about those requesting the materials, and in some cases the release of documents considered politically sensitive was delayed, according to numerous e-mails that were obtained by the AP. . . . According to the directive, political aides were to review requests related to Obama policy priorities, or anything related to controversial or sensitive subjects. Requests from journalists, lawmakers and activist groups were to also to be examined.”

Under FOIA, the identity of the requestor is legally irrelevant. Politically, not so much I guess.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Tunisia’s Chance At Democracy.

AYELET WALDMAN: In Defense of the Western Mom.

CHANGE: ‘Germany Abolishes Itself’ – the publishing sensation that challenges Europe’s diversity consensus.

UPDATE: More on Europe: EU Optimism Is Screeching To A Halt. “So here we are again. Spanish yields are widening, markets are down, and the euro is taking a nasty move lower. We may be back to the Europe we know.”

LOOKING FOR WAR ON TERROR NEWS? Check out Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg.

ROSE PETALS FOR A KILLER: “My father, Salmaan Taseer, governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab, was murdered on Jan. 4, shot dead in broad daylight by the policeman tasked to protect him. Acting out of a twisted piety, the man—Malik Mumtaz Qadri—shot my father because of my father’s belief that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have been misused to persecute religious minorities. . . . The biggest danger faced by Islam comes from those who claim to serve it. Its first victims are its own adherents.”

HIGHER EDUCATION: For-Profits Break the Monopoly on What a College Can Be. “The deep value of for-profit education is that it breaks the practical monopoly on what a college can be. The behavior of some of the big for-profits remains a scandal and needs to be corrected. They may be the robber barons of higher education. But the robber barons of times past bequeathed us a national railway system, a functioning oil industry, and the basis for a century of national prosperity. I’d gladly forgive the depredations of the for-profit colleges on the national treasury if their real legacy were to help the United States transition to a genuinely diverse and flexible form of higher education.” And the traditional institutions need competition.

But the empire strikes back where it can: “I recently learned of a case in which a start-up for-profit university offering only narrowly focused masters’ degrees in a highly technical field was advised by the regional accreditor to which it had applied that it really ought to add a provost to its administration in addition to the university president and dean of faculty. Given the importance of accreditation as the gatekeeper for student loans, the for-profit university is complying without a murmur. But on the face of it, this is an increase in administrative overhead mandated not by the practical need of the university but by the accreditor’s sense of how things should be done.”

TIM PAWLENTY opposes raising the debt ceiling. Video here.

CAROL SHEA-PORTER makes history more lively than it seemed at the time. I love this: “Shea-Porter’s town halls were indeed raucous affairs. During one such event in August 2009, a retired police officer was removed for standing up and speaking when it wasn’t his turn.”

RON RADOSH: The Dishonesty of Paul Krugman.

P.J. O’ROURKE: The New York Times Hits Bottom. “Judging by what I’ve heard from my fellow conservatives, the issue is decided. The New York Times is a worthless, truthless, vicious institution. But I disagree. I think things are worse than that. . . . If we’re going to discuss dark, paranoid corners of the Internet that have an unwholesome influence on our national life, there’s the New York Times online.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

O’Rourke, of course, is exactly right. Part of my Saturday routine is to buy a copy of the Times and then read it over lunch. This past Saturday, the Times was either sold out or no longer available at the mini-mart where I usually buy it so I got a copy of the Saturday/Sunday edtion of the Wall Street Journal instead. It was excellent! I’m not business oriented (could care less about who is buying out whom, whether pork bellies are going up or down, etc.) and so always resisted the Journal. But the news section was great and the “Review” section fabulous. The Times has now lost my $2.00 to the Journal.

This would strike fear into Pinch’s heart, if he had one. Another interesting sign of the NYT’s descent and — more significantly — the WSJ’s ascendancy is the huge brouhaha over Amy Chua’s parenting piece, which until very recently would have been something in the NYT, not the WSJ.

MICKEY KAUS: “Nobody wants to be seen as a single issue group, especially groups that actually are single-issue groups. They want to be treated as Americans first. That’s a good thing, even when it’s phony.”

ANOTHER BLOGGER sours on Politico. “I still think of Politico as a political blog, but it now is more of a mainstream media operation populated by people who could just as easily be working at The Washington Post or The New York Times if those newspapers were not in such decline.” Ouch.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): Investors Have Been Fleeing Municipal Bonds. “A few factors can be blamed for this sudden retreat, but the one making all the headlines is the fear that cash-strapped states and municipalities issuing the bonds will renege on promises to investors.”

SHERIFF CHARGED IN TEXAS WHISTLEBLOWER-PERSECUTION CASE: “A state grand jury in Winkler County, Tex., has indicted the sheriff, the county attorney and a hospital administrator for their roles in orchestrating the prosecution of two whistle-blowing nurses after they had reported allegations of malpractice.”

ADVICE TO OBAMA on that “civility schtick,” from The New Republic.

WHY THEY’D RATHER TALK ABOUT SARAH PALIN (CONT’D): America: Paydown Problems.

As it stands today, the US borrows about 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Curbing the budget deficit has been the stated mission of Mr Ryan, a rising Republican star, for several years. But such calls for action have multiplied in Washington in recent months, igniting what some say is the fiercest debate over fiscal and budgetary policy in decades.

The risks are big. If the government rushes into austerity, cutting too much and too quickly, it could stunt economic recovery. But if the political system cannot forge some kind of consensus on steps to restore US deficits to sustainable levels, the danger is potentially even greater: a sovereign debt crisis in the world’s largest economy.

Fortunately, the country’s in the very best of hands.