"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth," wrote H.L. Mencken. Heather Havrilesky updates Mencken's thesis by examining some of the big liars of the year -- Stephen Glass, "reality TV," Jayson Blair, and of course George W. Bush.

Conservative columnist George Will doesn't think it's anybody's business that he's been paid $25,000 a year by scandal-plagued media magnate Conrad Black. Will is one of several mostly conservative pundits and politicians who got paid to sit on the advisory board of Black's company, Hollinger International.

"For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government - cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters," report Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound.