I met Tim Russert only once, before a "Meet the Press" debate between two Senate candidates from my home state of Pennsylvania. Russert was engaging, impressively au courant with Keystone State politics and, well, a nice guy. I also admired his work, and I was sad when he died before his time. (You never hear about someone dying at his time.)

Still, I cringed at the excessiveness of his obsequies. Journalism has a long, and appealingly human, tradition of providing a little nicer send-off to colleagues than someone in another business might receive. That's why newspapers give their own printers and truck drivers suspiciously long obituaries. The over-the-top eulogies for Russert were a species of this phenomenon, but that didn't make them less bizarre. I like to think that Russert, looking down, would want to interrupt his media mourners in mid-gush just the way he called politicians on their prevarications.

But at least that's over now -- except that it isn't. Tomorrow the Newseum (I know, it's a goofy name for an interesting resource) will unveil a new exhibit: a re-creation of Russert's office at NBC News, complete with his desk "stacked high with research material, books and handwritten notes, illustrating the rigorous preparation Russert put into each show" and "mementos of his beloved Buffalo Bills." What, no Rolodex?

This has just a whiff of the medieval Catholic practice of venerating relics of the saints, which probably would amuse Russert -- and, I hope, embarrass him.

Maybe it's because I'm a long-ago high school newspaper editor, but I was shocked and appalled (nobody is ever shocked but not appalled) by a New York Times report that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy -- "widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values" -- insisted on reviewing and tweaking an article about his appearance at a private school in New York. The student newspaper at the Dalton School published a tantalizing editor's note saying: "We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints."

Then I read the Times article again and discerned some shades of ethical gray. It's true, as Frank D. LoMonte of the Student Press Law Center said, that "in the professional world, it would be a nonstarter if a source demanded prior approval of coverage of a speech." But apparently Kennedy's purpose wasn't to vet the article as a whole but to reconsider the felicity of some of his phraseology.

It wasn't clear whether he made this request in advance. But if he did, and the agreement was confined to allowing him to polish his prose, I'm less shocked but still somewhat appalled. My own practice as a reporter was to refuse at the outset to show my completed story to an interviewee. As for quotes, I never would allow someone to retract or rephrase an answer because of second thoughts about its political effect.

But I made an exception when I did a series of interviews with prominent intellectuals. One law professor, in explaining his constitutional philosophy, used an analogy in reference to the Constitution. He later called me to suggest a different analogy that he said more precisely made his point. I let him change it, because the whole purpose of the piece was to let him present his thinking in his own words.

The difference here is that the Kennedy story was an account of an event at which an audience heard the justice's original words. That tips the scales of journalistic justice. Kennedy said what he said; if he wanted to correct it, he should have written a letter to the editor.

Actually, there's a precedent. Last year the court ruled that the death penalty couldn't be imposed for rape. Writing for the court, Kennedy cited as proof that the penalty was cruel and unusual the fact that, while 26 states and the federal government, had the death penalty, "only six of those jurisdictions authorize the death penalty for the rape of a child." After the decision, a blogger pointed out that the Uniform Code of Military Justice allowed the death sentence in the rape of a child, a fact the court had overlooked

The court added a footnote rectifying its omission -- but it didn't blot out the original language.

--Michael McGough

I never met Robert "Prince of Darkness" Novak but my association with the columnist who died today goes back to my earliest days in journalism. As a twentysomething copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was responsible for proofreading (and condensing) various syndicated columns, from James Reston to William F. Buckley Jr. to Rowland Evans and Novak.

A lot of obituaries highlighted Novak's scoop about the undercover status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. But in his later career Novak was known less as a reporter and more as an opiner and television talking head. His metamorphosis says a lot about the evolution (or devolution) of Washington journalism.

The title of the Evans-Novak column, "Inside Report," said it all. Like the more decorous Reston column, it was a form of foreign correspondence, initiating Mr. and Mrs. Heartland into the exotic culture of the capital. I remember amusing myself with a parody of "Inside Report" that went something like this: "A whispered conversation at the yellowed urinals of a hotel men's room explains why President Ford's defense budget is in grave trouble." Then came open primaries, C-SPAN and the celebrification of what used to be backroom advisers.

Insider journalism wasn't the only casualty of this transformation. So was the political novel. Potboilers like "Advise and Consent" and "Seven Days in May" depended for their popularity on their familiarity with the hidden Washington of political strategists, lobbyists and reporters for whom everything was off the record. Today those once-shadowy figures blab and blog their way to fame.  Why rely on a novelist's depiction of a fictional James Carville when the real one is all over CNN?

If you want the thrill of a behind-the-scenes potboiler, look for a book like "The Da Vinci Code" or its imitators. As I've written before, the sacred precincts of the Vatican are an even better setting for skullduggery than the Oval Office or the Senate majority leader's hideaway. Conspiracies are still being hatched in smoke-filled rooms, but these rooms smell of incense, not tobacco. (Is that part of the reason Novak converted to Catholicism?)

Photo credit: AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

-- Michael McGough

Cue the ominous soundtrack and over-earnest narration. No, really -- this is a terrible story:

Whole enraging, armed-revolt-inspiring article from the New York Times here.

Or, if you're into the whole brevity thing, here's a short version of the NY Times' story: In this recession, when individual credit scores are likely to take major hits, more companies are using credit histories as a quick way to whittle down growing pools of applicants, thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle -- and few states are doing anything about it.

Before you get overcome with rage, realize that the NY Times provides zero statistics to prove this problem is really an epidemic, relying instead individual anecdotes from down-on-their-luck Juan Ochoas and job counselors. It's certainly not enough evidence to provide the groundwork for legislating more restrictions on the hiring and firing decisions of private companies, a move that certainly wouldn't help their efforts to grow and power economic recovery. Besides, I'm inclined to think their heartless human resources departments know better than the part of my brain given to populist sympathizing what red flags on a background check indicate potentially risky behavior in the future.

But really, these kind of despairing credit-check job rejection represent the kind of insensitivity that inspires the masses to grab the pitchforks, light the torches and storm the bastille -- or worse, vote for John Edwards and watch Lou Dobbs. The same goes for the board-room suits that freeze salaries or lay off workers while handing their executives handsome bonuses. It's greedy, tone deaf and sinful to the point that there ought to be a circle of hell set aside for those who practice it. But it shouldn't be illegal, and the offending businesses may want to consider improving their public image.

What are your thoughts? Should the feds and state governments curtail such such seemingly irrelevant pre-employment credit checks, or should laissez faire economic principals prevail? Take our poll, leave a comment or both.

One last thought on the Henry Louis Gates Jr. case: If Gates had been equally eminent but a professor at somewhere other than Harvard, would the media have regarded his ordeal as such a "teachable moment"?

Maybe it's sour grapes because they rejected me, but take Harvard out of the equation and the story might not have become an iconic example of strained race relations. Sure, Harvard's location added to the plot line: Tension between Harvard and the Irish working class of Cambridge (and Boston) has been grist for a lot of pop-sociology journalism and some excellent fiction. (Check out "The Governor" by Edward R.F. Sheehan if you can find it in a second-hand bookshop.)

Google "Harvard" and "New York Times" and you get 8 million results. Replace "Harvard" with "Cornell" (which is in New York State) and you'll get a measly 1.82 million results, and Dartmouth must content itself with 425,000. Other indices of Harvard's disproportionate valuation are its over-representation on the Supreme Court (though Justice David H. Souter's retirement reduced the Harvard-educated cohort to six) and the national press corps.

If Gates, who used to teach at Duke, had been nabbed by the Durham, N.C., police, would Obama have had to bring out the beer?

Much ado over the last few days in newspapers and the blogosphere about healthcare reform. Here's a partial round-up, starting with the left.

The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson writes that forcing bipartisanship on reform could result in a modern-day “Missouri Compromise that reconciles opposites at the cost of good policy.” Meyerson says giving in to what he says are extreme right-wing demands won’t fix healthcare:

Charleston Gazette columnist Joseph Wyatt compares Congress’ blocking of healthcare reform to Alabama Gov. George Wallace's symbolic attempt to prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama by blocking a campus doorway. Wyatt also looks for the flaws in the Canadian healthcare system that conservatives often cite as their reasons to oppose healthcare reform:

At the Weekly Standard's blog, Jeffrey H. Anderson rails against the increasing costs of the healthcare programs that the government already runs. He argues against the idea that military healthcare is the best, calling it "first-class-meets-DMV-style medicine." He provides some entertaining anecdotes about his wife’s experience with military healthcare: 

Theodore Dalrymple -- nom de plum of Anthony Daniels, a British physician -- writes in the Wall Street Journal that no one has a right to healthcare. He says that equal healthcare isn’t desirable because “to provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality.” He says there are more important necessities in life than medical care:

Finally, in the New York Times, former chairman of National Transportation Safety Board Jim Hall says those working for healthcare reform should take a lesson from his agency and have an investigative body be in charge of uprooting the causes of medical error:

Today's memorial service for Michael Jackson at the privately owned Staples Center reminds The Times editorial board of a sad fact of life in Los Angeles: It's a city without a public square. Though the backers of LA Live once promised that the downtown entertainment mall would become L.A.'s version of Times Square, the fact remains that it's a private space whose owners can bar the public anytime they choose.

We also weigh in on President Obama's trip to Russia, which isn't expected to accomplish much -- but even a small thaw in relations between the two countries, and the modest improvement represented by the nuclear weapons pact concluded Monday, is better than the chilly status quo.

And we ponder the lessons to be learned from the example of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who died Monday at 93. Though many see parallels between the mistakes made in Iraq and the mistakes made by McNamara in Vietnam, we think the larger lesson is that using yesterday's solutions to today's problems is often the pathway to failure.

Over on the opposite page, columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks all the sturm und drang over the canceled "salons" by the Washington Post, in which lobbyists were invited to pay heavily to attend get-togethers with the newspaper's journalists and top politicians, amounts to little more than posing. After all, many publications offer similar meet-and-greet opportunities, Goldberg says.

The hand-wringing over genetically modified foods, meanwhile, reminds author Tom Standage of another food-related hysteria from a few centuries ago -- over the potato. When the tubers were first discovered in the New World, Europeans feared they were a dangerous, unholy poison. They got over it, just as they'll probably eventually get over their irrational fears about improved crops.

And psychiatry professor Sander L. Gilman cautions against jumping to conclusions about Michael Jackson's cosmetic surgery. True, the King of Pop clearly was fond of surgical reshaping, but that doesn't necessarily indicate self-loathing.

* Illustration by Bob Daly / For the Times

When LA Times readers picked up their newspapers this morning, they were greeted on the front page by the dark, outsized image of a vampire with blood dripping from his mouth.  This striking picture advertised HBO's television series "True Blood" (the point being that the new season starts this weekend) and covered the entire page under the Times masthead.  The ad relegated the top stories of the day to a trivialized insert section. OK maybe trivialized is too strong a word, but the ad still pushed some boundaries. What did you think?

--Kevin Patra

Tea, anyone?  During the week ending April 18, The Times received 669 usable letters, 322 of which were in our Top Five Topics.  More than 100 focused on last Wednesday's Tea Party protests.

• Tea Parties:  102 letters, reacting to Times coverage of the April 15 rallies, including this Op-Ed by Marc Cooper;
• Front page ad:  89 letters, most excoriating our newspaper for running a large advertisement for a new show on NBC on the front page. Also included here are a few letters about a Times ad for "The Soloist," based on the friendship between Times columnist Steve Lopez and musician Nathaniel Ayers;
• Pirates:  65 letters, responding to coverage of the pirate crisis off the coast of Africa;
• John Yoo:  37 letters, reflecting on this Op-Ed and this Op-Ed debating whether former Justice Department official Yoo -- one of the authors of the infamous Bush administration "torture memos" --  should or should not be allowed to teach law at Chapman University, where he's currently a visiting professor; and
• Rosa Brooks:  29 letters, commenting on the columnist's last piece for The Times and her new job at the Defense Department.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart. 

For more on The Times' letters process, visit our Letters FAQ online. 

In case you're wondering why you haven't seen your comment on this piece yet, it's not because we're censoring them. We typically approve 98% of the stuff that comes in, rejecting only things that are profane, threatening or hate speech. We get a fair amount of comments that include words not publishable in a newspaper, and we reject those out of hand. The other two categories, not so much. We also look askance at comments that insult other commenters without adding any substance to the conversation. Go ahead and insult the writer of the piece, that's fair game.

So what's the hold-up? There are two (robotically evil or simply human) forces at work:

1) Our publishing platform online is hideously slow and finicky. We'll approve comments, then they'll wait sometimes for hours -- literally -- to make it onto the page. I'd love to work with a better platform, but we don't have a lot of spare cash these days.

2) We don't monitor the comment boards around the clock. Sorry, but we just don't have the staff for that. I wish it could be otherwise, 'cause lots of people read and comment early in the morning or late at night, and we don't want to cut them out of the discussion. But for now, it least, it doesn't work that way.

UPDATED, 2:13 p.m. The cookies used by our site seem to freeze the comments counter at whatever level it was when you first hit the page. To see the latest comments, click on the link at the top labeled Discuss Article. There's still a time lag between when comments are approved and when they post, alas.

UPDATED, 5:03 p.m. Actually, to see the latest comments, you may have to clear your browsing history -- the temporary copies of the web pages you visit that your browser automatically saves. Go to the Tools menu in IE or Firefox and work from there. (You have to go the Options/Privacy submenu in Firefox to get to the right place.) Yes, that's a pain in the neck, and no, we're not trying to make it that way.