Author: Andrew Sullivan

"What’s he call up and say? 'I got a hot one for you, Jon. Can you take — what’s your email address?' Is that what he does?" – Chris Matthews on Cheney's media spokesman, Mike Allen of Politico.

As Chris says, this was "not reporting." It was fusing a journalistic enterprise with a political machine in order to gain page-views for a scoop and thereby money. And that's the danger of someone like Mike Allen getting so close to Dick Cheney that he is a stenographer-for-hire. Couldn't Cheney have just faxed his recent attack on the president to the press in general? Why does Mike Allen have to be his conduit? We know why. Allen has proved his worth to Cheney.

Video of Politico's Jonathan Martin trying and failing to defend the whoredom of his publication after the jump:

Apparently not.

Hume doesn't understand that fellow Christians might object to his use of a secular platform for direct religious proselytizing. And O'Reilly, of course, saw no offense to Buddhism or Buddhists at all. There is a little queasiness about Hume's open sectarianism on the right – as in the decision of many rightist bloggers to ignore this kerfuffle altogether. But in the end, in the current GOP, there is no real internal cost to sectarian politics or media. That's the underlying dynamic.

Which means it will get worse before it gets better.

Don't go swimming, dudes.

And God bless her for it. But the evidence of a wider liberal revolt just isn't there in the polling:

Obama's rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent).

Bloggers have had a great time exposing the inconsistency on the pro-torture right. Why should Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab be tortured as an enemy combatant while Richard Reid was prosecuted by civilian authorities under Bush? Isn't the unconscious truth obvious? One has an English name; the other has a very foreign-sounding Muslim name. One was born in Bromley and one in Kenya. One is "us"; the other is "them". And it is much easier to torture them than to torture us. It just seems to me that this distinction has no moral, legal or strategic basis.

Joe Carter piles on Thiessen's perversion of the just war tradition:

Perhaps torture would make sense in a pagan society where the nation-state is of primary importance and all actions are ultimately justifiable if they serve nationalist ends. But in a nation whose ethical foundation is rooted in a Judeo-Christian concept of justice, torture by state agents should always be considered impermissible. The reason that there is a long history of just warfare theory but no corresponding “just torture theory” is because torture is inherently antithetical to justice and morality.

Who better to counter it than Don Imus?

Ed Morrissey was right. This piece – about the imminent demise of the Khamenei junta – turns out to be very fishy, as Laura Rozen explains.

Contra Drudge, Bradford Plumer explains why the recent cold snap in North America doesn't disprove global warming:

Even though the 2000s were the hottest decade on record, there were a lot of record lows set in the United States during that time. It's just that there were even more record highs—and the ratio of highs to lows was greater than the ratio during the 1990s, which was, in turn, greater than the ratio during the 1980s, and so on. Note also that the United States is just a small patch of the globe, and while we're bracing ourselves against freakish cold, the central Pacific has been seeing freakish highs. The thing to watch is the overall trend.

Chart from UCAR.