I'm "guilty" of a long URL but I did check in FF to see that the long URL wasn't throwing the margins off.

Now, tinyurls certainly aren't friendly by definition. The objections to them can be summed up in the idea of lack of transparency (see RFC 1736 for the URL requirements).

1. A "long" -- whatever THAT may mean -- URL can be transparent to readers, if the URL is written to be human readable. A tiny URL, by contrast, is a string of gibberish.

2. A "long" URL can be transparent to readers, because the location of the URL is visible; the reader can decide whether to go to the site or not.

3. A "long" URL is transparent to search engines like Google, and to its users (for reasons #1 and #2 above), so they reward good behavior by increasing hits.

4. An finally, I don't see the sense in entrusting a key piece of functionality for what is, after all, an ongoing collective corpus of archival posts, to a URL remapping service. Why would I? If tinyurl ever goes down, 87 million links are going to break, and then we won't be able to do research on any of those links. How much sense does that make?

The real answer to "long" URLs is for Salon to upgrade their commenting software to either (a) break the URLs into shorter lines, (b) turn them into links, or (c) allow the A tag (incorporating such protections as need be). All these are well-known, workable solutions from the open source CMS world, and the Salon admins can surely incorporate them here.

I don't see any reason to encourage the use of a poor solution, especially for cosmetic, layout, purposes, when real solutions exist.

NOTE Oh, I just went to the tinyurl and found that they're somehow sucking down my Amazon account (cookies, or whatever) to "greet" me. Not cool at all.

Let's try not to use terms that involve the word "licking."

That creates way too many unpleasant pictures, don't you think?

Sayeth WaPo's coverage, translated:

Bartlett orchestrated the suppression of Bush's dereliction of duty in the Texas Air National Guard.

Good man to have around.

http://www.correntewire.com/republican_operative_who_orchestrated_successful_suppression_of_bush_awol_story_to_exit_west_wing

Glenn:

Thanks for the link on the 35,000 estimate -- we lowballed an estimate of 8,500 back in 2005. For those interested, here are some other posts on secret prisons from Corrente:

But we really have been all over this one since at least 2005, so may I suggest in addition to the Wilkerson link one or more of the following:

Two short summary (the best, I think -- this is the story some journalist should pursue. They start out the same -- repeat, repeat -- but end up differently.

http://www.correntewire.com/the_bush_gulag_where_are_the_bodies

http://www.correntewire.com/the_bush_gulag_where_are_the_bodies_press_wont_ask

Long summary (I wrote the short when this got no hits):

http://www.correntewire.com/the_arithmetic_were_thousands_from_bushs_gulags_disappeared

And the arithmetic posts:

http://www.correntewire.com/14_000_in_bush_gulags_not_just_100s_at_gitmo

http://www.correntewire.com/how_many_prisoners_are_in_bushs_european_gulag

http://www.correntewire.com/how_many_inmates_are_being_held_in_the_bush_gulag_at_stare_kiejkuty_poland

Here is the nut graf from the "Where are the bodies" post. It would be really nice if a journalist could follow up and get some answers:

Let's do some arithmetic on how many prisoners Bush is holding in his gulags.

1. We know that there are thousands of prisoners (estimates range from 7,000 to 35,000).

2. Gitmo holds only 500.

3. So, where are the missing thousands? The only alternatives I can think of:

1. They've been released

2. They're still in jail

3. They've been disappeared.

Barring divine intervention, the bodies of the missing thousands occupy time and space in this world. Where are they?

Which door would you choose? (a), released? (b), still in jail? Or (c), disappeared?

Then, of course, there's a the longstanding authoritarian confusion between imprisonment, torture, and sex (cf The Passion), but investigation of the dank recesses of the conservative psyche is a topic for another day. But for anyone who wants to get started:

http://www.correntewire.com/shays_r_pro_torture_says_abu_ghraib_just_a_sex_ring

Suck it up and get on with the coup.

And I heard the PodCast, and thought it was great.

Klein: Of course we're your betters. We come to your coffee shops and visit you almost every six months.

America: [Prolonged Bronx cheer followed by silence, shuffling feet as people walk away from the corporatist press.]

Impunity is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, especially in Latin America. Guy tortures you, then you see him a few weeks later getting a latte at Starbucks. "His hair was perfect."

Just guessing, but it could be that one little noticed aspect of the Latin aspect of Iran-Contra--and all the perps popped up again in the Bush administration, with promotions--is that Republican operatives found out down there how Latin American regimes worked, and decided they wanted that kind of power (and, specifically, the power to torture and disappear) for themselves.

Sort of a bringing-the-dirty-war-back-home style of thing...