Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 10:18 AM by Gene

We hate to say it again, but say it again we must: NEWS HACKS act as though we spend every morning going out to the stoop and getting the daily paper, that we take every ink-stained word of it at face value, and that the most high-tech we have in our home is granddad's 1934 Philco cabinet radio. Listen to this graf from ASSociated Press flack Jim:

Murtha, coming from the working-class district around Johnstown, has strong ties with organized labor. He is more conservative than many of his Democratic colleagues on other issues, opposing abortion rights and backing gun owner rights.

We've read enough of the hacks to know when they're trying to pull their usual unbiased, nonpartisan snow job on us, so we looked it up for ourselves: the ACU ranked Rep. RESPECTED X. MARINE a 40 last year -- his lifetime rating's a 33 -- and the ADA ranked him a 75 (his lifetime rating is in the fifties or sixties). Now we know these partisan tablepounders rank by key votes, and they reward the ones who love them; but it does sound as though ol' RESPECTED's just a little south of conservative.

A NEUHARTHISM OF THE WEEK AWARD (majority-leader-spokesman division) to JIM!