Alex -

This comment's not tied to this particular post, but to the whole string of posts since this afternoon that I just read in one sitting: Congratulations on a good night's work, old man. You stayed late and shut the place down, and having been incommunicado for the primary night's news I was grateful to read your take on it all.

As others have said, you do indeed have big shoes to fill. But I and the many other War Room loyalists expect and look forward to seeing you fill them -- or rather, to seeing you fill them sort of for awhile as you break in your own new boots, and then finally discard Tim's. You've got your own style, it's clear, and it's personal and chatty and often disarming. Work on that, on refining your voice and analytical angle on all this stuff; your grasp of the facts and the issues and history is already, clearly, quite keen. I'll be missing Tim for awhile, but I'm excited to see the new ideas for War Room's future that you alluded to yesterday unfold and come into being. And we'll be reading you daily as you develop and operationalize those ideas. You seem like a hardworking guy, and there's hasn't been a time like this to be a political reporter in your adult lifetime -- so go get 'em, and make it count.

N

And very well done, Alex. Please do keep it up.

N

This is a critically important issue that has, as the writer notes, been far too little addressed in the political discussion to date. Thanks to Salon for running this piece and to the writer for ably executing it.

Nice reporting (or, at least, meta-reporting) on one small but significant off-the-radar issue. Somebody needs to do this work for posterity. Thanks for taking on a little chunk of it today.

What is future President Obama going to do about GITMO? Is he prepared to shut it down once and for all, send home the majority of inmates who have not yet had any charges filed against them despite being held for up to 5 years of their lives and swiftly transfer the rest to mainland US Federal Prisons to be tried promptly in Federal Courts under the Federal Rules of criminal procedure affording the accused due process and the right to confront their accusers? Better yet, why not let the World Court try them under international standards of criminal prosecution - wouldn't that be more appropriate for people who have been brought to US against their will and in fact have no connection to the US judicial system other than based upon the whim and say so of George W. Bush? And how about asking the World Court to try George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzalez, David Addison & Co. under the statutes governing international war crimes? Even in absentia, they should be charged and tried as an important symbolic step towards restoring the moral and legal integrity of the United States.

A simply masterful depiction of the moment. Thank you for this little gem.

here's my ranking:

1. Sebelius

2. Kaine

3. Biden

4. Bayh

Thank you, Salon (and Ms. Weir), for giving us this outstanding piece of environmental writing, with its fairly detailed overview of a complex subject that is still known about by far too few people. There is a serious dearth of this kind of reporting in the online media -- what you find is mostly print-media pieces aggregated on special-interest websites, but very little that seems to be generated for sites like Salon and its ilk. I'm encouraged by the fact that this is the debut piece in a new series on Salon, and I will look for the next one with interest. I hope that this series sticks with serious science writing and eschews the green-lifestyle pieces that seem to be popping up everywhere -- they have their place, but there's too much of that already and we need to educate a broader reading audience about issues like this.

At the risk of being too fulsome in praise, this article makes a great pair with the bat piece as a kickoff to the new series, and I applaud both its author and the Salon editors who brought it about. The is a real void in online reporting of this type, and I would love to see Salon start to fill it. Please seek out more high-quality, serious scientific articles like these -- keep it up and show Salon's peers what they've been missing!

Wow. Nicely done. Thank you very much.

Oh, God, it's heartbreaking, and so inevitable. Even so, the news hit like a brick in the gut.

Thank you for this.

Love this Almond guy.

Nice to have you covering War Room over the weekend. Good stuff.

Nice little nugget, Alex.

Nice job, Gary.