Don't look back; something may be gaining. Particularly apt for Condi and the Bushies.

I've never understood the rationale for calling her "brilliant." She sure was no wunderkind. Ph.D. from the University of Denver(??!)? She is almost certainly the only brand-new Denver Ph.D. Stanford has ever hired, which sounds good, but it was by the side door, the Hoover Institute, ideological home for policy analysts too reactionary for the University of Chicago or the Manhattan Institute.

and the credits, too. They need every available second for the actual TV show. On DVD, an episode of Gray's Anatomy runs 42 minutes -- 18 minutes are set aside for commercials. I assume that other shows are similar. Is a song, whether custom-tailored or an off-the-shelf pop song, worth cutting in to those pitiful few remaining minutes?

I think they ought to put the credits in a crawl like the news shows do and go with wall-to-wall narrative for their 42 minutes. Better still, refer the viewers to their web site for the credits.

Besides, are the TV themes you cherish really all that great, or do they merely evoke memories of the shows themselves? How many shows you didn't like had, in your opinion, a great theme song?

I've complimented Klein and the other Time bloggers before for blogging and, more significantly, interacting with bloggers and responding to critiques. The reason I think that is an important process is because journalists so frequently misunderstand the primary criticisms bloggers make, and instead, respond to caricatures or strawmen.

C'mon, Glenn, you know better than that. They understand perfectly, but respond to the strawmen because they're chickenshits.

Joe Klein:

And unless we can actually have the revenue to go out there and the credibility to report these issues, all of these right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and the left-wing bloggers who are parasites on our reporting, are going to have nothing to do but sit home and twiddle their thumbs and opine about things they have no data for.

Here's a window on what I think is the real bug up KleinAlterCohen's ass. They've gotten so used to mollifying the Right-Wing Noise Machine that they've been able to convince themselves that they're independent and courageous journalists who wouldn't dream of mollifying the Right-Wing Noise Machine. But along come the Lefty blogger-gadflies pushing them back toward the true unbiased center. Now, not only does KleinAlterCohen have to contend with pressure from the Left, but he can no longer pretend he hasn't spent the last 20 years giving in to the Right.

It's like Alec Guiness in "Bridge on the River Kwai." Initially he's an iron man. The Japanese can't co-opt him. They can force the prisoners to work on a bridge, but they want to tap all that good British engineering know-how. So, little by little they erode his resistance, until he believes that building a first-class bridge for his enemy is really a good thing -- for prisoner morale, showing the Japanese how "civilized" Westerners behave, etc. When the British commandos come along to blow up his bridge, he fights them, until he finally wakes up from his daze, realizes the enormity of his crime, and asks himself the tragic question, "What have I done?"

KleinAlterCohen is still fighting the commandos. It'll be a while before he gets to the "what have I done" moment.

Josh Marshall has put together a tough little reporting team, one that breaks stories. The attorney purge is merely the most recent. Does the MSM pick up his stories? Only when it's forced, kicking and screaming, to do so.

There are also plenty of facts dug up by their own reporters that the MSM simply chooses to ignore, as when David Broder or Tim Russert contradict their own employer's poll data.

So, given the MSM's difficult relationship with facts, what happens if we sit-at-home thumb-twiddling bloggers report a fact? Like, for instance, the actual size of the crowd at a war protest, or that the content of the famous replicated memo that got Dan Rather into so much trouble was indisputably close to that of the original, or that the Florida coroner who ruled Lori Klausitus's death accidental was not only a career GOP party hack, but an incompetent?

Nothing. The MSM accepts no uncredentialed fact, and they, in secure in their delusion that they occupy the center, get to award the credentials.

If he does, how will Bush get another henchman through the Senate confirmation?

because powerful Senators named Clinton and Obama want to be president. It's useless to take Bush down without Cheney, and after they're both gone, we'd have popular Nancy Pelosi in the White House, running for election as the first female incumbent. No history for Hillary. Obama might be content to bide his time -- I think he should -- but Clinton wants it NOW.

favor torture as a one-size fits all remedy. After all, Christians worship a man who was tortured and killed as a suspected terrorist. The cross itself was designed to be an instrument of torture. In the usual versions, Judas and Herod and the Jewish mob bear most of the blame -- that torture by crucifixion was business-as-usual for the Romans excites little comment. Jesus's horrible death is a crucial (no pun) part of the story, because it augments the glory of his resurrection.

Noreover, the historical and cultural path from monolithic Catholicism to secular humanism is distinguished by a falling tolerance for torture. Catholics brought us the Inquisition, burning heretics at the stake, and "mortification of the flesh" in all its bizarre forms. It's only as one moves from "high church" to "low church" to no church that these practices come to be seen as the perversions they are.

Now that Bush is firmly established in the Sudetenland, it's inevitable that he'll go for the rest of Czechoslovakia.