How to say the date this year? Judging by last night’s New Years Eve broadcasts, I think American media may have finally abandoned the “Two-thousand” construction when saying the name of the year. I heard a lot more “Yippee, it’s Twenty-Twelve!” than “Two-thousand-twelve” on the teevee machine.

This is what we do, human beings, we look around our own lives and we talk about what’s going on. It’s the only way we do this, the only way we really connect. And as a reporter sometimes your job is to point the camera at something somebody else doesn’t want it pointed at, and tell everyone you can as much as you can about what’s going on. And that job is dangerous, and it’s scary, and it’s necessary as blood.

The world that anti-journalism conservatives, the ones who rant about the “lamestream media” and chat and wave their fists at reporters, envision? That world, in which “enemy journalists” publishing stuff they don’t like and stuff that contradicts their worldview are harassed out of business, beaten, even killed? It’s happening now in Egypt. I hope they’re watching. I hope they’re paying attention.

And I hope, though I have no reason on earth to believe they’ll ever think this hard, that they’re wondering if this is really so very funny after all.

And so begins the Day of Departure, the mass demonstration called by the Youth of Tahrir Square for after Friday prayers.

The passionate media poobah dismissal of Scott McLellan’s new book, and the insistence that he has joined the ranks of liberal bloggers in an outlandish attack on their integrity, is pretty amusing. I guess it’s on us to remind everyone how Time Magazine knew that what McClellan was telling them about Plame wasn’t true, but they printed it anyway…