... then he can turn state's evidence against Rove (or Cheney) in exchange for a lighter sentence.

But Rove isn't really higher up in the hierarchy than Libby. As Cheney's chief of staff as well as an extra job as a senior adviser to Bush, Libby was basically at the same level of power as Rove. This might not have been true in some other administration, but Cheney was basically running the show in the Bush administration and Libby was his top guy.

Hillary will not win the Democratic nomination. The activists, the kind that turn out for the early primaries, will not forgive her for her hawkishness. Her big piles of money will not help overcome her high negatives, not with the right but with Democrats. Iraq is issue #1, and she's on the wrong side. Worse, she seems to suffer from a need to overcompensate: people think weapon are weak, so she thinks she should show at every opportunity how hawkish she is. No, thank you, the Democrats will say.

She has no sense. At the height of the wave of protests about police shootings of blacks in NYC, by her constituents, she announced a press conference and came out against video games. She's running as if she thinks she has the nomination locked up and can move right to win the general election.

And this isn't just about her, it's about Bill: we don't need his foreign policy people back either; too many of them are unrepentent "liberal hawks" who helped sell the Iraq war. Enough of the Clintons.

A GPS unit needs to have a line-of-sight view of at least three satellites to "know" where it is. It doesn't work indoors. It doesn't work in the middle of a redwood forest. It's flaky in an urban canyon. People seem to think that these units will really track people at all times, and they won't. The technology isn't that good. The fact that the unit frequenty doesn't report any position means that there's no reason to be suspicious when the user prevents it from reporting a position.

But then, the purpose of these laws seems to be for politicians to position themselves as tough on crime and for voters to feel better. So perhaps it doesn't matter that it doesn't work.

TMSC and UMC are a key part of Taiwanese national pride; for electronics companies who don't own their own fab (and most don't) but want to produce a cutting-edge chip, Taiwan is pretty much the only option. I can't see the Taiwanese government allowing the George H.W. Bush and his friends to get their hands on them.

Also, the Carlyle Group is not exclusively American; John Major used to be European chairman, and former leaders of the Philippines and Thailand, and at one point the family of Osama bin Ladin had multiple millions invested with the firm; there's still a lot of Saudi money involved. There's no reason to suppose that an asset becomes American because the Carlyle Group buys it.

When a consortium of Western companies creates a standard that requires the licensing of a pool of patents, giving the companies who created the standard a permanent advantage, for some reason no one uses the term "protectionist". When the Chinese try to play the same game, suddenly the word "protectionist" is used.

Early Chinese attempts failed because they were new to the game, but they'll get better.

"When Paris Hilton is deemed an inadequate member of the feminist movement but, say, Eve Ensler is considered worthy, I start to feel like feminism has been co-opted as the Mean Girls' table in a high school cafeteria."

Wow. So any suggestion that Ms. Ensler's contributions to feminism than Ms. Hilton's makes one a Mean Girl? I'm impressed with the author's commitment to full equality, but perhaps there are other reasons to make a distinction?

Remember? Last week? When Congress shredded the Constitution, passing a bill as heinous as anything since the Sedition Act?

In the race to find something to attack the Republicans with that wishy-washy incumbent Dems can unite on, it seems that we've found that we're all against sexual harrassment of 16 year olds. That's cool, but the R's have a whole month to unearth a Democratic "pervert".

Meanwhile, I can hardly wait for the Republicans to spin this in an anti-gay direction and use it as an excuse to censor the Internet. We've got to protect the children, right?

Chafee could be counted on to vote with the party whenever it counted; the party arranged to allow him to dissent when it was necessary for his survival in a blue state, but only when they had the votes lined up anyway. So you'd see him regularly voting for cloture (the vote that counted) and voting against the final bill or nominee. And you'd never see him on talking head shows bashing his own party.

In the UK, the person who has the equivalent of Katie Couric's job is called a "newsreader". That's what the job is: to read the news.

Let's face it, the requirements are to have good TV presence, be able to read a Teleprompter well, and look good doing it. Ms. Couric's background is as a TV entertainer, she isn't a journalist, but she's fully qualified for the job, which has little to do with journalism.

So, while the network looks stupid for shipping the slimmed-down photo, I'm not going to get all offended for Katie. This is just show business.

Just because Cheney has been acting like the co-president doesn't mean that he is. His official duties, according to the Constitution, are to preside over the Senate, vote to break ties, and wait around for the president to die. The president can also assign him other tasks, but while doing those tasks he's much like any other staffer.

Now, the courts might see this differently, as there are four Supreme Court justices who essentially believe that the president is a king with term limits.