Raines resigns! I can't speak to the newsroom culture at the Times, and I thought Raines brought a renewed freshness to the paper when he took over just days before September 11, 2001. In fact, the seven pulitzers the paper won for its coverage of the attacks of that day and the subsequent war in Afghanistan were well deserved. The work the paper put out during that time -- from tracking the terrorist web that led to the attack to the wrenching "Portraits of Grief" -- was a reminder of how special and important The New York Times is.

But I think this is a good thing overall. The paper clearly has been killing itself lately with a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. One had the sense that in the face of the Raines autocracy, the editors were beginning to fail to make tough choices and just put it all out there, a la Blair and Braggs. And great writers were leaving to go to the WaPost and LATimes.

Then, of course, there's the most egregious reporter on the paper who, perhaps because of Raines' star-system, keeps her job. I mean, some papers had reporters embedded with the military in Iraq. The Dept. of Defence had their own writer embedded at the Times. Howard Kurtz's story is an indication of just how bad things were in the newsroom -- leaking e-mails?

*****

That inside-the-beltway maven Josh Micah Marshall finds a great quote about how hard, really hard, Bush's tax cut architect worked to keep some measure of progressiveness in the "Honey, I shrunk the kids" tax bill.