In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama urged members of Congress to be more transparent about their interactions with lobbyists. Yet this same week, members of the House Republican Caucus will attend a retreat sponsored by the non-profit Congressional Institute, where they will mingle privately with lobbyists.

Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review writes, "Jonathan Gruber is an economist from MIT. Jonathan Oberlander is a political scientist from the University of North Carolina. Both are health policy experts and, from what we can tell, both know their stuff. But the press has counted on Gruber rather than Oberlander to give gravitas to their stories.