If Cheney goes, they'll replace him as Veep with someone younger, charismatic and who doesn't scare people. Then when Bush gets tired of playing politics when the game isn't rigged in his favor, he'll resign and the new guy can run as incumbent in 2008.

My prediction: Jeb. If the Dems win in November, he'll be VP by Christmas.

Judicial ethics aside, this looks like insider trading to me. In the middle of the case he bought GE stock, then ruled for GE? Did he, perhaps, sell right afterwards, taking in a tidy profit?

Good.

The proper comparison is with the night Ed Murrow finally took on Joe McCarthy. Murrow wasn't funny, either.

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

It's the best slogan, ever. Eight years of misrule condensed into two-and-a-half words. Re-Elect Gore! Re-Elect Gore! Re-Elect Gore!

I know I'm late to this party, but there are a lot of hidden costs to impeaching Bush. Pelosi is right to take the issue off the table.

1. What about Cheney? We can't just impeach him along with Bush, because we have no evidence. Vice Presidents don't have much actual authority. We all know he's the evil mastermind, but the documentation would have to be pried out of the (Bush or Cheney) White House first. That would take time.

2. Bush could well be as unstable as a lot of us suspect. If he thought he had nothing to lose, he might start a nuclear war against Belgium, declare himself Fuhrer, who knows? It's better to reserve impeachment as a threat.

2a. Even if Bush isn't crazy enough to go nuclear, he is crazy enough to make all sorts of idiotic last-minute decrees to advance his agenda as far as possible before the end. Clear-cutting Yosemite, rushing equipment to ANWR to start drilling, return to the gold standard, Gideon Bibles in all the public schools, who knows?

3. The impeachment issue will destabilize the Democrats. Don't forget that if Bush and Cheney are impeached and convicted, the Speaker of the House becomes President. Right now, the heir apparent is Nancy Pelosi. But if becoming President seemed a real possibility, there would be a real food-fight for the post among House party leaders. It would happen during the campaign season, and could well result in snatching, at the polls, defeat from the very jaws of victory.

4. It would be more fun to have him in office, suffering. Sort of like Richard III (my kingdom for a horse!) or the Wicked Witch of the West (I'm melting! All my beautiful wickedness. . . ).

You've gotta infer that they wouldn't sign the memo because all of them (presumably, all prosperous lawyers) want to be able to pretend it wasn't really their doing. Of course, if this is a typical case, one of the 14 wrote the memo, then got the others to sign on -- actually, not sign on -- to give his spuriosities some heft. I can understand why they didn't sign. But not signing merely gives the secret away.

But what's with this trend among Goops? Oil execs and Al Gonzales won't take an oath when testifying to Congress. Now the Boyle clerks would rather not own up to helping to write the "Boyle's OK" memo. I'm sure glad the grownups are in charge.

Under your interpretation of the Constitution and the "unitary executive" theory, do you have the authority to (a) cancel or ignore the results of the 2006 elections; or (b) cancel or ignore the results of the 2008 elections; or (c) remain in office after January 20, 2009, if at your sole discretion you conclude that as Commander-in-Chief doing otherwise is harmful to national security?

Isn't it great to have presidential candidates like Kerry and Gore who can fight back against smears and lies, and really show what they're made of, two years after the campaign is over?

Maybe we'll get lucky and Cheney will announce that the Democratic Party is in its last throes.

I'll bet Bush has been doing this kind of thing all his life. Using cash, hardly ever his own, to buy friends. You know the type. Repulsively spoiled, rotten to the core and on the surface. No one can stand him. You also know the type of great friend money can buy.

I'd almost feel sorry for him if he wasn't so hell-bent on destroying everything in his path.

The official word is apparently that a simple scheduling snafu led to the gathering of the leaders of the Religious Right in the wrong place as Bush waxed adequate about the transcendent virtues of heterosexual marriage.

Baloney.

The theocrats were deliberately kept out of the picture -- literally -- lest anyone get the idea that they were watching Bush, or pulling his strings. Whether they were actually misdirected by the White House, or if they were in on the con from the first, I don't know. Either way, the "simple snafu" explanation is a sham.

Reid should sue for defamation. He should be standing on the courthouse steps at 9:00 tomorrow morning. He wisely ignored the whole thing at the beginning, because Solomon and the AP would have just spun it as a harmless error, and what's he so huffy about anyway? But now the AP has had several days to check things and has put its stamp of approval on the original piece.

In fact, Reid is in an awkward spot -- he might have to sue against his better judgment, just to set the record straight, because otherwise the presumption will solidify that he did something wrong.