Timothy Egan, liberal New York Times reporter turned left-wing, Rush Limbaugh-despising online columnist for nytimes.com, tried to smear fiscal conservatives in Congress as akin to the violent anarchists (actually leftists) who rampaged through Seattle in 1999 in a “protest” against the World Trade Organization, using hammers to smash windows of retail chain stores.

Egan opened his Thursday evening post, “The Republicans’ Flirtation With Anarchy,” with scenes from the infamous Seattle riots in 1999 (which he covered for the Times as a reporter).

Amid shattered glass and the black smoke of urban pyres, I found myself in a riot some years ago -- the anarchists-led assault on the World Trade Organization meetings of 1999. At the height of what became known as The Battle of Seattle, I bumped into an otherwise mild-mannered, libertarian-leaning friend on the streets, gasping at the bitter taste of tear gas. He was ecstatic.

Tuesday’s New York Times featured a rare excursion into print by Timothy Egan, liberal Times reporter turned leftist nytimes.com blogger, excoriating Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan and the "Tea Party political illiterates" as greed-heads for wanting to reform the bankrupt Medicare system: "The Need for Greed."

The bet was audacious from the beginning, and given the miserable, low-down tenor of contemporary politics, not unfathomable: Could you divide the country between greedy geezers and everyone else as a way to radically alter the social contract?

But in order for the Republican plan to turn Medicare, one of most popular government programs in history, into a much-diminished voucher system, the greed card had to work.

Timothy Egan, liberal New York Times reporter turned very liberal Times online columnist, thinks that Americans will be better off when the old, tired, hypertensive Tea Partiers depart the scene for good and let the lively youth take over saving the world, in "Save Us, Millennials," also featured in Friday's print edition.

When an electorate is red-faced and fist-clenched, when the collective national blood pressure is 160 over 100, when the big issues of the day are mired in tired minds, it's time to turn to the great, renewable resource of any vibrant democracy: the kids.The millennials, that echo boomer generation born after 1982, have not been heard from of late, ever since proving that they could pull away from their Facebook pages long enough to help elect a president.

....We've been led to believe that the grumpy, the cranky and the bitter will drive the midterm elections in the fall. You would never know, with nightly images of jowly Tea Partiers and their inchoate discontents, that people ages 18 to 29 years old made up a larger percentage of the 2008 electorate than those over 65.

Timothy Egan, a New York Times reporter for 18 years before turning into a liberal blogger at nytimes.com, demanded in a Wednesday night posting that the next Supreme Court justice hail from a law school other than Harvard or Yale: "Supreme Club."

At last count, there were about 200 law schools in the United States accredited by the American Bar Association, but apparently only two of them -- Harvard and Yale -- can be a path to serving on the highest court in the land.

It was surprising enough to see that with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court will not have a single Protestant among its black-robed elite. But equally jaw-dropping was the fact that without Stevens, every member of the court has attended Harvard or Yale law school.

Fair enough. But he goes off the rails claiming that Stevens, who has held down the liberal wing of the court for years, is actually a moderate. In fact, Egan seems to go further than even liberal former Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse in bizarrely claiming that there are no liberals on the court, just four moderates, balanced, presumably, against five conservatives! This on a court that includes, besides Stevens, former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Stevens, one of four moderates on the Court, has held that seat. He is not just the last World War II veteran to serve, but as a product Northwestern University Law School, he succeeded a very iconoclastic justice, William O. Douglas, whose law school days were not spent in Cambridge or New Haven.

Liberal New York Times reporter turned liberal nytimes.com blogger, Timothy Egan, posted "Capture the Flag" on Thursday, on how heartening it was to see American flags pop up in liberal domains. The post was ostensibly a plea for people of all political views to have faith in the future good of America. But Egan excused liberals for their lack of public patriotism during the Bush years, citing "years of sanctioned torture and war built on deceit."

Traveling in California and New York over the last couple of weeks, I noticed something in the summer landscape of these two deeply blue states that is more reminiscent of rural America this time of year -- a surfeit of American flags.

Among the offerings of street vendors in Harlem and outdoor stalls near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the flag is often fused with the image of President Obama, a burst of color against a bleak wall, sometimes with a Superman motif. In California, I saw Old Glory on bicycles in the Bay Area, on backpacks in Yosemite and at campgrounds under the redwoods.It's not unusual to see a flag in liberal provinces, of course. But in the Bush years of sanctioned torture and war built on deceit, many Americans withdrew from overt displays of patriotism. Some said they were ashamed of their country.