THE BEST OF THE WEB TODAY

Today's Videos on WSJ.com: Paul Gigot interviews Russian dissident Garry Kasparov for "The Journal Editorial Report," and Mary O'Grady on Hugo Chavez's democratic pretensions.

Dems: No Protection for These Spooks
"Angry Democratic lawmakers called for investigations Friday into the Central Intelligence Agency's destruction in 2005 of at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody," the New York Times reports in its Paris edition:

Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts accused the CIA of "a cover-up," while Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois said it was possible that people at the agency had engaged in obstruction of justice. Both called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate.

At issue is the possibility that the videos depicted "waterboarding," an interrogation technique that only simulates drowning. CIA agents are believed to have used it to obtain lifesaving information from three top al Qaeda terrorists, and, according to the Washington Post, top Democratic lawmakers knew about it and did not object to it:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Fox News reports that "the CIA said Thursday it destroyed the tapes because of concerns that its agents could be put at risk." The same lawmakers who are untroubled by putting agents at risk now were up in arms over the exposure of CIA analyst Valerie Plame as a consequence of her husband's publicity-seeking. They really seem to view Karl Rove, not Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, as the enemy.

Gay Rites, Special Rights?
"Equal rights" or "special privileges"? That's often the question in debates over gay rights. Often it comes down to a matter of sematics: Proponents of same-sex marriage, to take one much-discussed example, say they are merely seeking for homosexuals the right to marry the person of their choice, a right heterosexuals already enjoy. Opponents say supporters are demanding that society upend millennia-old definitions and change the fundamental definition of marriage. Each side has a point.

Last week, gays actually did win special rights, albeit apparently without intending to, as the Associated Press reports from Providence, R.I.:

A lesbian couple who married in Massachusetts cannot get divorced in their home state of Rhode Island, the state's highest court ruled Friday in a setback to gay rights advocates who sought greater recognition for same-sex relationships.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court, in a 3-2 decision, said the family court lacks the authority to grant a divorce because state lawmakers have not defined marriage as anything other than between a man and a woman. . . .

Cassandra Ormiston and Margaret Chambers wed in Massachusetts in 2004 after that state became the first to legalize same-sex marriages. The couple filed for divorce last year in Rhode Island, where they both live, citing irreconcilable differences.

They can't get divorced in Massachusetts either, because the Bay State has a residency requirement. That means that, if you set aside the man-and-woman element, they have a genuine traditional marriage, till death do them part--something the law no longer recognizes for heterosexuals.

Oh, apparently there is one other group that doesn't have to worry about legally sanctioned spousal abandonment. A headline in the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., reads: "Court Rejects Right to Divorce Lawyer." Leave it to the lawyers to find a way around the law!

Political Pandering
"Ask Mike Huckabee about his tax plan and he'll talk about pimps and prostitutes," the Concord (N.H.) Monitor reports. Not a bad lead. The story continues:

The Republican presidential candidate often says that one of the selling points of his plan to replace the federal income tax with a 23 percent sales tax is that it would force those who deal in cash to pay taxes.

"You end the underground economy," Huckabee said at a recent luncheon for the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce. "Illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers--everybody pays taxes."

Huh? Does Huckabee really think prostitutes are going to collect sales taxes and pass them on to the government? Apparently not:

William Ahern, spokesman for The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group in Washington, D.C., said even Huckabee's claim about pimps and prostitutes isn't true.

"Say (a drug dealer) spends $100,000 on a tricked-out Hummer," Ahern said. "Instead of just paying the local car tax or sales tax, he would be paying, according to the Fair Tax, the full 23 percent (tax).

"But he won't be collecting the Fair Tax on his sale of drugs," Ahern added. "You and me, the two secret heroin addicts who are pouring our wages into the coffers of this drug dealer instead of making mortgage payments . . . we avoid paying the Fair Tax by buying heroin instead of taxable goods."

To put it another way, under Huckabee's plan, johns and drug addicts would pay for sex and drugs with pretax income.

Left-Wing Fundamentalism
Talk about Mitt Romney and the "Mormon issue" has centered mainly on evangelical Protestants who view the Latter-day Saints as not really Christian. But NewsBusters.org notes an unhinged expression of anti-Mormon prejudice from a left-wing fundamentalist, Lawrence O'Donnell.

Appearing on "The McLaughlin Group" this weekend (tiny video with distorted aspect ratio here), O'Donnell ranted and railed:

This was the worst political speech of my lifetime. Because this man stood there and said to you "this is the faith of my fathers." And you, and none of these commentators who liked this speech realized that the faith of his fathers is a racist faith. As of 1978 it was an officially racist faith, and for political convenience in 1978 it switched. And it said "OK, black people can be in this church." He believes, if he believes the faith of his fathers, that black people are black because in heaven they turned away from God, in this demented, Scientology-like notion of what was going on in heaven before the creation of the earth.

There's more, but we'd like to focus on the racial point. It is true that the Mormon church excluded blacks from the priesthood until 1978. Far be it from us to defend this former policy. But it is a former policy. Doesn't the church get any credit for doing the right thing and abandoning it? And if not, shouldn't the Democratic Party--once a crucial institution in preserving racism--be shunned for its history?

On a lighter note, we were amused by this InstaPundit item:

Maureen Dowd's latest column begins:

When I was a kid, we used to drive on the Beltway past the big Mormon temple outside Washington. The spires rose up like a white Oz, and some wag had spray-painted the message on a bridge beneath: "Surrender Dorothy!"

But if you're imagining Dowd as a pigtailed six-year-old in the back of the family station wagon, think again. The temple was finished in 1974. Maureen Dowd was born in 1952. So she was a "kid" who was old enough to vote and drink. (According to this source, the graffiti first appeared in 1973, when Dowd would have been 21.) . . . I remember the graffiti, too, though, which was still there in the 1980s when I was a "kid" practicing law in Washington. By then Dowd was pushing 40.

C'mon, Glenn, haven't you heard that 22 is the new 6?

Clinton Mythmaking
New York Times reporter Katharine Q. Seelye, writing at the paper's Caucus blog, that TV personality Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama "is already having a ripple effect on rival campaigns":

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is sending Bill Clinton here to South Carolina on Saturday, the day before Oprah Winfrey arrives. The former president has spoken here often on behalf of his wife and has proved enormously popular with South Carolina voters.

That's like saying George W. Bush "has proved enormously popular" with New York voters. Bush got 40.1% of the New York state vote in 2004, slightly more than Clinton's 39.9% in South Carolina in 1992. If you think this is an unfair comparison, try this one: Clinton got 43.9% in South Carolina in 1996, just below Bush's 44% in Maine in 2000. Would the Times say Bush "has proved enormously popular" Down East?

Metaphor Alert
"The administration is going to pay a price for not allowing allies in on it at an earlier date. The French had carried the administration's water on this issue and really went out on a limb to get the European Union to adopt tough sanctions. And now the rug has been pulled out from under them."--former State Department official Robert J. Einhorn on Iran and the National Intelligence Estimate, quoted in the Washington Post, Dec. 8

Homer Nods
Our item Friday on John Kerry, the NFL and the Dec. 29 Giants-Patriots clash included an inapposite reference (since corrected) to Thursday night games. The Giants and Patriots are playing on a Saturday night; and Saturday night games, like Thursday night ones, are carried on the NFL Network.

Whatever This Means, It's Not Bad for a Dead Guy
"Debutant seamer Yasir Arafat jolted India with three important wickets in a tight seven-over opening spell before his side ran into Yuvraj and Ganguly, who counter-attacked to steer their team to safety."--Agence France-Presse, Dec. 8

Are Cops Allowed to Accept Gratuities?
"Robbed Pizza Man Gives Police Tip"--headline, New Hampshire Union Leader, Dec. 8

Let's Hope They Collar Him
"Suspect Fleas Court Before Knowing His Verdict"--headline, WFOR-TV Web site (Miami), Dec. 8

Good News for Anemic Mice
"Researchers Cure Sickle-Cell Anemia in Mice"--headline, Concord (N.H.) Monitor, Dec. 9

World's Biggest Book Burning
"Sixty Percent of Amazon to Be Destroyed by 2030"--headline, Pravda.ru, Dec. 6

Someone Better Alert ALPA
"WGA, AMPTP Stalemate May Blow Out Pilots"--headline, Hollywood Reporter, Dec. 10

Bill Murray Steps Up
"Global Warming Talks Go On Without Chevy Chase"--headline, Journal News (White Plains, N.Y.), Dec. 10

We Spent All Our Money on Soviet Jewelry
" 'Endangered Feces' Being Auctioned on eBay"--headline, FoxNews.com, Dec. 7

I'm Bart Simpson, Who the He . . . Oh, Look! A Squirrel!
"Rare Ground Squirrel Spotted in Springfield"--headline, Munster (Ind.) Times, Dec. 10

Breaking News From 1942
"Gandhi Speech Explanation Sought"--headline, BBC Web site, Dec. 10

News You Can Use

• "Tailgating in the Truck? Douse Grill Before Driving Away"--headline, Green Bay (Wis.) Press-Gazette, Dec. 10
  
  
• "Beware the Force of Water in Any Form"--headline, Scripps Howard News Service, Dec. 9
  
  
• "Historic Whiskey Comes at a High Cost"--headline, United Press International, Dec. 9
  
  
• "UMass Finds Gap Between Studies, Real Life"--headline, Boston Globe, Dec. 10

Bottom Stories of the Day

• "Fla. Teen Documenting '08 Election"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 9
  
  
• "Bar Staff Ask 'Old Fart' to Go Outside to Pass Gas"--headline, FoxNews.com, Dec. 7
  
  
• "Canadian Retailer Bans Some Plastic Bottles"--headline, New York Times, Dec. 8
  
  
• "Belgium Remains Without Government"--headline, CNN.com, Dec. 10
  
  
• "Gore Gets Nobel, Warns of Ominous Threat"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 10

Reality Bites
Here's one thing that bloggers can do every bit as well as the mainstream media: embarrass themselves spectacularly. Jim Henley of the blog Unqualified Offerings had a post last week attacking Mark Steyn, author of "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It":

The excerpt . . . that ran in Maclean's last year is far more blatantly racist than I figured it would be when I began reading it. I knew Steyn was a bigot, with a 1920s obsession with demographic decline. . . . But I imagined Steyn was more adroit in his use of code words and deniability feints. No! "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes" is merely the most spectacular example of--not code words. I'm not completely shocked that Steyn would write with such frank bigotry, or that Regnery would publish it. I'm somewhat surprised that an establishment organ like Maclean's would run it.

Here's the actual quote from the Steyn excerpt:

"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children."

Realizing his mistake, Henley updated his post, applying the "strikethrough" HTML tag to the erroneous quote and directing his readers to a new, naval-gazing post in which he puzzles over just why Mullah Krekar would say such a thing:

Krekar can't have meant, when he compared Muslim birth rates to "mosquitoes," to liken his fellow Muslims to vermin. Krekar in fact did this, and if I were a European Muslim, I'd be [angry or irritated] at the [offensive or disagreeable person]. Since Krekar didn't mean the mosquito metaphor to suggest that Muslims were like insects, parsimony demands that I not assume Steyn quoted Krekar because he wanted to liken Muslims to insects. Had Steyn said what Krekar said, as I incorrectly implied that he did, it would be a fair inference. Steyn didn't say this, so it's an unfair one.

So what did Krekar mean? It seems to us that the comment that sparked the whole kerfuffle probably wasn't invidious at all. If we're not mistaken, mosquito is merely the Spanish diminutive for mosque.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to John Nernoff, John Robb, Ed Lasky, Don Stewart, Lewis Sckolnick, Ethel Fenig, Michael Benn, Paul Graves, Evan Slatis, Greg Askins, Matthew Franck, C.R. Treuhold, Joe Hobden, Anne Fox, Dave Ferris, Steve Hatfield, Curtis Sherwood, Abraham Oseroff, Mordecai Bobrowsky, Bruce Goldman, Paul Wicht, Stewart Seman, Scott Miller, Thomas Sattler, Charlie Gaylord, Thomas Mayer, Barbara Meier, Steve Karass, John Alder, Rowe Sergent and Richard Haisley. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)