Regardless of where the various militant groups fired from, Israeli munitions hit the soccer field. Given that the Israeli military is the best in the world, and that they enjoy the best armaments in the world, thanks to their (goy) Uncle Sam, it's hard not to conclude that they want to hit that soccer field.

Mr. Keillor concludes "I don't think the Occupant plans on being Distinguished anytime soon. I think he'll stay at the ranch and wait for the revisionists. In 30 years, a few historians will come along to say that he was better than a lot of people thought."

No, we won't have to wait 30 years. The planned Bush (George W.) library is already hiring revisionists - more like fictionists, or fabulists - who are hard at work "documenting" the administration of the Current Resident. Their arduous task is to make him look good. Half a billion bucks (that's $500,000.00) is allocated for this task.

It may not be enough.

Zubs suggests voting on Sundays. Why not take the whole weekend? This is a big country! Make "Election Weekend" a holiday in itself. Maybe 'round the clock polling could be arranged.

Also, a note in passing. Bill Maher has the revelation that "This is why Bush scandals never catch on with the public -- they're all evangelicals of course, and nobody is having sex."

Not true. How about that evangelist who was busted for having gay sex while all crystal-methed up? How about the Duke Cunningham/Dusty Foggo corruption scandal in which Shirlington Limo (itself also a Homeland Security scandal) delivered Republican Congressmen for many wild nights of drinking and prostitutes? How about Rep. Mark Foley stalking underage Congressional pages? (All boys, natch.) How about this scandal being broken by the heretofor-closeted Gay Republican Underground?

Actually, Mr. Maher has a point - none of these REPUBLICAN SEX!!! scandals has caught on with the public, except for Mark Foley, and the Republican Gay Underground eased quietly back into the closet afterwards.

The reason the Bush scandals aren't catching on with the public is not because there isn't enough seamy sex. It's that the media is somehow turning down the opportunity to make money by publicizing it.

"So what did Rove do in the face of the e-mail policy change? According to the Times, he continued to delete e-mail messages from the RNC's servers himself."

Seriously?? Rove has 'root' (or Administrator, or whatever) access to the Republican mailservers? Why do I feel skeptical?

By "delete", might the article have meant that he set his POPmail settings to "delete off server," so that his personal mail would not be archived?

I find this more likely than contemplating "Sysadmin Rove." He's never struck me as the "geeky" type. On the other hand, if Rove were actually running, or interfering with the running, of Republican servers, one might suspect that they're riddled with viri and rootkits.

Has anyone checked this out yet?

Laura M shows us where to find US Government email policies (thank you! real information!), but then goes on to suggest, "If anything this lesson has taught us, it should be that the Federal government should require that copies of e-mails be kept into infinity. Storage prices are extremely cheap so it shouldn't be that bad."

Sure, storage may be cheap now, and cheaper in the future. It may even last, from a physical point of view. But can you read it? I mean, from both a hardware and software point of view. Does anyone remember Foxpro? How about 8" floppies? What about the different formats of magtape, from the big reel-to-reel jobbies (7 bit, 8 bit, 9 bit, etc) to a wide range of cassettes? Is there any serious doubt that rotating storage has and will change? And can you still read anything that came off the old Wang (no kidding) word processor?

When you consider different email programs and their associated formats, it becomes even more of a nightmare. You can save stuff, but you're going to have to constantly be migrating it to the latest-and-greatest, probably shortly before its current format(s) become obsolete.

I used to work in the nuclear weapons complex, and a continuing nightmare was saving all that test data throughout the life of a weapon system. At that time, there were nukes that had been in the stockpile for 30 years. Of course, all data had been recorded with whatever was the best and brightest at the time - and that changed constantly. One of the big achievements was specifying a "standard data format." Then it was just a matter of migrating to "moderner" media as needed.

If you expand this exercise to all the crap the federal government puts out, soon most of the budget will be used to save, convert, and migrate data. And lots of luck if you ever need to find anything...