Oop, that squirted out unproofed and unsigned. Sorry.
Looking it over quickly, I meant to say there was *no* duplicity between the two groups of mad policy makers -- their interests actually overlapped -- and the mystery word in the last sentence is "barnacle concrete."
And just to wrap up the subject of The Nation -- I've read Jason Vest before, in the Voice, back when I used to read the Voice, and as far as I remember, he never had this problem before of completely obscuring his story. In fact, if anything, I remember his articles tending toward the opposite vice of sometimes having more story than the facts warranted.
Right wing magazines still suck -- no amount of editing can make up for dog wrong arguments. But the guy at the LA Times is right about one thing: the Nation is not edited with the goal of making its writing lively. And it could be.
Michael