"Kenny Boy" and the Times and the oral argument in the Cheney case. I know the Times has a standard policy of alerting its readers to the age of seemingly anyone mentioned is a news article, but what is the policy for noting Bush's nickname for a given person? This is from the report in the NYT on the oral argument in the case involving Cheney:

Mr. Bush, a former Texas oilman himself, has always had close ties to the energy industry and business leaders like Mr. Lay — "Kenny Boy" to the president — who was once one of his most generous campaign donors.

What does the nickname add except an implication that the nickname reinforces the statement that Bush is very close to Lay? The best that can be said for providing the nickname here is that Bush's propensity for nicknaming everyone is so well known that no one is misled that the "Kenny Boy" nickname means anything. People seem to never tire of saying "Kenny Boy."

There's also this:

The presentations today were so highly technical at times that spicier elements of the long-running controversy were all but buried — notably, the duck-hunting trip that Justice Antonin Scalia took with his old friend Mr. Cheney shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case argued today, Cheney v. U.S. District Court, 03-475.

Oh, so the reporter was disappointed in his search for more excitement, which could scarcely come from understanding the legal issues in this important case about Presidential power? He was sitting there waiting to hear about ducks. Good luck trying to understand the real issues from this press report. Perhaps the reason we're not getting any explication of the issues here is that the case in favor of Cheney is just too easy. But the article seems only to say, oh it's all just too technical to bother to explain, so please just see it as a hopeless legal tangle with no legal answer that will therefore be resolved by the Justices based on whether they like Cheney better than the Sierra Club. And so what really matters is those damn ducks. I wanted to hear about the ducks again. Please tell me about the ducks.