How did someone like Leon Panetta, former chief of staff in the Clinton administration, with no career background in intelligence, get tapped to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency?

He earned it -- in a number of ways, but especially when he recently wrote this in the Atlantic Monthly:

We have preached these values to the world. We have made clear that there are certain lines Americans will not cross because we respect the dignity of every human being. That pledge was written into the oath of office given to every president, "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution." It's what is supposed to make our leaders different from every tyrant, dictator, or despot. We are sworn to govern by the rule of law, not by brute force.

We cannot simply suspend these beliefs in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

God knows the Obama team has had a couple of swings and misses here in the transition, and a big whiff with the Bill Richardson, but late in the game they're hit a home run with this selection and with his late appointments to the Justice Department, all of whom seem committed to human rights and to the Constitution.

Panetta's words show he truly wants to bring change to the intelligence community, and his experience as a top governmental official who understands the kind of information that's useful to the White House should help him carry it out. He's not a career spy? So what? We don't pick a career military person, generally, as Secretary of Defense, so maybe the CIA should be treated the same way.

Look at George H.W. Bush, who ran the CIA in 1975-76 and had their building named after him -- he wasn't a career spy (was he?). I just wish that all of Obama's Cabinet choices had sent as clear a signal as this one.

Jack Shafer has an excellent piece in Slate (h/t Romenesko) that tears down another myth: That newspapers never saw the Internet coming. To the contrary, his article notes that newspaper owners reacted aggressively to radio, TV, the possibility of an electronic newspaper and even the actual Internet when it came of age in the 1990s. The problem wasn't that they didn't react, but how they chose to do so.

His devastating conclusion:

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.

UPDATE: Dana Milbank in today's Washington Post: "Aspiring RNC Chairmen Wonder: What Would Reagan Do?:

Luckily, all six RNC candidates agreed on a solution to the party's woes: They would say Ronald Reagan's name over and over, as if it were a tantric incantation.

Anuzis quoted Reagan in his opening statement. Former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell lamented that too many Republicans "campaign like Ronald Reagan and then govern like Jimmy Carter." Saltsman talked about his high school days: "Ronald Reagan was president, and he got me excited."

Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, tried to top that. "I was inspired as a college graduate by a fellow who walked in the room by the name of Ronald Reagan."

The five GOP chairman candidates (maybe we should call them the Washington Generals, since they're all losers) just voted for their favorite Republican president, and it was a rout.

Reagan 5.

Lincoln...who's that?

I guess the rule here is that, by definition, the best Republican president can't be anyone that a Democrat might pick. That's a shame, because as the song (not by Cher, unfortunately) says, "he freed a lot of people." Maybe that's the problem. Also, shouldn't Ike get an honorable mention.

Tear down this myth.

Blogger's note: Changed the headline from the original because....I can. It's my blog.

He's good enough, he's smart enough, and doggone it he has 225 more votes than the other guy.

Stuart Smalley is headed to the United States Senate.

Discuss this, or whatever else is on your mind -- it's an open thread. Jan. 5 is a horrible day for blogging. Who knew!

Has blogging become sooooo 2004? Some days I wonder. There were a lot of stories around this time last year about a surprising drop in blog traffic, considering how the 2008 election was at hand, and the authors threw out a lot of theories -- but they all missed what I thought the obvious answer was: People were spending too much time with their friends on Facebook to check out blogs as much. The number of Internet diversions keeps increasing, but last time I checked the number of hours in the day stayed fixed at 24.

And this was before Twitter -- now Facebook can seem soooo 2007 at times. I had my doubts about Twitter -- a network where you exchange pithy observations with friends and other followers, and by pithy I mean they can't be more than 140 characters. So today on an Eagles Sunday I'm reading lots of "tweets" (I know, I know, but that's what they call them) along the lines of "Westbook, yes!"

Insightful? I had my huge doubts about the Twitter phenominon and resisted joining, but now that I finally did a month ago I am learning its usefulness as well: A passenger in the Denver plane crash was twittering even before he fled the burning plane, I read about an environmental disaster in Tennessee on Twitter before reading it in the mainstream media, and I've been introduced to the writing of a student journalist named Suzanne Yada who should be offered a job upon graduation somewhere withi Philadelphia Media Holdings -- if only we did that sort of thing (i.e., hire people) anymore.

So now I am a tiny cog in the Twitter revolution (although only when I'm on the big clunky PC, since the next email or even text message that I send from a cell phone will be my first). Any remaining Attytood fans :-) can follow me on Twitter by going here.

The funny thing is that when it came to promoting my upcoming book on Ronald Reagan -- "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" -- I would have guessed not long ago that having a blog would be a valuable tool for getting the word out. I still think that's true, but I'm already seeing evidence that social networking, via Facebook especially, may be a more valuable tool for spreading the word -- virally, starting with my online friends (and I'm always looking for more of these) and then with their friends. On New Year's Day, while Penn State was getting routed, I launched a Facebook group for Tear Down This Myth, which now already has more than 400 members (!) and continues to grow. If you're interested in news about the book (i.e., in-person or media appearances, or where to, ahem, buy it) I hope that you'll join as well.

The rise of social media is an exciting thing -- if you haven't tried it, it's a great way to reconnect with old friends from high school, college, etc., while possibly making some new ones, but I think this development is also one more clue that points to why newspapers and other local news organizations are in trouble. I've come to see over the last couple of years that most people are the most obsessed with news from two areas. One is what I would call "media world" -- TV. movies, music, pro and big-college sports, and politics as practiced on a national level over shoutfests and yukfests from Rush Limbaugh to Keith Olbermann to "The Daily Show." The second wave is what I would call "friend world." Just a couple of years ago, the idea of marketing "news" about your circle of friends and family would have seemed patently absurd but now, thanks to Facebook, Twitter and the like, it is this type of "news" that many people seek out first.

Newspapers fall into a dangerously grey area here. While we overlap, obviously, with "media world," (and almost not at all with "friend world"), the real goal of most local media is to peddle news of "your hometown world" -- a world that especially on the metro-area scale is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the TV/computer age (with one huge exception, hometown pro sports teams, which have literally kept us in business). Some have suggested newspapers move more into social media and to some degree they have (you can follow Philly.com on Twiiter here, for example), but a newspaper isn't going to invent Facebook or Twitter.

Because else somebody already did.

And we'll see you....next week in the Meadowlands!

* (Yet another obscure '70s song reference, as noted below)