"According to the magazine, White House press secretary Scott McClellan was not told of Cheney's involvement in the shooting until 6 a.m. Sunday, at which point, a Time source says, McClellan began pushing hard to have the information released immediately."

Gosh, poor Scotty sure comes off smelling like a rose here, doesn't he? He jumped out of bed at 6 on a Sunday morning and, for the first time in his career, immediately started calling for a full and open release of all relevant information.

Makes you wonder, who do you think might have stepped forward as Time's anonymous source for this article?

If this guy dies, Cheney might resign (conveniently before he gets indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald in the Plame case). Practice saying it now: Vice President of the United States Condoleeza Rice. Vice President of the United States Condoleeza Rice. Vice President of the United States Condoleeza Rice.

And, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, try this one on for size: Condi/ Jeb 2008...

did I read that right? the appropriations committee has 64 members? why in the name of sweet jesus does a committee need that many members? how do they ever get anything done? isn't a committee supposed to consist of relatively few members, say 15 or 20, who can concentrate on doing the people's business and then report back to the whole?

oh, it's the appropriations committee. the people's business doesn't really have much to do with it, does it - why delegate to a dozen or so kleptocrats, when everybody and their lobbyist can get in on the party?

still, 64 people on the committee. that's a lot of fingers in the pie!

To those readers who question whether it is significant that no US airlines fly to Africa: yes, it is!

I fly to East Africa pretty regularly for work (two to three times a year). The planes are generally full. The flights almost always involve a layover in Europe (though you can dog-leg through the UAE, or go direct through Addis Ababa if you enjoy spending an eternity with the extremely cheap, friendly, and chronically-late Ethiopian Airlines). Whichever route you take, the trip between Dar es Salaam and New York always takes a minimum of 24 hours (that's with the smooth 3 hour connection in Amsterdam on KLM), and often takes more than 30.

A nonstop flight covering the same distance (6718 nautical miles) would probably take a mere 16 hours or so (it's about 850nm more than the NY-Tokyo route, which I've flown in about 14 hours, though I couldn't tell you anything about the comparative winds). You'd probably need to add on a couple of hours to Dar, because the plane would also stop in Nairobi on that route.

There are plenty of people flying between East Africa and the US, and plenty of people flying between other parts of Africa and the US. Certainly enough people make the trip to make various routes worthwhile between the US and Africa, at least a few times a week. However, almost all those people, except those who fly to South Africa (which is too far out of the way for trips to the rest of the continent), are forced to transit through Europe. What this means, in money terms, is that all of those passengers are paying 4-figure ticket prices (5-figures for first class) to European airlines, at least for the expensive south-bound portion of the flight. How many times has my money gone to KLM, BA, Air France, or another European carrier to fly me from my transit point on a continent I didn't even intend to visit? And usually, if I'm flying BA from London south, I'll be flying BA across the Atlantic as well, rather than switching to a US-flag carrier.

Every time I hop a European carrier to Africa, I am sending US$$ outside of the US, without having the option to keep that money within our economy, and I am wasting my own transit time as well. Put a few long-haul aircraft on some of the more lucrative routes between the US and Africa, and almost everyone flying between those points would abandon the European detour and gleefully hand their money over to the US airline.

Go on, Delta. New York to Nairobi to Dar, and back again. Try it - you won't be sorry!

In a nutshell:

Conservatives compulsively take illegal drugs (Rush), gamble (Bennett), extort (the Dukester), shoot their friends (Dick), bend over for bucks (Jeff Gannon), divorce their hospitalized wives (Newt), defraud Native Americans (Jack Who?), launder money (Hammer DeLay), molest women (Ahnold), chase women through hotels in foreign countries (Bolton), make obscene phone sex calls to their female employees (O'Really), shop for expensive shoes (Condi), start wars (most of the above), plunder the treasury (most of the above), torture (Gonzalez), give no bid contracts to their friends, play guitar while New Orleans drowns, desecrate the environment, steal from Target, and sanctimoniously claim a unique hold on morality and virtue that makes them the arbiters of everyone else's private lives - and yes, they even demand the right to spy on you in your own home to make sure you are living up their code.

Liberals, on the other hand, compulsively believe that each person should take responsibility for their own actions, that government should exist to assist in that goal, that there is no national interest in crying over a little spilled semen between two consenting adults, and that the public morality of the governmental policy a person advocates is much more important to the public than their private moral choices to cheat on their spouses, shoot their friends, or steal from Target.

Also, liberals tend to compulsively refresh War Room. Go figure.