Throughout California cost Busby, but it cost the whole state new libraries, too. It seems clear to me that the heavy Republican districts still managed, through effort, to turn out some votes, whereas the Democrats didn't really have a GOTV campaign up and running yet. All I got, sitting in the heart of Dem Country, Sonoma County, were robocalls from people I was already voting for.

I am moving out of state before the November elections, but I sure hope the DNC gets organized at the grass roots before then, or it won't be looking good in CA. The figures I heard said about 28% turned up at the polls, and a whole lot of people used absentee ballots or just plain stayed home. Burnout and apathy are our worst enemies.

was the reporter I was waiting for on this one. He usually gets it right. Whether we ever see a Rove indictment is getting blurred by whether we will ever see Cheney on the witness stand. Both would be ideal.

Jason Leopold, to be so convincing to his editors, must have been the victim of a practical joke, perhaps played by someone who doesn't like to see bloggers get scoops on the regular media. If he had simply made all this up, no one else at TO would have listened to him. So, it makes sense that, Leopold's reputation for veracity having already been in some trouble, somebody just delivered the final blow. Will Madsen be next?

And, just for perspective, why doesn't Matt Drudge take more flak when he so obviously makes stuff up out of thin air?-- (I won't give him "whole cloth").

This is truly frightening. He doesn't KNOW when he's laughing. He actually said, "I'm not laughing," when everyone in the world saw him laughing. All along, whenever I have seen that laugh, that smirk, I have taken it as a sign of his arrogance, his dismissal of his questioners. Now, I see that it is just a tic, an unconscious expression of the little boy caught killing those frogs. He doesn't know he's laughing. Someone has to tell him that he has laughed whenever the number of dead in his war has come up or any other of his multitude of sins has been mentioned to his face.

War IS unsettling. It makes people feel sour. Karl Rove said so, and now G.W. has said so, too. As if this war just happened, without any causes or anyone to blame for it. As if Iraq had attacked the USA. The way the kid in the high chair learns so early to say, "Uh-oh" and look at the ceiling after deliberately dumping his cereal on the floor. "Uh-oh!" Bad war, upsetting everybody. How could that have happened?

Oh, well, let's just do another kid thing and hope it will go away. "Where's that dune buggy? That was fun!"

Where's New Orleans? I used to LOVE getting drunk there.

Where's my aircraft carrier? I had fun playing soldier wearing a codpiece and all.

Where's my boat and my lake? I want to catch another perch or bass or whatever it was. That was fun!

More prisoners to torture? That's always fun.

Another execution? Oh, goody. Those are really fun!

Let's go sign some bills with our fingers crossed behind our back. That's fun!

Let's go cut some brush! Better yet, let's go kill some frogs. That was fun!

GOD HELP US. THIS IS OUR PRESIDENT.

skepticism that has been taken literally should qualify:

"Born in the U.S.A." (they didn't get it)

"If I Had a Hammer" (they never understood it to begin with)

"This Land is Your Land" (Guthrie's protest to Kate Smith and "God Bless America")

I realize some would not classify all of these as rock, but most songs I can think of are in the Country category, and the duel between "Hippie from Olema" and "Okie from Muskogee" (Merle Haggard) happened so long ago that current conservatives probably wouldn't remember it, Country or Rock.

But for literal mindedness, conservatives win it all. Skepticism, not so much.

For your thorough rehash of the Leopold matter. At DailyKos, it has now become a topic for some entertaining satire. I still don't understand the loyalty of some who believe this guy. I felt pretty sure I had flushed him out in one of his pseudonyms on dkos, but then I thought, why am I wasting my time on this publicity hound? If Fitz is going to indict, we will all know it when it happens. If not, well, we will just have to defeat Bush and Rove and Cheney at the voting booths in November.

And we can. Work for that, Americans.