Waterboarded conservative admits it's torture

This is beautiful. Erich "Mancow" Muller, a conservative radio host, took the challenge of being waterboarded and his opinion took a complete 180. He now admits that it's torture. Sean Hannity is next on my list, followed by Dick Cheney. Or maybe flip that. Or maybe waterboard them at the same time ... then fight to the death. I'm getting off track.

Hannity and others often refer to waterboarding as dunking someone's head in water, and he's offered to be waterboarded for charity but has yet to follow through. I'm not expecting he will. Big credit to Mancow for having the big balls to go through with this.

Ex-FBI agent: "Enhanced interrogations" don't work

"There are a lot of people who don't know how to interrogate, and it's easier to hit someone than outsmart them."

Torture, or enhanced interrogation depending on your party affiliation, doesn't work. That's what former FBI agent Ali Soufan told a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday. The guy's got credentials too, he was one of Abu Zubayda's interrogators. Soufan said Zubayda gave up "actionable intelligence" within the first hour of interrogation. Once the enhanced interrogation methods were used, he stopped talking.

"I wish to do my part to ensure that we never again use these ... techniques instead of the tried, tested and successful ones -- the ones that are also in sync with our values and moral character. Only by doing this will we defeat the terrorists as effectively and quickly as possible.

"These techniques, from an operational perspective, are slow, ineffective, unreliable and harmful to our efforts to defeat Al Qaeda."

Soufan also explained the basic strategies that a good interrogator will use and vouched for their effectiveness. These communication methods aren't about being soft, but about outsmarting the detainee by using methods he's not prepared for. Al Qaeda is trained to resist torture strategies, which he said try to "force compliance, rather than elicit cooperation."

I don't suspect that determining that waterboarding is illegal, and doesn't work, will stop Republicans from defending it. If their guy did it, by definition, it was the right thing to do. Their stubbornness is killing their reputation right now.

More in the video. Soufan is hidden behind a screen to protect his identity.

Obama tells jokes, too

I'll say something bad about Obama one of these days, I promise. But he's even a pretty damn good standup comic.