The description of Krugman as “hateful” has a nice straight outta 2003 quality to it. Of course there is some hateful political rhetoric out there. But the effort to stigmatize all strident political commentary as “hate” is annoying, and the effort to exclusively stigmatize strident liberal political commentary as hate is absurd. And this — rather than, say, regular appearances by Nobel Prize winning economist and hugely popular political columnist Paul Krugman — is what we get on our terrifyingly liberal MSNBC.

Paul Krugman points to a valuable chart from the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center comparing estimated impacts of the McCain and Obama health care plans. Much more informative than your average newspaper article.