Earlier this week, ThinkProgress noted that two months into his tenure as Attorney General, Mike Mukasey still would not answer whether waterboarding is torture. The New York Times reports that yesterday, Mukasey hedged even more. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t answer it,” he said at a news conference. “I didn’t say that I would.” When asked about the nomination of torture advocate Steven Bradbury to the Office of Legal Counsel, Mukasey said, “Steve Bradbury is one of the finest lawyers I’ve ever met. … I want to continue working with him.”

UPDATE: Marty Lederman has more.

Man. If you’d asked me yesterday to list Barack Obama’s strengths and weaknesses, I would have told you he’s much more impressive giving a formal speech than on a debate stage. But it’s doubly-impressive all over again when you see him giving a big formal speech — he’s much better in this format. I somehow doubt that a broad swathe of Americans are sitting at home on a Saturday night (though maybe in California where it’s only a quarter past six), but if they are I think they’ll be very impressed. When forgotten element of this campaign is that even though Obama’s given several speeches that are quite well-known among political junkies, most voters have almost certainly never sat and watched him deliver one.

After all this time being told by the Clinton campaign that Barack Obama is some kind of closet Reagan-worshipping right-winger, it’s a bit confusing to be told that he’s the second coming of Jesse Jackson, too.

Y’all know I’m not one to say that everything is good news for John McCain. But tonight there is actual very good news for McCain as Florida’s super-popular and somewhat moderate governor Charlie Crist is going to endorse him. This comes on the heels of his endorsement from Senator Mel Martinez yesterday.

The fact that big turnout seems to have powered Obama to his big win strikes me as perhaps more significant than his margin of victory as such. Obama’s message of “bringing people together” to create “change” is often castigated by his critics as a “kumbaya schtick” but it looks like something very different whenever he can deliver on promises to mobilize new people and bring them into the process. At the end of the day, politicians respond to facts on the ground. A presidential candidate who can change the facts on the ground by bringing new people into the process can carry a lot of supporters on his coattails. A president who can organize people at the grassroots in support of his agenda could get amazing things done.

Could Obama really do that? Well, it’s hard to know for sure. But it does fit his background as a community organizer, and it does fit his results in Iowa and South Carolina.

It looks like Bill Clinton’s heavy-handed attacks on Barack Obama didn’t serve his wife well in South Carolina, with about sixty percent of voters saying Clinton’s actions were a factor in their decision in what looks to have been a landslide win for Barack Obama.

That, I think, is about as it should be. Team Clinton has consistently, and rightly, maintained that they’re within their rights to be tough on Obama. And so they are — politics is a contact sport. But that doesn’t mean that maximum viciousness is actually a good idea. You want to be seen as likable, fair, judicious, etc. and over the past few weeks the Clinton campaign has been making its candidate look like something other than the mature, experienced, sober-minded choice.

Based on exit polls, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) is projected to win the South Carolina Democratic primary “by a substantial margin.”

UPDATE: Fox News reports that “more Democrats voted today than Republicans voted last Saturday.” “Party officials predicted a record-setting turnout,” adds the New York Times.

He wins, as expected. Apparently it’s a big win, though, which wasn’t inevitable and exit polls are incapable of telling whether John Edwards may overtake Hillary Clinton for second place. Obama’s likely to wind up with a pretty substantial lead in delegates after this.

Jack and Jill Politics as a great post up on the media’s “three fifths of a vote” approach to African-American voters.