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."