Okay, I know that picking on George Will might seem like cheap fun, but as an oped columnist for the Washington Post we are supposed to take him seriously.

I hope the marginal benefit of not pissing off homophobes in swing states who weren’t likely to vote for the President anyway was worth it.

Today’s column by Robert Samuelson tries to tell us that Franklin Roosevelt would be appalled by the current state of the Social Security program. Of course, he produces not a single iota of evidence to support this position, although it is very clear that Samuelson doesn’t like Social Security.

Once again, the economic community is scrambling to find the reasons why they were suprised by the March 2012 jobs report. The monthly report from ADP had private sector jobs at 209K increase for March 2012 which apparently led many economists to predict a similar number for the official report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was released on Friday.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is dismayed that President Obama would call into question the political legitimacy of the Supreme Court should they overturn the Affordable Care Act, a decisin she also says would be not only bad for health care but bad for the Court itself. Bad Barack. Bad Ruth.

A recent poll says a majority of the American people want us to leave Afghanistan right away. In addition the poll found that after weighing the war’s costs and benefits, only 35 percent of the country think the war was worth fighting, while 60 percent think it was not worth it.

Sunday, the Washington Post ran a piece from the Pete Peterson funded Fiscal Times warning about the “debt bomb” from student loan debt. (The Post did not identify Pete Peterson as the funding source for the Fiscal Times.)

The piece manages to get just about everything wrong. To start with, the piece did not even get the rate of student debt accumulation right.

Rick Santorum — a pious Roman Catholic — has gotten knocked for losing the Catholic vote to the Mormon Mitt Romney, but those who note this generally take a simplistic view of “the Catholic vote.” They confuse the positions taken by the bishops with the positions embraced by rank and file Catholics, and wonder why Santorum doesn’t get more Catholic votes. Hint: maybe it’s because lots of Catholics disagree with their bishops. See “contraception” and “divorce and remarriage.”

That said, Rick Santorum is poised to win the Kansas caucuses today, and if he does, it will be because of the support of the conservative “purity Catholics” that are more numerous in Kansas than other parts of the US church. And in a caucus state, you can be sure that they’ll turn out.

The Washington Post had a front page fluff piece on the IMF of the sort that would be expected in a paid advertisement. The IMF had enormous sway in determining economic policy in developing countries in the decades of the 80s and the 90s, especially in Latin America where many countries were following the Washington Consensus neo-liberal model. This led to two decades of dismal economic growth and weak progress on social indicators like health care and education measures.

The deluge of sorrow-filled tributes and reminisces that have been written by other journalists already testify to how highly Anthony Shadid was regarded among his peers. But let me add a few words from a blogger’s perspective to explain how special he truly was.