Fake-Outs

I guess we all dreamed it, those of us who could swear that Scott McLellan spent most of last week blaming the Newsweek Koran-in-the-toilet story for riots in Afghanistan. McLellan now comes close to denying that he ever said any such thing. Having that guy in the green robe hanging around the White House insisting that the Afghan riots were caused by, uh, Afghan stuff probably reminded Scott that he almost didn't say what he said.

But Tuesday's news was dominated by two other cases of stories that went off the rails into the world of the never-happened. The much-predicted roadblock in the Senate disappeared in a whiff of behavior which you could only call....Senatorial. And Jay Leno's ballyhooed testimony in the MJ trial was more hooey than bally. Did we dream these events were going to happen, too?

When I was editing the news pages of my college newspaper, I enraged certain members of the student council by refusing to go along with the tradition that the front page be dominated by such blockbusters as "Sophomore Dance Scheduled for Next Month". When confronted on the issue, I found myself blurting something I later found to be truthful--"News," I said, "is what's happened, not somebody's idea of what's going to happen."

Members of the journo trade, used to seeing advance texts of speeches not yet delivered and polls about behavior not yet engaged in, barely stifle giggles at the bare-chested predictions delivered each week on the McLaghlin shoutfest, yet a big part of the daily news diet is made up of stories about things that haven't yet happened, and sometimes, as on Tuesday, never do. Perhaps the same editors who are busy scrubbing single anonymous persons off the list of acceptable sources can make some time to remove future-tense stories from anywhere near the front page...

UPDATE: Now that the filibuster fuss has settled, maybe somebody can explain this to me: the Dems are mad because the Reps used the "hold" system to block Clinton's judicial appointees, correct? As I understand it, the system allows any one--ONE!--Senator to block an appointee from his/her home state, confidentially, for whatever or no reason for as long as
said Senator may desire. The Dems, seeking occasional revenge, chose the filibuster as their method. The question: why didn't the Dems use the much more surreptitious (and effective) "hold" system on the Bush nominees they found egregious?

SECOND UPDATE: Many emailers have written in response to the question above, most of them linking to partisan liberal websites or blogs which offer somewhat less than factual answers (e.g., "Orrin Hatch said this policy would end"). However, one emailer linked to a blogger who provided a handy chart, courtesy of Kevin Drum, of the recent history of the (correct name) "blue-slip" rule.
My question should have been: yes, you can Google your way, slowly and eventually, to answer the query above. But since the DC-NY media were trying to gin up this controversy to a point where America might care (they failed), why did no MSM bother to explain why the Dems felt forced to fall back on the filibuster? Was that not a major unreported part of the story?