In this part of her indefensible defense of an indefensible practice, she actually cites Scott Horton - somehow deluding herself into thinking he's making her case?

Scott Horton is a lawyer and blogger for The Atlantic [sic] who has written about the subject of torture. He points to George Orwell's 1946 essay: Politics and the English Language. "The thrust of the piece is we have to be on guard against the government debasing of language through the use of euphemisms," said Horton.

"So in not using the word torture, you are toeing the line the government put down and you are being hypocritical if you previously had used the word," said Horton, who noted the New York Times used the word torture in its reporting on the Communist Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.

"And the media is affecting the debate because you are saying it is a legitimate question and that reasonable people could differ on whether waterboarding is torture or not," he continued. "The media pulling back from the use of the word legitimized the views that waterboarding is not torture. As a result of the way it's treated by the media, most Americans really think this is an open question." Please listen to Horton discussing this with On The Media.

And this somehow supports Shepard's excuse? It's a non sequitur at best, and she's dead wrong - beginning with her placing Horton at Atlantic Monthly. Try Harper's, Alicia.

(er...He hasn't moved, has he, and Harper's and Atlantic haven't updated their sites?)

my two main sources of information: the NYT and you, and through you, I find a whole lot more that I need to know

check your paypal, buddy...

(now if only Harper's would allow online-only subscriptions...)

Professor Rove? Are you kidding me? Since when has a four-college dropout been qualified to teach?

For the record: Utah, Maryland, George Mason - where he was investigated by the FBI for dirty tricks during the campaign to rule the CollegeYoung Republicans - and Texas.

What's next? An honorary doctorate? Oh right - Liberty University, 2004. In the Humanities yet.

Talk about lowering the bar. How low can we go? (See: Bush, George W.)

Obama's excuse for not investigating and prosecuting blatant criminality - "Wah! I don't want this to get in the way of my agenda!" - is getting more and more unbelievable. One simply cannot give any credence to such a rationale for avoiding basic enforcement of the law.

His agenda - no matter how laudable and necessary - is an end that is not justified by the means of concealing and refusing to prosecute criminality, let alone criminality so obvious that it's virtually hanging on your front door like a dead rat. Such means will inevitably taint his agenda, poison anything he achieves, and go down in history as a massive, willful, unconstitutional assertion of presidential power to the detriment of our ideals and principles.

And Obama is smart enough to realize this. One hopes. No, "my agenda" cannot be the real reason. The real reason must be the simplest explanation: Obama wants to preserve the power that Bush passed on to him - after all, Obama may want to use this power some day.

Oh wait - he's already using it. And he's finding he likes it.

It's very disturbing to realize that this guy, a supposed journalist, a master of language and its efficient use, cannot string together enough words to form a coherent sentence. I shudder at the vision of how this guy thinks - to abuse the word "thinks" unmercifully. Appalling.

And that's in addition to what he's thinking and saying. How did he ever get his job? He's about as proficient in the English language as George Bush. He should be embarrassed. I know I'm embarrassed for him.

The journebrities pontificating on Cronkite could only hope to be a fraction of the journalist he was. Yet Cronkite, too, was actually a member of the elite, and he served them well, not breaking ranks until Vietnam. Still, he did it, and that was his finest moment. If only he hadn't retired - one would hope he could have continued to set an example that the likes of Gregory and Russert would have been too ashamed not to follow, and Cronkite's benign influence could have saved maybe even more lives over the next quarter-century.

But when it comes to speaking truth to power, no one compares to Lewis Lapham. And him the scion of the family that founded Texaco! This man born to wealth puts to shame those faux journalists whose avarice, insecurity and hypocrisy stand out, embarrassingly, as their most notable traits.

That's stomach-turning. Gregory is even worse than previous evidence indicated. I hope this egregious bit of slavishness gets good play somewhere - maybe Maddow or Olbermann. One can only hope, because neither one of those focuses much on critiques of mainstream "journalism," despite there being such riches of embarrassing misconduct to exploit. Instead they focus on Fox, which is just too easy.

Lawyers are also supposed to "act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance," right? I mean, that's how law is practiced, right? Isn't that the whole point? It's how the body of laws governing human conduct has been laboriously, with no little bloodshed and catastrophe, has been constructed, brick by brick, over centuries.

Yoo and Bybee and the rest acted not only in bad faith but entirely outside the scope of legal guidance - legal guidance, in the form of law and precedent, that defines torture in plain, inarguable English comprehensible to a fourth-grader.

So how is it Yoo and Bybee fall somehow outside the scope of this preliminary review?

And why am I constantly amazed at how incredibly dumb and shortsighted our government is? You'd think I would have learned by now...