I'm not one for fellating fellow journalists, but I'd make a knee-bruising exception for Slate's Ron Rosenbaum, the first big-name journalist (who's not a card-carrying libertarian) to stick up for President-elect Barack Obama's nicotine addiction.

Every journalist, at some point in his or her life, must write the "I've seen something out in the world which confuses me" piece. Andy Rooney does it every week. Me, I've publicly scratched my head about umbrellas. But I tried to keep my whining to a couple of sentences, and Rooney's done gassing in [...]