From Obama's "liberal" voting record to dispatches from the Taliban's front line, Charles Kaiser rounds up this week's media winners and sinners

Sinners: Charles Green and the rest of the editors of the National Journal, for their ridiculous method of determining who has the "most liberal" voting record in the Senate.

Just before Super Tuesday, the National Journal published a story asserting that Barack Obama was "the most liberal senator in 2007." Here are seven reasons that this study is meaningless, except to the people in charge of attack ads for the Republican National Committee:

• In 2006, Obama was the 10th most liberal senator; in 2005, he was the 16th most liberal, according to the same statistical methods.

• The 2007 rankings are based on 99 votes—and Obama only participated in 66 of them.

• John McCain missed so many votes in 2007 that he avoided being rated altogether.

• In 2004, the National Journal obliged the Republicans by making John Kerry it's number-one liberal—entirely on the basis of his votes on economic issues, because he hadn't voted frequently enough in the foreign policy and social issues categories to be rated at all.

• In 2007, a vote to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission was counted as a "liberal" vote—as were all votes in opposition to the war in Iraq.

• Karl Rove has already said, "Nonpartisan ratings say that [Obama] has a more liberal and a more straight-party voting record than Senator Clinton does. Pretty hard to do."

• Adam Nagourney, chief political correspondent for the New York Times, told FCP he would never use anything like the National Journal's rating to assess a candidate's voting record. When he saw the Journal's ratings, he said, his first thought was, "regardless of its merits, that's going to be a Republican attack ad."

Winner: Martin Peretz, for a surprisingly nuanced defense of Obama's relationship with Pastor Jeremiah Wright: "Every candidate has noxious supporters, and it is simply illogical and unfair to impute the views of these supporters to their favored candidate, especially when the candidate clearly disagrees." Peretz said that Obama's cadence in his speech about race reminded him the "disciplined thinking" of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Turns out Peretz has some differences with his own rabbi, especially when he declares, "'We rush towards war and crawl to peace." According to Peretz, "This is a lie!" So why does he still pray in this synagogue? "Because, aside from the offending 'hip' politics of the rabbis, there is an all-embracing warmth that suffuses the fold."

Winner: The Globe and Mail, for training an Afghan researcher to conduct a series of videotaped interviews with Taliban fighters. One conclusion: The men who spoke were less motivated by religion than they were by hatred for foreign invaders.

Winner: Eric Alterman, for a comprehensive (and comprehensively depressing) assessment in the New Yorker of the bleak future for American newspapers.

Winners: The New York Times and the Washington Post, for two excellent pieces about the state of the oil industry in Iraq. Richard A. Oppel, Jr. reported in the Times that "at least one-third, and possibly much more, of the fuel from Iraq's largest refinery here is diverted to the black market, according to American military officials. Tankers are hijacked, drivers are bribed, papers are forged and meters are manipulated—and some of the earnings go to insurgents who are still killing more than 100 Iraqis a week."

In the Washington Post, Steven Mufson wrote that insurgents are pouring their profits into destroying the oil infrastructure, driving up prices and scaring off investors. Though Iraqi reserves are capable of producing up to six billion barrels of oil a day, Iraq struggles to reach a prewar output of 2.5 billion barrels per day. If Bush's goal for the war was to control plentiful oil supplies, Mufson said, he's failed miserably.

And on the News Hour, the indispensable Juan Cole identified oil as one of the main reasons for renewed violence in Basra: "There are several party militias that are fighting turf wars with one another, in addition to tribal mafias, that are seeking to control rights to gasoline and kerosene smuggling worth billions a year. And they're siphoning it off from the central government. They're basically stealing it from Mr. al-Maliki, and he wants them to stop."

Sinners: Graydon Carter and David Friend, for collaborating on a 10,427-word piece in the April Vanity Fair about Jack Worthington, "a respectable financier," who came to the magazine with the claim that John F. Kennedy was his father. Unfortunately, every piece of hard evidence Friend came up with contradicted that claim—but Graydon decided to print the endless article anyway. How come? "Because—Who knows? What if? Remember the 'Deep Throat' scoop?—it just might be true." Next time, spike it instead of giving it a cover line.

Winner: Mark Morford, for another enraged (and deadly accurate) column in the San Francisco Chronicle about our magnificent president: "[N]ow Bush is in his final year. This is both the good news, and also the very, very bad news. Because we are now in the death throes of the worst administration in modern history, entering the period of serious consequences, of economic collapse, environmental impact, record oil prices, international recoil, rashes, boils, inexplicable vomiting. Fun for the whole family."

Winner: David Wessel, for a brilliant page-one explainer on the meaning of the Fed's rescue efforts, beginning with the collapse of Bear Stearns. The bottom line: "The Government of Last Resort is working with the Lender of Last Resort to shore up the housing and credit markets to avoid Great Depression II," economist Ed Yardeni wrote to clients.

Sinners: Major donors to the Democratic party, who wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, urging her to reconsider her position that superdelegates should follow the lead of elected delegates when they choose the Democratic nominee for president. It's still possible to make this nomination worth as much as Hubert Humphey's was in 1968. (Value then: Close to zero.) This could be one of them.

Winner: Arthur Laurents, for proving that even at 90, you're as young as you feel—by garnering the review of a lifetime for his direction of the new Gypsy with Patti LuPone.

Winner: The Onion, for finally discovering the real reason gays are not allowed to serve openly in the American military: "They're special, pure and rare, like a gleaming diamond, or a snow-white colt. We must protect them."