Last Monday, President-elect Barack Obama announced the nomination of his campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser Susan Rice as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Obama added that he would restore Rice’s position to Cabinet-level rank, as it had been during the Clinton administration.

But in searching for an alternative perspective of this decision, it appears that some in the media got lazy. Instead of providing a thoughtful counterpoint from a respected and credible voice, the easy route seems to be just to quote U.N. basher John Bolton:

– The New York Times: [Bolton] said it was unwise to elevate the position to the cabinet again. ”One, it overstates the role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy,” Mr. Bolton said. ”Second, you shouldn’t have two secretaries in the same department.”

– USA Today: [Bolton] said Cabinet rank creates the potential for bureaucratic conflict, especially with the State Department. Bolton also questioned whether the U.N. — whose culture he says is “impervious to change” — should be so central to U.S. foreign policy.

Naturally, Fox News gave Bolton air time, who, having once served as U.S. ambassador to the world body himself, offered Rice some advice: U.N. ambassadors “are not sent to New York to be platonic guardians with other ambassadors for the good of the world.” Watch it:

Of course Bolton thinks elevating Rice to a cabinet level position and refocusing U.S. foreign policy on greater international cooperation is a bad idea. He hates the United Nations. Bolton famously said “there is no such thing as the United Nations” and if the U.N. building in New York “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Not only that, but Bolton once boasted that he never took any international law classes while attending Yale.

In fact, Bolton’s credibility on issues of peace and cooperation are certainly suspect, as he has spent much of the past year calling for war with Iran. Even President Bush thinks Bolton is a fraud.

But that doesn’t seem to stop the media from continuing to quote him. After all, without much to do these days, perhaps Bolton is more than happy to sit by the phone.

December 02, 2008 ABC News

The Preznit, out working on that Legacy Thing, was on ABC with Charles Gibson last night, and had this revealing exchange:

Gibson: You've always said there's no do-overs as president. If you had one --

Bush: The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said, you know ... the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration, and um ... You know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Gibson: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

Bush: If he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

Gibson: No, if you had known he didn't.

Bush: Oh, I see what you're saying. Uh ... You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.

David N: As always with Bush, the Buck Stops Over There, Or There -- Anywhere But Here.

It obviously never crossed Bush's mind to consider the possibility that there weren't WMD in Iraq -- which, as we now know, was a lot of the reason the intelligence he received was getting so skewed. Indeed, it's obvious he'd probably have simply ignored that intelligence even if it had clearly warned there were no WMD.

Meanwhile, guys like Richard Clarke were warning him he shouldn't even go into Iraq if he was serious about combating terrorism.

Clearly, he wasn't. He was just intent on kicking Saddam's ass, regardless of the price paid.

And that's why, contra Karl Rove, he is forever doomed to be known as the Worst. President. Ever.

Adam Serwer at TAP and Greg Sargent at TPM have more on Bush's actual record regarding pre-invasion intelligence on Iraq.

A new poll commissioned by the LGBT advocacy group GLAAD found encouraging news for supporters of gay rights:

– Three-quarters of U.S. adults (75%) favor either marriage or domestic partnerships/civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Only about two in 10 (22%) say gay and lesbian couples should have no legal recognition.

– Almost two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults favor allowing openly gay military personnel to serve in the armed forces.

– About six in 10 (63%) U.S. adults favor expanding hate crime laws to cover gay and transgender people.

– Nearly seven out of 10 U.S. adults (69%) oppose laws that would ban qualified gay and lesbian couples from adopting children.

Though conservatives criticized the poll for being funded by an advocacy organization, some of its results are actually more tempered than other polls. For example, a Washington Post poll in July found that a full 75 percent of Americans support gays serving openly in the military.

• What's a good answer when a job interviewer asks what salary you're looking for?
• How do you deal with a boss that brushes you off when you offer a better solution to a problem when their solution has rather large and obvious holes in it?
• What warm winter clothing do you recommend for a woman who likes nature photography and hiking?
• I got an Xbox 360. It's awesome. I can do so much stuff! Now what?
• Is there a product that will make gloves more grippy?

So far, Obama has only nominated one ambassador - career professional Susan Rice as ambassador to the UN. Here she is in September talking about Obama's foreign policy.

Following up on reports of Obama's intended Herculean cleaning of the Agean Stables at the Department of Defense, where the entire body of Bush-appointed deputies and under-whatevers are expected to be fired, the Washington Post now reports that the incoming Obama administration has told every single Bush political appointee as an ambassador that their services will no longer be required come January 20th.

That's an awful lot of ambassadors. An unusually high percentage of Bush's ambassador picks throughout his presidency - about half - have been "political appointees," as opposed to career foreign officers and without fail those political appointees have been big campaign donors, each raising over $100,000 for Bush and lots more for the Republican Party.

Nations that have had these, usually clueless, ambassadors foisted upon them just so that Bush could thank his biggest funders with a prestige sinecure include: Canada, Mexico, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Singapore and the European Union as well as a host of smaller nations. The United States is the only nation which habitually staffs its top diplomatic positions in other countries with check-writing rank amateurs rather than professional diplomats.

Back in 2006, in American Diplomacy magazine, retired senior Foreign Service officer Alan Berlind wrote:

[T]he day will dawn when our elected leaders rediscover the need for dialogue and reasonable accommodation in our international relationships. When that happens, the job of repairing the enormous damage done to those relationships and restoring our reputation, credit, and influence in the world will fall in large part to America’s diplomats, most particularly, American ambassadors, i.e., the senior representatives of the American government and people abroad. What better time, then, to re-examine the almost uniquely American practice of including among those representatives large numbers of people only rarely qualified for the job.

What better time indeed. If Obama actually breaks with the tradition of the last three presidents and appoints more than two thirds of his ambassadors from the pool of foreign service professionals, then that will definitely be change I can believe in.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

iPhone/iPod touch only: Amazon released a new mobile application for the iPhone and iPod touch today, ensuring that you can now get your online shopping fix no matter where you are. Not only does the Amazon app provide an excellent interface to search, buy, or add items to your wishlists, but if you're an iPhone user, the application's Amazon Remembers feature identifies any product you take a picture of—sort of like previously mentioned SnapTell. When you snap a pic, the app uploads the picture to Amazon, which looks for a match among its products. If it finds one (it can take anywhere between a couple minutes and 24 hours), it'll send you an email and update the Amazon Remembers tab. So far it's worked like a charm with all of the products I tested. I expected that my iPhone book might throw it for a loop, considering it has a picture of an iPhone on it, but even it was correctly identified within a few minutes.

If you give it a go, let's hear how it works out for you in the comments.

Democratic senatorial candidate Al Franken has “unexpectedly picked up 37 votes due to a combined machine malfunction and human error on Election Day.” Today, Franken’s counsel Marc Elias said Franken is now up 22 votes, with “approximately 138,000 ballots left to count.” “This would be the first time that Franken has claimed a lead in this drawn-out process,” notes TPM.

Early last month, a reporter asked Assistant White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto why the White House refuses to use the word “recession.” The reporter quipped, “Is that word radioactive?” Fratto demurred, saying, “we don’t make those determinations.” Watch it:

Fratto’s attempt to pass the buck on the question has become a familiar refrain in White House press briefings over the last year:

– “Recessions are things that are declared by other people — National Bureau of Economic Research.” [Edward Lazear, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, 3/7/08]

– “The classic definition of a recession is not something that we could determine now, or forecast. It’s something that people look back on.” [White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, 10/7/08]

– “[Y]ou’re asking me questions — I’m not an economist. … [I]f you want definitions about what is or isn’t a recession in this day and age…you’re just going to have to go to an economist, not me.” [Perino, 9/17/08]

But on Monday, the White House could no longer pretend to be oblivious to whether or not the U.S. is in a recession. Indeed, the organization that, as Fratto put it, makes “those determinations” — the National Bureau of Economic Research — announced that the U.S. currently in a recession and has been since December 2007.

Amazingly, however, the White House still can’t bring itself to publicly discuss the fact that the U.S. economy is in recession. In fact, as the Associated Press noted, in responding to NBER’s Monday recession announcement, Fratto managed to avoid ever using the word “recession.” Additionally, in the two press briefings since the announcement, the word “recession” was not used a single time — by White House officials or by the press.

Despite the fact that the White House’s rhetoric on the economy over the last twelve months has been exposed as nothing more than economic happy talk, the press corps seems content to keep on listening.

I haven't seen him on FOX in a long time, but Neal Gabler sez it all...

The GOP's McCarthy gene...Think Goldwater is the father of conservatism? Think again

The killer wrapup:

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.

YouTube is full of videos that don't require singled-minded attention, but trying to keep a YouTube page visible in the background for passive watching isn't easy. Digital Inspiration's Amit Agarwal suggests two methods, though, that work great for browsing other sites or doing actual, you know, work, while keeping a video cornered and always on top. The first requires re-working a video link to its full-screen version and bookmarking it to load in Firefox's sidebar—something we've covered before with many other apps. The other method creates a mini-browser window that always stays on top using an AutoHotKey-coded app. Hit the link below for details on each idea, which should make burning through your favorite webisodes easier while still plucking away on your busy work. How to Watch YouTube Videos While Working on other Tasks [Digital Inspiration]

Former Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former U.S. prosecutor at Guantanamo, told BBC yesterday in his first interview since resigning earlier this year that Guantanamo detainees were treated in a “wrong, unethical and finally, immoral” manner. Vandeveld was so “appalled” by the conditions at Guantanamo that he consulted his Jesuit priest, who told him to resign. “I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything,” he said. Watch BBC’s segment:

A Pentagon spokesman responded: “We dispute Darrel Vandeveld’s assertions and maintain the military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes.”

The private security firm Blackwater is planning to offer a new service to make money: protection from the pirate-infested waters off the coast of East Africa. “Blackwater’s push to land its first antipiracy contract is part of a strategy to build its business outside its State Department security work in Iraq, which brings in between $300 million and $400 million a year.” The security company may be looking for new lucrative opportunities partly because the Iraqi government has now ratified a law stripping Blackwater contractors of immunity. Indeed, Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell noted the legal benefits of operating in the open sea: “We would be allowed to fire if fired upon; the right of self-defense is one that exists in international waters.”

Download | Play    Download | Play

Dittoheads on CNN's Late Edition, Sunday. Sajjan Gohel agrees the Mumbai culprits are the Lek, even though he told the WaPo the day before it was definitely Al Qaeda, and former CIA DDI John McLaughlin, with a straight face and without challenge, says Pakistan's ISI is "very responsive" to civilian authority.

The international community and media appear to have accepted India's allegations of Pakistani involvement in the Mumbai bombings, via an ISI proxy terror group. Yet no-one is mentioning India's atrocious record of widespread torture or the questionable nature of confessions gained by such methods.

The Washington Post's editorial today leads:

WITH EACH passing day, suspicions of a Pakistani link to the slaughter of 174 people, including six Americans, in Mumbai grow stronger -- and more plausible. A captured terrorist has reportedly confessed to Indian officials that he received training in Pakistan from Lashkar-i-Taiba, a guerrilla organization that was nurtured by Pakistani military intelligence to fight India in the disputed Kashmir region.

But really, that confession by one captured terrorist is the only evidence thus far advanced, and (until late Tuesday) everything we know about it has been leaked by unofficial officials rather than with the full backing of the Indian government.

We only have this detainee's alleged word that all the attackers were from Pakistan, that there were only ten of them, that the attacks were funded with Saudi money, that they trained at an LeK camp inside Pakistan, that they hijacked a single Indian vessel to transport then to Mumbai or that they had hoped to kill 5,000 rather than the 200 or so they did murder. All of this relies on the confession of one man, presumably not one of the attacks leaders because that possibility hasn't been mentioned at all and certainly would have been if it were there. The leaked details of his confession have then been amplified and added to by rumor and speculation, particularly by the understandably angry Indian press.

Yet many analysts, including former White House homeland security advisor Fran Townsend on CNN's Late Edition this Sunday, have been openly sceptical about that number of ten terrorists and some reports have said five or more attackers are still quietly being sought while others have reported the involvement of Mumbai locals and links to previous attacks by indigenous militants. If the Indian authorities are sure of the vessel used to sail into Mumbai, as alleged, why are they rumored to be still looking for a possible two more ships? And why is there no sign that the captured terrorist, variously identified as Ajmal Amir Kamal, Azam Amir Kasav, or Azam Ameer Qasab, has ever been near the Pakistani village he told his interrogators was his home?

What India most wants to hear is that Pakistan is complicit and culpable in the Mumbai attacks. Interrogators have delivered exactly that, by way of unofficial leaks. Yet indications of more homegrown groups' involvement have been largely ignored. The tactics used in Mumbai are far more reminiscent of the indigenous communist Naxalite insurgency of India's poorest regions while the dock at which the terrorists landed, perhaps co-incidentally, is one controlled by the D-Company criminal organisation and has been used to smuggle arms into Mumbai in the past. The reality, to my mind, is most likely to be that of elements from homegrown groups reaching out to bigger fish for aid, and those bigger fish having historic connections to the Pakistani establishment. As Mark Sageman wrote in a seminal report on post 9/11 terror networks in 2003: "The network is now self-organized from the bottom up, and is very decentralized. With local initiative and flexibility, it’s very robust."

Right now, accusations concerning the LeK and Pakistan suit everyone. India wants Pakistan to be involved not only because it has a justifiable institutional paranoia where Pakistan is concerned but also because it takes the focus off its own internals feuds and enables it to maintain a facade of an intergrated nation beset from outside. The US and its Western allies want to use such allegations to pressure the Pakistani government to crack down on its shady ISI intelligence service and to pressure Pakistan to expel or crack down on terror groups it has sheltered up until now. And Pakistan wants to use these accusations to bang its own domestic drum about the perrenial Indian threat and to provide a convenient excuse for giving up the reluctant war against militants it has been conducting in regions bordering Afghanistan.

I've one word of caution for those reading about culpability for Mumbai - and that word is "Gitmo." Western readers are already familiar with the stories of "enhanced interrogations" there and at other US-run sites around the world in pursuit of the "war on terror", and have read in detail about how such interrogations produce intelligence that is entirely untrustworthy because tortured suspects will tell their questioners whatever they want to hear. Well, India has an even bigger torture problem than Bush's US does.

A recently released report titled "Torture in India 2008: A State of Denial" - the first-ever nationwide assessment on the use of torture in the world's largest democracy - by the Hong Kong-based Asian Center for Human Rights (ACHR) contains disconcerting facts about the blatant and widespread use of the practice by Indian authorities in prisons and police custody.

The ACHR report found that 7,468 persons, or an average of 1,494 persons per year (four persons daily), have died or been killed in Indian prisons and police custody during the period 2002 to 2007. An equal number of persons, if not more, have been killed in the custody of the army, central armed forces and states' paramilitary forces in insurgency-ravaged areas, according to the report. Worse, a large number of these deaths are allegedly triggered by torture.

ACHR stated that unless India addresses human rights violations and brings suspects to court, the prospects for counter-insurgency success will plummet and the scope for more violent and extreme Armed Opposition Groups (AOGs) will expand. Existing conditions are facilitating those who commit appalling acts of torture with impunity.

India, it seems, is in a worrying state of denial about torture.

If, outside the apologists of the rabid Right, we in the West feel that the taint of torture makes it impossible to justify the rule of law and so justify imprisonment of the tortured, even if they're guilty - then how much more should that moral taint affect our thinking when we consider evidence gained through torture as a justification for war?

Obama, and others who would talk glibly of "sovereignty", should be sure of their moral footing before they shoot.

Keith Olbermann talks to Steve Clemons about the tensions between India and Pakistan and whether our country can has any standing to tell India they don't have a right to pre-emptive strikes after what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Crossposted from Newshoggers, with videos added. Hat tip to Heather for the vids.)

CNET reports that Wikipedia has received $890,000 in funding specifically aimed at creating an easier to use interface for readers with a low level of tech knowledge. Wikipedia's goal is "to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them." It's an excellent idea, considering the obvious fact that there are presumably countless potential contributors with a lot of knowledge but a low level of tech skill. Still, since most of our readers are a tech-savvy bunch, it got us wondering:

Have You Ever Edited Wikipedia?
( polls)

It's not clear when the new and improved interface will reach public eyes, but all the new code will remain open source for those of us who've set up ou own personal Wikipedia using MediaWiki's software. Until then, check out our previous guide to contributing to Wikipedia.

Last night, Fox’s Hannity & Colmes hosted John Ziegler, author of a push poll attempting to prove that voters who supported Barack Obama were misinformed. Hannity used Ziegler’s study to complain that Obama supporters didn’t know about “really significant issues” like Bill Ayers and Obama’s views on coal. He insisted that only those who watched Fox News understood the real issues:

HANNITY: If you don’t listen to talk radio, if you don’t watch the FOX News Channel, you’re not anywhere nearly as informed as people that are just hearing the bumper stickers, the slogans, the snippets of the commercials of the media. So, journalism died in 2008, and it influenced a lot of people on the way out.

ZIEGLER: That’s exactly right.

Watch it:

Studies have consistently shown Fox viewers to be among the most misinformed Americans. A 2008 Pew study ranked Fox News dead last in the number of “high knowledge” viewers, with only 19 percent of Fox viewers able to correctly identify the majority party in Congress (Democrats), the name of the U.S. Secretary of State (Condoleezza Rice), and name of British Prime Minister (Gordon Brown).

Fox viewers are particularly misinformed about the Iraq war. A 2003 study found three common misperceptions about the war held by many Americans: first, that US troops found evidence of close pre-war links between Iraq and al-Qaeda; second, that troops found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; and third, that world public opinion favored Washington’s going to war with Iraq. Fox viewers were the most likely to believe these falsehoods:

Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception, compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in between. … As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between 12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of [print media] readers believed all three, while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.

Yet Hannity and Ziegler were convinced that media malfeasance was the only reason for Obama’s victory. Ziegler even claimed, “Bush would have won 65-35 with fair coverage in 2004.”

Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets. Similar to SyncBackSE but smaller and portable, Toucan is a nice option for making sure you've got everything on your thumb drive. Toucan is a free download for Windows only.

Download | Play    Download | Play

Rachel Maddow interviews Leo Gerard, the President of the United Steelworkers Union and asks if the auto industry is getting tougher treatment than the financial industry did when it was their turn for a bailout.

Gerard goes through the list of bailouts that have cost our economy trillions of dollars and notes that no one complained when CEOs made away with hundreds of billions of dollars over the years while they have taken our entire economy down the tank. He makes some great points on how "we've treated the people who take a shower after work much different than we've treated the people who shower before they go to work".

As one of those people who takes a shower after I get off work and not before, I concur.

Maddow and Gerard then move on to how politics is playing into this debate. Transcripts to follow:

Maddow: I spoke with the President of the auto workers' union recently on this show about the difference in the response to those other industries that have been getting assistance or asking for assistance from the federal government and the way that the auto industry has been treated and it seems to me that there is a real political inflection to the resistance to helping out the auto industry. In that political inflection you can hear when they start, when people start complaining, critics start complaining about auto workers being overpaid. And they start complaining about unions. Unions are being set up as if they are the reason that America can't be competitive and that business has failed. Do you feel that is a political attack on the unions as a union leader right now?

Gerard: I think it's a lot of Republican hypocrisy, Wall Street hypocrisy, it's the hypocrisy of the already rich and powerful that have kept silent like the Governors that you had on earlier. Kept silent about bailouts when it was going to their friends on Wall Street. Look at the economic deregulation we've seen in this country over the last twenty years. We deregulated the financial sector. We deregulated industries like the aerospace industry, like the trucking industry, like the energy industry, we deregulated employment levels so that now for the first time in the last fifty years this generation might pass on a lower standard of living for the next generation. And we deregulated global trade.

Tell me which one of those have been good for working families. Which one of those has increased America's standing in the world. Of course it's a phony attack. An auto worker that made fifty seven thousand dollars a year, working some overtime who produces a good car, who has a half decent pension who has now had their pension equity whacked by more corruption and callamity on Wall Street, who has some decent health care after working thirty or forty years in a work place. An employer that's trying to provide that health care because it's the only country on earth where society doesn't get health care provided through a universal system, and all of a sudden we're going to blame the workers? Uh, it's not the workers' fault. In fact the calamity issue report said today people aren't buying cars.

I was in a car lot on Saturday with my wife. I went to buy my daughter a coat. Stopped at a car lot just to see what was going on. There was nobody in the car lot buying any cars. You know why? Because they can't access credit. That's not the auto workers' fault. That's Wall Street's fault. That's those who deregulated the financial sector.

You know I have this little saying, I get a chance I'll tell it to you. When we deregulated the financial sector, that was the economic equivalent of leaving three year olds alone in a candy store. You know what they're going to do. They're going to gorge themselves and when you go get them, they're going to throw up on your shoes. I'm just tired of having my shoes thrown up on by Wall Street.

Hear, hear. I think we're all a bit tired of having our "shoes thrown up on". I believe Mr. Gerard meant to refer to the fact that our country ranks very poorly among other industrialized nations and is the only wealthy industrialized country not to offer a single-payer program as opposed to the "only country on earth", but given all the other great points he made I think we can give him a pass for that slip. It's not easy being on television when you don't do it all the time as I'm sure he does not, but easy to criticize someone who puts themselves out there if they slip up, so I won't do that. I think it's obvious what point he was trying to make. The lack of universal health care in this country plays a huge factor in our industries having trouble competing with other industrialized nations. And worse yet we're never going to compete with countries that use slave labor and need to have that practice stopped and some trade laws enforced which protect workers rights in every country we do business with. With China owning us right now I'm not sure how likely that's going to happen any time soon, if ever.

We may have ended slavery in this country but sadly we just outsourced it so we no longer have to look it in the face.

On Monday, ThinkProgress caught Bill O’Reilly claiming that there is “no proof” that detainees were ever abused at Guantanamo Bay, despite the fact that both the FBI and the Red Cross have documented abuse at the prison. On MSNBC’s Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann pointed out that O’Reilly is also contradicting himself when he says that there is no proof of abuse at Gitmo:

OLBERMANN: That kind of contradicts this is quote from somebody who visited Gitmo in June of 2005.

“There have been abuses by U.S. interrogators there, but not many and now we have some stats to back that up.”

It also contradicts what the same visitor said after a second trip to Gitmo in June, 2006.

“Muhammad al Gitani, thought to be directly involved with the 9/11 attack, was treated harshly and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered that Gitani could be subjected to coerced interrogation.”

Who is it that disagrees with Bill O’Reilly’s contention that there is no proof of mistreatment at Gitmo? Bill O’Reilly. He was the visitor who had confirmed the abuses.

Watch it:

During today’s press conference, President-elect Barack Obama called on Fox News to ask a question for the first time since the election. Fox News had not been called on in Obama’s five prior press conferences. Fox’s Wendell Goler began by thanking Obama for calling on him, and then proceeded to ask about the TARP funds and Bill Richardson’s now-removed beard. Obama began by offering a light-hearted take on Richardson’s beard:

I’m going to answer this question about the beard. I think it was a mistake for him to get rid of it. I thought that whole western, rugged look was really working for him. … We’re deeply disappointed with the loss of the beard.

“With respect to TARP,” Obama said, quickly turning the page, “my team has been reviewing very carefully how the TARP program has proceeded.” Obama stressed that one of his first principles is “strong oversight.” Watch it:

Download | Play    Download | Play [h/t to Jimmy at McCranium]

What was the most important story in the news yesterday? According to Bill O'Reilly, it's the fact that an atheist group was permitted to erect a holiday display alongside a Nativity scene at the state Capitol in Washington state.

His entire opening segment on The O'Reilly Factor yesterday was devoted to the subject, replete with a chryon featuring Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire's phone number, and featuring one of Papa Bear's patented "Talking Points Memo" rants, claiming Gregoire had "embarrassed Washington state and the nation."

He had on local blogger David Goldstein, who opened by noting pointedly that Gregoire was busy meeting with President-elect Obama to work on an economic-recovery plan "instead of worrying herself over this annual tempest in a teapot, which is what this is."

What's odd about O'Reilly's rant is that the state did not move to prohibit any kind of displays. The problem for O'Reilly is that it was too inclusive: the state essentially makes the space available for any group that wants to use it for a holiday display. (See the explanation here.)

In other words, O'Reilly is less interested in defending Christmas here in this crazy-ass liberal state (as O'Reilly depicts us) than he is in denying atheists their free-speech rights.

Goldstein smacked O'Reilly's whole premise by pointing this out:

Any religious organization that wants to put up a religious display gets to put one up. This is the problem of having religious displays on public property. It's a free-speech issue in the end. Once you allow one group to do it, then all groups get to do it. And in fact, I'm surprised that there's only three this year.

I think O'Reilly is starting to lose it, now that the recent elections have delivered a clear repudiation to just about everything he stands for, particularly that monumental waste of time and energy known as the Culture War. Unfortunately for him, he's built his whole career out of stoking the flames of that dimming fire.

So of course he has to do his damnedest to keep that faint little spark glowing. That seems to take a lot of huffing and puffing.