You were right to start that paragraph, "We're just guessing here..." because we don't know, but what you're suggesting makes sense. It seemed too bizarre even for Bush to suggest that a delay in the bill would mean extended deployments. Loss of funding would mean withdrawals. Democrats were reining in the mission, not extending it. Delays would mean shifting money like prior years. How his statements connected just made no sense. Now it does. He was going to frame the issue by saying delaying the bill or including withdrawal dates would mean extensions, and then he would extend. They must have been talking about such a broad extension a long time, so when they wrote Bush's speech, they knew this was coming up. Had to. I can't believe the White House would be in the dark about something like that. It's still not proven, but if I can make a guess, whoever leaked was one of those who knew and couldn't stand to watch it happen.

That's a misdirection to say he was just keeping his inbox clean. Most of us clean out our inboxes. I've had employers that automatically delete mail after a certain date. It's not about the inbox. It's about the servers. Mail servers hold the archives, the traces of deleted mail, and because of legal requirements regarding evidence discovery and lawsuits, and just the desire to back up their own cases, every organization keeps everything. They have backup servers, stoage servers, tape backups, even sometimes off-site storage in case of disaster of the non-political kind. If the RNC or White House really lost all that e-mail, they were trying. They were deleting from servers, reformatting hard drives, running magnets over them, and maybe smashing them with axes. Even if we never get the missing e-mail, someone ordered the destruction of the servers and archives in order to comit obstruciton of justice. Trace that to the White House, and they're still going down.

You left out the rest of story. After his apology, he put on Shakespearean costume and said, "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions."

Let's not jump to any conclusions about this, whether the university handled it right or anything else. It took me only a moment to come up with several basic questions we don't yet know the answers to. This is a story that just broke, and we should know by now with stories like this that much of the initial reporting is wrong.

Impeachment isn't about Bush or Cheney. It's about their successors. If there is no serious effort to impeach them, future presidents will have to be even worse before they can face impeachment. Even an unsuccessful effort, however, will set an historical precedent, leaving open the possibility that only contemporary politics protected Bush and future presidents can't assume immunity. I've never bought the argument that removing Bush would put Cheney in the presidency because Cheney and every subsequent president would know their predecessor got involuntarily removed. I don't buy they removing Cheney anoints his successor as the next president because again, that successor will know his predecessor didn't get away with his crimes. Besides, Congress has to approve an appointed VP, and I doubt they'll approve an obvious GOP presidential candidate. If they did, that candidate would get incumbency, but also be saddled with Bush's problems.

Impeachment: not just for presidents anymore!

Seriously, impeachment can be applied to cabinet members too, though I don't believe it ever has been. Here's a good place to start. Gonzales already bears much responsibility for torture being US policy, and clearly he continued Ashcroft's policy of politicizing the DOJ. He not only deserves impeachment, but the GOP might go along with Gonzales' removal. Maybe, being optimistic, and remembering that Gonzales is one of the people closest to Bush and who knows where the bodies are buried (in a frighteningly literal sense) he might even spill it to protect himself.

I recall Democrats.com going hard after MoveOn when MoveOn asked supporters whether to support the House Iraq appropriations bill. My thought was maybe there was a better way to ask a question, and Democrats.com could reasonably disagree with MoveOn's suport for the bill, but they acted like MoveOn had suddenly changed sides. This time, Democrats.com probably did get gulled and meant nothing malicious, but they burned up some liberal goodwill by eating our own. There's a difference between disagreeing or lying for the neocons.

Maybe something else explains it. Living in America means living in car culture. Driving is a necessity for most of us. It's possible rapid shifts in our driving don't occur because we've already done what we can to reduce our driving. I expect that's particularly true of lower income drivers who are most likely to have already reduced unnecessary fuel consumption. Moving closer to workplaces or mass transit is a longer-term solution for most of us, not something to do next month if gas prices increase. I suspect sustained high prices are necessary to get people to not move far from work because they want newer suburbs and big lots near rural areas, or cheaper houses outside the metro area but within driving distance for a long commute. I know people who move over an hour's drive from work because the housing is so much cheaper. It takes years to see a change in that sort of behavior. We also need to stop putting economic development far from workers and beyond mass transit. Those long and lengthening commutes really drive our increased driving. Against that trend, $4 gas will have no effect.