because it is still happening and will continue to happen as long as Great Journalists like Garrison Keillor downplay and apologize for the torture regime, as well as focusing on distractions like potato salad puff pieces.

Bush should be sitting in the dock but instead the poor guy is resting comfortably in his mansion without a care in the world, preparing to spend the rest of his life giving $300,000 a night speeches and eating steak dinners. And he, and Obama and whoever follows him forever, have all of you cowards to thank for this wonderful precedent, and all because people can't properly resolve their cognitive dissonance. Go ahead, tell Bush and Cheney and friends that they are most welcome and that after all they've done, they deserve to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches and eat steak. After all, nobody seems to think otherwise besides the "partisan leftist extremists".

But alas, all the apologist morons will still come back here after the fact, confused, asking "what happened? what went wrong? who could have seen this coming?" and opine about how we need to be more careful in the future, to "live up to our American Values" and "make sure these things don't happen again", by doing absolutely nothing but justifying the bad behavior, again.

... if Mr Keillor were to dedicate an essay to why he was wrong about going easy on our home-grown, All-Amurkin torturers? How about if he penned an editorial for the NY Times? Did a few humorous spots on his radio show? Say, waterboarding Mr.'s Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Yu, and Addison, to confirm that they jointly kidnapped and killed the Lindburgh baby, and work closely with Osama bin Ladin?

Frankly, I hope y'all are bombarding the Congress, Justice Dept and White House with your justifiable call for prosecution. You'll make better headway, talking to the folks who actually have some power to do something about it.

I hope you're not just persecuting Mr. Keillor because he's an easy mark.

This is exactly the type of courageous stance I expect of a "journalist" of Garrison Keillor's stature.

I just wish that Mr. Keillor (and this wingnut "guy") would make their respective stances elsewhere and stop wasting space on Salon. There are numerous places I can find banal homespun drivel and Wrongwing Neoconmen spewing disinformation if I for some reason want to read it, so why put it here?

Ditch this bloated pro-torture potatohead and "Mr." Wingnut and and use the money you save to buy more Chomsky articles.

Enjoy your potato salad you fucking apologist morons.

If you are you trying to persuade people to your point of view, you're going about it in the wrong way.

On the other hand, if you just want to rant at people and not change any minds, just keep on doing what you're doing.

A Minnesota man, born and bred, and you neglect to mention (from The Betty Crocker Cookbook, circa 1946, one of my mother's wedding presents) the part about marinating the potatoes in French dressing.

Mom's cookbook is falling apart, and the pages are stained beyond redemption. But I still peel the potatoes while warm enough to burn my fingers, chop them into chunks and fold in the French dressing. It makes the most beautifully colored potato salad ever. Even the years when my mom substituted sour cream for the mayo, believing my dad's big lie that he had, suddenly and inexplicably, become allergic to mayonnaise, even then the potato salad on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day was lovely and delicious. Just more delicious, when made with mayonnaise.

"Now those that are against torture are "committed leftists".

Enjoy your potato salad you fucking apologist morons."

This week the Taliban gleefully released a beheading video of their latest hostage, Polish engineer Piotr Stancza. Excuse me for not caring a flying dollop of store-bought mustard for the civil rights of such animals.

of hands' on time. Anybody who has routinely cooked for a family knows that the time invested in preparing food has two pieces. One is the time it takes, start to finish. It could be hours, if it's soup or stew, nearly a full day, if it's loaves of whole grain bread.

The other is the time that one actually spends preparing the stuff. Potatoes peel FAST when they're cooked, and chop faster, too. With an egg slicer, it's amazing how quickly you can slice a half dozen eggs for a huge potato salad. Might be a little longer than a half hour, all told. But not much.

But damn, now I'm not only hungry for potato salad, but deviled eggs.

Where I live you can buy hard boiled eggs by the carton in the grocery store. If someone can't be bothered to boil an egg they for sure won't be making potato salad.

It's time to stand up for homemade potato salad.
(But not time to stand up against torture.)

Come on, people, it's not that hard to make (the choice). Do you really think we can't tell the difference?

A Minnesota man, born and bred, and you neglect to mention (from The Betty Crocker Cookbook, circa 1946, one of my mother's wedding presents) the part about marinating the potatoes in French dressing.

Actually I think Keillor prefers his potatoes marinated in blood drenched urine from a recently beaten detainee freshly flown in from Cuba with a fine cigar from the same place to follow afterwards.

political speech is one thing, do you expect us all to sit around in silence if we don't yell about bush's crime??

Otherwise this is a good piece, for where it is. Did you all miss the lovely messages with their own potato salad recipes?? This is non-political discourse. It made me want to try some of the recipes even though my own recipe is a really good one that converts everyone who tastes it. And Garrison is so right, we need to show people what real food is so that they will stop buying that slop from the big companies. Is there anything more rebellious or democratic than that??? So Prosecute Bush, grow up and join the adults while we have our little holiday and remember what it all really means, that families and societies are more important than who or what government is doing.