Time magazine columnist Joe Klein appears to be the latest Judith Miller— ie, a careerist journalist and damned shoddy reporter who has been manipulated by the “well-placed sources” he depends on for advancement and whom he will protect at all cost. A column he wrote last week has been dissected by Glen Greenwald at Salon and many others and shown to be—in addition to completely muddled—shot through with planted misinterpretations by Republican sources who, through Klein, decried recent Democratic federal eavesdropping legislation as weak on terror for proposing to prevent the U.S. government from eavesdropping on calls made outside the U.S. by non-citizens— or as Rush Limbaugh might put it, “for providing lilly-livered protections for those who mean to do us harm.”

Klein made some half-assed excuses for this blatantly false interpretation of the legislation that culminated in him saying that, in effect, the House bill he had been so stridently writing about was in fact too complicated for him to unravel, that he had “neither the time nor the legal background to figure out” who was interpreting its provisions correctly. The comment thread following this craven backpedaling is priceless.

Best, and the reason for this post, is that after dodging for days, Time finally gave up Priscilla Painton as the editor of the column. Greenwald and journalist Jane Hamsher called Painton to ask about Klein’s sources and to find out what Time was going to do about the errors in the column. After ten seconds, that’s right, Time Deputy Managing Editor Priscilla Painton hung up the phone! That’s how much Time magazine (circulation 4 million) thinks about investigative journalism! You can leave a polite message for Priscilla, asking her to come clean about the sources behind Joe Klein’s misinformation, at: 212-522-2022, or you can email Priscilla’s boss, Rick Stengel at: richard_stengel@timemagazine.com. Please do!