Seeing that the tone of press coverage is often the deciding factor in whether something carries "political advantage", it would appear that Time magazine is pro-torture.

Of course they do. And the American people lap it up.

That's the sad facts, folks: We and Glenn here are in the minority. The constituent parts of the corporate GOP/Media Complex have had decades to reinforce their chosen themes, and they have more money and reach than we do. (This is quite deliberate: See http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/080499a2.html for the details.) We have the internet, but they have TV and radio, and most Americans get their news from TV and drive-time radio.

That's why Salon has it and they don't.

The story was there for the taking, but the Corporate GOP/Media Complex won't touch it for the same reason that they won't talk about Sibel Edmonds or the existence of peaceful anti-US resistance groups in Iraq: It's not the story their rich and conservative GOP-aligned bosses want them to tell.

Pass this story on to the rest of the media, yes -- and shame them. If they can be shamed.

They're fine with his being a bigot and Holy Roller.

They're fine with his being a sleazy hypocrite liar who would free Wayne Dumond, rapist and murderer (over the repeated pleas of his victims' families), just to piss off Bill Clinton (whose young cousin was one of Dumond's victims), and then to feign innocence when Dumond killed two other women after Huckabee freed him.

What they AREN'T fine with is the idea that he might try to raise taxes, particularly on the rich, in the course of trying to help the little (white, Christian) guy.

In other words, they like what's bad about him and hate that little bit that's good about him. Par for the course for the modern hyperconservative rich man's GOP.

See here: http://www.wormwoodsociety.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=85

Compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf.

Let's cheat and count the (secular Ba'athist) Saddam as an Osama-style Islamofascist (even though Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we've propped up, hated and feared Osama) and thus count all the people he's killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was "gassing his own people", i.e. the Iraqi Kurds).

Saddam's death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power -- and HRW probably grossly inflated this figure (http://firedoglake.com/2007/03/28/one-out-of-every-forty/). Meanwhile, over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush's invading and occupying Iraq (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html).

I'm actually being nice here: I'm not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin's (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates. (And I'm not counting the quarter-million or so that the UN sanctions on Iraq are alleged to have killed during the 1990s and early 2000s.)

-- Better to know your own limits than to be a Joan Crawford.

-- I'm waiting for the silly little Google-using stalker-wannabees who thought they'd scored a coup by mocking Gross' lust-in-the-heart confession to state, for the record, that they have never lusted after anyone once they got married or even started dating someone. That is, assuming they have the social skills needed to so much as date something that wasn't made of plastic and batteries.

-- International versus domestic? I don't have a dog in this fight. I have heard that even foster care, which runs the risk of the child's being constantly shuttled from home to home, is still better than warehouseing kids in orphanages.

-- Mocking fertile women for adopting? Hey, I'm glad that the fertile women are choosing to do that and helping out an impoverished woman and/or family, either here or in the US. The alternative is to add another child to an already-overloaded planet. The whole business about "the poor women will just have more babies except this time for pay" sounds a lot like the anecdotal bullshit used to push welfare deform in the 1990s; no actual proof is brought forward to defend this assertion.

...just so the Southwest and Southeast can continue to live MASSIVELY unsustainable lifestyles based on turning native climates into green-lawned golf courses?

Sorry, but you're not the only person on this planet. Or even on this continent. But too many Americans act like they are.

The water shortage isn't a cause but a symptom: Of too many of us living lifestyles that are driving up the temps and slowly cooking life on this planet.

The climate change is being accelerated because now people in China and India want to live the same affluent lifestyles we do, and because greedy CEOs in the West, rather than deal with pollution controls or living wages for their workers, packed up and went to the East to build factories and turn China's big cities into the most polluted ones on Earth, all so they could maximize their own profits and mansions.

The reckoning is coming due. The free ride is over.