May this be the first and last time I use the phrase “100 days”. Here is the full video of Obama’s news conference tonight:

At MyDD’s liveblog, Jonathan Singer likes the ideology of Obama’s torture response: “Obama nicely swats down Cheney’s argument vis a vis torture, offered up by CBS Radio — memos don’t address the more fundamental questions of whether torture actually makes us safer on the whole and whether information could have been obtained otherwise.”

CNN’s viewers, voting online, gave Obama a B+ on the event. “The White House gotta be pleased with that,” Anderson Cooper said. Fareed Zakaria, meanwhile, said Obama is comfortable with foreign policy questions but that he lost an opportunity to say something nice about Mexico and its handling of swine flu.

TalkLeft’s Jeralyn liked Obama’s off-the-cuff style in answering a question about what had elicited various emotions from him as president: “President Obama is on TV talking about his first 100 days. I just tuned in. He’s answering a question, off the cuff, going through a list of emotions from surprise to enchanted to humble. It’s refreshing to see him speak without a teleprompter.”

To finally see a president who truly grasps the vital nature of retaining the rule of law, core Western values and, at the same time, the need to fight Jihadist terror with all the legal, humane weapons we have is an enormous relief after the callowness and cowardice of his predecessor. It was great to hear him talk of the experience of Britain during the Second World War.

It’s hard enough to believe CNN has actually reassembled their election night team to “grade” Obama on his first 100 days and then tell us what to think about his press conference tonight, but they actually had people write in with grades for their Senators, which is based upon, as far as I can, tell absolutely nothing — and is obviously being freeped. (Right now you have exactly 1 minute to grade Tim Geithner! Hurry!)

This whole 100 Days ritual navel gazing has always been stupid, but they’ve reached unprecedented heights this time. They’ve turned it into a Major TV Event, in which the only thing that actually happens is that the usual fatuous gasbags blather on for hours about nothing in advance of a mundane press conference. Talk about riveting television.

The good news for the team is that the consensus is that Obama is popular and doing well. The bad news for the country is that shallow, puerile psuedo analysis never actually helps anything.