Grace is in Florida for two days in search of ratings, I mean baby Trenton Duckett, and watching her in action is like watching someone pick the pockets of the infirm and mentally challenged. It's sickening, it's depressing and it's a sad reflection on our nation. And yet, there is something sickly compelling about watching the off-kilter Grace in her element.

For those of you lucky enough to have not followed the story, two-year-old Trenton Duckett disappeared in late August from his mother's apartment. There are a lot of questions about the disappearance, and in fact, I suspect that it's more than likely that mom Melinda Duckett knew more about the events surrounding the disappearance than she admitted publicly.

Even friends of Melinda's admit she was high-strung and troubled and all of her insecurities and fears smashed head on into Nancy Grace when Grace did a phone interview with her in early September. Before Grace was even able to air the interview, Melinda Duckett had killed herself, blaming in part the oppressive media pressure. The show aired the interview as scheduled, and even some fans of Grace's were troubled by her belligerent and self-righteous interview with the troubled woman. If she did know anything about Trenton's disappearance, she was unlikely to reveal it to someone who's only goal seemed to be to score points off a woman who was teetering on the edge.

Grace befriended Trenton's father, and has been wheeling him out at every opportunity to answer the hard-hitting questions like "Did you ever think you would have to go through something like this?" I'm assuming when she asked that, she was referring to the crime, and not Grace's heavy-handed interviewing style.

Despite months of flailing away on her show, Trenton Duckett is still missing, and now Grace has headed to "Team Duckett" headquarters, in order to keep attention on herself…I mean the case.

Night one was the typical mix for a Grace show. She recapped the news from yesterday, that a Wendy's employee had claimed to have seen Melinda and Trenton the day he went missing. She then breathlessly hyped a "new witness," who claimed to have suddenly remembered seeing Melinda Duckett at a convenience store that same morning, making a "suspicious" purchase.

As is generally the case on the Grace show, her "breaking news" wasn't quite as impressive as advertised. While a private investigator recounted the sighting, Major Chris Blair of the Marion County Sheriff's Office essentially dismissed the sighting by noting that they already had an ATM transaction of hers less than 45 minutes later at a bank far enough away to make the identification unlikely.

Grace then went on to other new pet theories. There are reports that a sex video of Melinda Duckett might have been for sale online, although it doesn't seem to be clear to anyone whether it is indeed her, or if it was video made for sale, or just one made between consenting adults that was later offered for sale.

Regardless, that news sent Grace and her cadre of regulars into a frenzy of speculation, and it wasn't long until one guest suggested that perhaps young Trenton could have ended up in the hands of pornographers. That comment brought a slight smile to Grace's face, as if she was happy to get what she wanted…another sordid piece of speculation.

One of the fun things about watching Grace in action is that she consistently has to backpedal and re-spin her pet theories, as the actual facts make themselves known.

The most recent example of that was the case of the cut window screen in Trenton Duckett's bedroom. For weeks, Grace has been prattling on about the supposed "ten inch" cut in the screen, a cut she said was entirely too small to be used as a way to grab the child from his bed. Over a period of days, she brought out a procession of props to illustrate how big ten inches really is (feel free to make up your own jokes about that one). She had everything from a ruler to a screen "not unlike the one in baby Trenton's room."

But as it turned out, the cut screen was actually thirty inches wide and ten inches high. Ooops. Now, in Grace's defense, law enforcement seems to have let Grace spin in the wind with some incorrect info, so it's not entirely her fault. But still…a prop fake window screen?

People often wonder why I have such a distaste for Grace, and it comes down to this. Nancy Grace has consistently shown that she has no trouble at all shading the facts to make her theories of a story more believable. While that behavior might be entirely legal when you're a prosecutor, it's a fatal flaw in a talk show host. Particularly one who is dealing with people's real emotions and lives.

Tonight's example of that characteristic came at about the halfway point of the show when she was speaking with Court TV reporter Jean Casarez. After two days of hyping this "new" witness, the Wendy's employee who had supposedly seen Melinda and Trenton, it was revealed in passing that the witness also claimed to have seen Melinda at that same Wendy's later that afternoon, a claim that was impossible according to Melinda Duckett's cell phone records. That claim makes the entire sighting more than a bit suspicious, and yet, this vital fact barely made a ripple in the show.

This is the same witness who Grace has trumpeted as having passed a polygraph with "no apparent deceptions." But any second year law student (or anyone who has ever watched Matlock) can tell you that just means the witness believes what she is saying. It doesn't mean she's right.

I could go on and on about Thursday's show, including her segment on the newest dead white girl de jour, a 29-year-old former cheerleader who was found murdered in her home.

I'll end instead with this thought. I'll give Nancy Grace the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps everything she is doing is sincere and upfront. I would still make the argument that she doesn't deserve to be on the air.

Because when it comes to crime and punishment, the facts are too important to be bent for convenience or to fit preconceived pet theories. Grace exhibits an attitude often seen in longtime prosecutors. They all think they can tell who's guilty and who isn't just by using their "gut." But as any outside law enforcement official can tell you, the "gut" has gotten a lot of people wrongly accused and convicted.