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"Quote of the Day" doesn't quite cut it. It's more like "OMFG what planet am I on?". Check out this excerpt from Mark Thiessen's book:

Obama claims that by eliminating enhanced interrogations and closing Guantanamo, he is actually making America safer. In his view, both the CIA program and Guantanamo have driven the Muslim street into the enemy's camp and helped al Qaeda recruit new terrorists. As Obama put it ... "[I]nstead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause."

This is demonstrably false. First, the terrorists were successfully recruiting suicide operatives long before the CIA interrogation program existed or there were any terrorists held at Guantanamo. There was no Guantanamo and no CIA interrogation program when terrorists first tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993. There was no Guantanamo and no CIA interrogation program when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. There was no Guantanamo and no CIA interrogation program when they attacked the USS Cole. And there was no Guantanamo and no CIA interrogation program on September 11, 2001. The terrorists found other excuses to recruit the operatives for these attacks. Evil always finds an excuse.

This is a dumb rebuttal. Obama claims Guantanamo helped to recruit more terrorists and all Thiessen's got is that terrorists existed before Guantanamo, therefore Guantanamo didn't create terrorism. How observant!

Remember, this guy just got a job as an op-ed columnist for the friggin' Washington Post! Let me say that if this guy were black somebody on the right would be screaming about how terrible Affirmative Action is.

Now here's the money quote, watch Thiessen prove he doesn't deserve to have a job:

In the movie Batman: The Dark Knight, whenever the Joker is about to kill one of his victims, he points to the scars that form his hideous smile and tells the story of how he got his disfiguring wounds. Each time it is a different story. The first time he says they were carved into his face by an abusive father. The next time, he claims he did it to himself after criminals disfigured his wife. But when he says to Batman, "Do you know how I got these scars?" Batman says, "No, but I know how you got these," and pushes him off the side of a building. Batman is not interested in the villain's made-up excuses. We shouldn't be, either.

Christiane Amanpour is scheduled to take over as host of the Sunday morning bobblehead show This Week this August. Witness some succinct awesomesauce from Glenn Greenwald in "WashPost: Christiane Amanpour can't be 'objective'" on this issue:

Today in The Washington Post, TV critic Tom Shales condemns this decision on several grounds, including the fact that she is viewed by Far Right media groups as suffering from a "liberal bias." But as Eric Boehlert notes, the Right thinks that everyone who is not Rush Limbaugh is a biased shill for "the Liberal Media," and if that's the standard, then only Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck would be an acceptable choice for Shales.

But I want to focus on a far more pernicious and truly slimy aspect of Shales' attack on Amanpour. In arguing why she's a "bad choice," Shales writes that "[s]upporters of Israel have more than once charged Amanpour with bias against that country and its policies," and adds: "A Web site devoted to criticism of Amanpour is titled, with less than a modicum of subtlety, 'Christiane Amanpour's Outright Bias Against Israel Must Stop,' available via Facebook." Are these "charges" valid? Is this "Web site" credible? Does she, in fact, exhibit anti-Israel bias? Who knows? Shales doesn't bother to say. In fact, he doesn't even bother to cite a single specific accusation against her; apparently, the mere existence of these complaints, valid or not, should count against her.

This is what I mean when I talk about the kabuki masks of outrage conservatives pundits wear when they "criticize" just about anything. All too often entire conservative organizations are based around this gimmick, which is why I harp on how sad a website NewsBusters is. Their raison d'etre isn't to prove anything, they exist simply to keep making the accusations.

"Could SCOTUS Be The Death Panel For Health-Care Reform?"

I'd encourage you to read this if you're scared the Supreme Court will just blow health care reform up.

"NFL approves new overtime rule."

Nobody agrees with me on this, but I've always said the one thing from the XFL that rocked was the overtimes. I get mocked for saying that among sports jocks though.

County Fair: NewsBusters -- continuing to embarrass themselves