I've been following, as I'm sure you have, Wednesday's horrific terror attack at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which resulted in the heartbreaking, pointless and outrageous deaths of 12 journalists, cartoonists and editors at the paper, including two police officers. As you know, the attack is said to have been carried out in retaliation for cartoons published by the paper over the years lampooning the Islamic Prophet Mohammed.

It was a barbaric, gruesome, and unjustifiable act, allegedly carried out by extremist adherents of the Islamic faith against a group of journalists who poked satirical fun at extremists of virtually all religious faiths over the years.

There is no question about the absolute right of the journalists to do what they did, no matter who it may have offended. Moreover, courageous responses by the journalism and cartoonist communities (some great toons in response here and here), along with that of the people of France (see these photos, akin to none that I am aware of in the U.S. after the September 11 terror attacks here) have been both uplifting and inspiring in the wake of the attack.

That said, I am still having trouble understanding at least one thing about all of this...

It's difficult to know where Rightwingers are now when it comes to the release of today's remarkable, horrifying, redacted 528-page executive summary [PDF] of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,000-page report on Bush-era CIA torture.

"Torture never happened!," they used to say. Then, "Okay, it happened, but it wasn't torture!" Then, "Okay, torture happened, but it was necessary!" Now, "This report is just meant as a distraction from America's real problem: ObamaCare!"

You get the idea. So did legendary syndicated cartoonist and blogger Tom Tomorrow (aka Dan Perkins), and he's been covering it with brilliant, dead-on satire for years. With the release of the Senate report, almost a decade in the making, we're posting a few very-much-related Tom Tomorrow toons from over the years below, as self-selected by Perkins on Twitter today.

"It's not as if we've learned nothing in ten years," he tweeted. "In a 2004 cartoon, I still had to explain what 'waterboarding' was."

And, as he also made clear, none of what we are learning today is ultimately a surprise. "Presumably if the cartoonists knew about it, the White House did as well."

They did indeed, as a glance at these toons from over the years makes clear yet again...

[Hat-tip D.R. Tucker...]

P.S. Yes, I'm safely out of the mountains and just now beginning to get caught up with --- and make sense of --- the mountains of stuff that I very happily missed over the past week.

We desperately could use a toon or two around here of late. Sorry this is not a happier or funnier one though...

As to the extra punchline at bottom right, it's a reference to the quote misattributed to Churchill: "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

And, by the way, a better name for "Carbon Tax" is "Pollution Tax".

Yes, companies who dump huge amounts of pollution --- tons and tons of it --- into our atmosphere every single day ought not be able to do it for free, as they do now, since we all have to pay the price of cleaning it up, as we are now doing in spades.

[Hat-tip Joe Romm at Climate Progress]

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Last April, in an article which covered an ethics complaint filed by the Center for Media and Democracy against 43 Republican state legislators, The BRAD BLOG went to great lengths to explain how the "legislative task force" system employed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was not merely subverting but supplanting our representative form of democracy. It was an article that would later be reprinted by The American Trial Lawyer magazine.

But, leave it to a Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, like Mark Fiore, to provide a more succinct explanation of the same phenomenon in this relatively short but powerful animated toon...