I'm with ita on the silver fox FCM...it might have gone differently if I did not love "Good Night And Good Luck" so much.

Andrew Sullivan rips the NYT a new one on their coverage of torture during the Bush administration:

The NYT: We Changed Reality Because Cheney Wanted Us To

But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact, recognized by everyone on the planet as such - and by the NYT in its news pages as such - for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right.

So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says. In any dispute, their view is not: what is true? But: how can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers? If you want a locus classicus for why the legacy media has collapsed, look no further.

So if anyone wants to get the NYT to use a different word in order to obfuscate the truth, all they need to do is make enough noise so there is a political dispute about a question. If there's a political dispute, the NYT will retreat. And so we now know that its core ethos is ceding the meaning of words to others, rather than actually deciding for itself how to call torture torture. Orwell wrote about this in his classic "Politics and the English Language." If newspapers will not defend the English language from the propaganda of war criminals, who will? And it is not as if they haven't made this call before - when they routinely called waterboarding torture. They already had a view. They changed it so as not to offend. In so doing, they knowingly printed newspeak in their paper - not because they believed in it, but because someone else might.

This is not editing. It is surrender. It is not journalism; it is acquiescence to propaganda. It strikes me as much more egregious a failing than, say, the Jayson Blair scandal. Because it reaches to the very top, was a conscious decision and reveals the empty moral center in the most important newspaper in the country.

Oh, fuck, Dana, I'm sorry.

Dana, that's terrible and I am sorry to hear it.

Thanks for the confirmation on the zucchini non-peeling. I don't, usually, but since I'm self-taught, I sometimes have no idear what I am doing. For instance, I made a really good potato soup a few weeks back but it would have been a hell of a lot better if I'd peeled the potatoes. They had been grilled, and the grilled, tough skins didn't take well to soup. But they tasted great when just eating the potatoes. So I am learning.

I am afraid to let a frozen banana thaw! I always peel 'em before freezing and stick 'em in smoothies like others here report. I have never made banana bread out of once-frozen bananas, but now I shall try!

Is that an "mmmph" of being impressed, or being surprised, or something else?

Oh, sorry; it's the "mmmph" of I'm certainly not sniffling after reading that story, no sir.

Oh, sorry; it's the "mmmph" of I'm certainly not sniffling after reading that story, no sir.

Heh. Nor was I, not even a little bit, nope, nuh-uh.

Cold bastards. I was SOBBING.

Mel Gibson goes off the racist, abusive deep end.

Oh dear God.

Oh, sorry; it's the "mmmph" of I'm certainly not sniffling after reading that story, no sir.

Oh good. I was full out crying, and I couldn't figure out why you were irritated by it!