POWERS THAT BE: Another useful column by Bill Powers of the "National Jounal." This one takes journalists to task for a failure of original thinking in reporting on the scandals of the day:

The media can't and shouldn't control the fatuities of pols who wander into our space, but we can control our own impulse to turn all news into a rerun. Is it really necessary for every media person from Maureen Dowd to Bill O'Reilly to trot out the robber barons of a hundred years ago, whenever Enron, Martha Stewart, and WorldCom are under discussion? Are the constant references to the Gilded Age (or the "second Gilded Age," as Robert Novak called it) doing anything to make this story more compelling or understandable?

To me, they're doing the opposite. To label the current global political situation "the Great Game" -- a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling to describe a completely different world -- as The New York Times did recently in a headline is to cover it with dust and cobwebs. Aren't writers supposed to invent new ways of describing the world? Every time I see one of these creaking references, I get the same sinking feeling I have when a historian comes on TV to observe, with studied sagacity, that if you think the current scandal is wild, you don't know about Teapot Dome. It's all happened before, you see.

Just read the whole thing.