While we are considering various improbable scenarios (like the pregnant "pro-life" assassin), here is one that is actually semi-plausible: A woman gets positive result on a home pregnancy test. After mulling it over for a while, she finally confronts her boyfriend. The boyfriend starts beating her up, and she kills him in the belief that she is protecting her baby. (I assuming that the law doesn't specify how far along the fetus/embryo has to be.)

Unfortunately, by the time the trial rolls around, the baby has miscarried. It was early enough that there is no physical evidence that the woman was ever pregnant. The pee stick is long gone in the trash, the woman not realizing that it would be handy in her manslaughter trial...

The Ayers story and the lobbyist story are actually somewhat analogous, in that they both relied more on innuendo than fact. Right-leaning media outlets used Obama's rather slight association with Ayers to insinuate that he is a terrorist sympathizer. The NYT took the fact that McCain aides were concerned about the appearance of an inappropriate relationship to insinuate that there was, in fact, an inappropriate relationship. This kind of tactic should always be criticized, and the NYT was widely criticized by other news outlets.

If you want to bring a thoughtful conservative onboard, that's cool. Paglia is simply an idiot. It's true, you can be a college professor and still be an idiot.

I will never resubscribe with this kind of junk in Salon. It's not the ideology, it's the quality!

But I thought Barnicle was pretty-evenhanded, at least by the usual MSM assumption that both sides have an equally valid argument. He got in digs at both Biden and Cheney.

That guy Rivkin is a piece of work. He is a master of begging the question. Let's have a nice debate about whether abolishing torture and therefore (irrefutably!) making us less safe is worth it just to make those silly Europeans like us. Grrr.

Some clarity would be useful here.

Rove and Cheney should host a cable news show where they rant for an hour about Obama and the Democrats. It would be the gift that keeps on giving...

I can only hope that he comes to his senses.

For years I have been warning conservative friends that they shouldn't let Bush have any powers that they wouldn't want to give to Hillary Clinton (when she was the relevant bogeyman). But did they listen? Nooooooo.

Now an obvious retort is that I should be concerned about how Obama is continuing to expand these powers. And I am.

Sorry to see you go. I enjoyed your column.

As to the larger question of Salon's future profitability, it seems to me that Salon needs to stick to its knitting as a left-of-center publication. There are plenty of venues that purport to offer fair n' balanced news, and they are free. If a publication has a clear ideological orientation, though, then there is a chance that readers will want to subsidize it because they agree with it.

Now, this doesn't mean that Salon has to suck up to the current administration. There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize Obama from the left (for example, see almost any Greenwald column).

Obama got more than a million people to show up in one spot for his inauguration.

The tea parties only attracted about 200,000, and those were local affairs.

Obama is way ahead on this one.

Where all of this hyenas anyway, and how do I attract them?

In principle, Greenwald is right. But we have consider the reality that no jury in the United States would convict a government agent who was following these opinions.

The defense would be a slam dunk. This is all the lawyer would have to say: The Justice Department said that these actions were legal. Then they changed their minds, and decided to prosecute my client for doing what was supposed to be legal. You want to help the government put someone in jail because it changed its mind?

Not everyone will find these reasoning compelling, but I bet any jury would have at least one member who is convinced, if not an outright majority.

Barring a major change in government, is there any precedent for a government prosecuting its own agents for actions that were approved by the entire chain of command? By a major change in government, I mean something along the lines of writing a new constitution, going from a dictatorship to a democracy, etc.

I remember when Bush nominated Tommy Thompson for the exact same job, Thompson introduced himself as a "pro-life governor".

Now the Democrats nominate someone who holds a different belief, the one consistent with current law, the one supported by the majority, and it's a problem...

For a supposed "dean", Broder has a remarkably poor grasp of the English language.

Stop Scapegoating... Obama should use all the influence of his office to stop the retroactive search for scapegoats.

A scapegoat is someone who gets punished for another person's sins or crimes. Broder doesn't appear to want to punish anyone for the crimes of the Bush administration. Does he believe that no one was responsible?

Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability -- and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.

Vengeance is what you seek when you have been personally harmed, or a family member, etc., has. What we are talking about now is called justice.

MSM pundits in a nutshell

Sure, Republicans love them funny furriners, as long as they praise the Dear Leader.

But strictly speaking, people from Portugal aren't Hispanic. To be Hispanic, you have to have Spanish-speaking ancestors.