Okay, it is pretty much a given that David Brooks is a dunderhead, right?  He sees the country as a land of Bobos and delights in neatly splitting the country into easily differentiated groups: the Red Staters and the Blue Staters, of course, but also the Urban and the Exurban, the Country Mice and the City Mice, the Opera Lovers and the NASCAR Lovers.  Everyone fits comfortably into either one category or the other.  All complete bullshit, naturally, but the guy has made a hell of a living spewing it.

In case you missed it, Brook's NYT column today is a refreshing change! Brooks offers an evaluation of the SS debate and he goes to great lengths to take both Republicans /and/ Democrats to task for their failure to reform Social Security.  He declares, right off the bat, that SS reform is dead and frames his column as an "obit."  Reform is desperately needed, he says, but both sides screwed up badly.

John Kerry has managed to get nine newspapers (so far) that backed Bush in 2000 to endorse him this year.  A few papers that backed Bush in 2000 have declined to endorse anyone, which amounts to a black eye for Bush anyway.  Fine.
But now, the York Daily Record, from Pennsylvania, has become the only paper in the nation that endorsed Gore in 2000 to switch to Bush.

These guys need to get CREAMED.  Write them a letter today.  Their website is at http://ydr.com/news/main/  

Okay, a brief intro:

I've been an on-again, off-again correspondant with Bruce Dold, the Editor of the editorial page at the Chicago Tribune ever since he was a columnist. In those days, I often agreed with him and wrote to tell him so. He would often write back, thanking me for the words of encouragement. (I'm happy to say that I have similar relationships with other columnists...some not so nice.)

A few years ago, he was promoted from columnist to editor and his columns disappeared, replaced with the anonymous Trib editorials (written by Dold and Ann Marie Lipinski). But the style changed dramatically. The Trib being a Republican rag at heart, Dold's columns took a hard turn to the right.