I can't believe all this crap. Oh well!
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FIXED

The other site is fixed now.
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MILEAGE

NY Times: If you want to save energy, improving your gas mileage is a bigger bang for the buck than changing light bulbs. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
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TAKING CHARGE

The Democrats are flexing their collective muscle:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A disputed election result in a U.S. House of Representatives race in Florida will be one of the first items raised when the Democratic-controlled House convenes next week, injecting partisan politics into the start of the 110th Congress.

Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has pushed for better safeguards on electronic voting machines, said on Friday he would make a procedural point to establish the swearing-in of Florida Republican Vern Buchanan does not prejudice ongoing challenges by his Democratic opponent, Christine Jennings.

"This is a district, Sarasota area in Florida, where there's no way of knowing whether the result presented by Florida's secretary of state is valid. In fact, I think there is significant evidence that it is not," Holt told reporters.

Buchanan was certified the winner of the November 7 election by a 369-vote margin. Oddly, about 18,000 ballots in Sarasota County had no votes recorded for the disputed House race, while other races on those ballots were voted on.

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COMPARE AND CONTRAST

So we killed someone to make sure everyone knows killing people is wrong. Not only did we kill him, we killed him after putting him in power and making sure we gave him enough weapons and chemicals with which to kill people.

For some reason, we don't feel compelled to kill every dictator who kills his own people. Possibly this has something to do with oil, or lack thereof.
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OY

My hosting company claims I crashed their server. This is their response to the latest trouble ticket my tech guy put in:

This issue is NOT related to your bandwidth allowance. The problem here is caused by one or more PHP scripts being simultaneously accessed on your site. On several occasions (particularly last night) these accesses brought the H17 server to a stand still, creating a load of over 250! Luckily we managed to restart Apache and disable your site before the server crashed.

If you are having problems with Spammers, it seems that that maybe the problem, as it is the Wordpress comments script that is being accessed here.

Unfortunately, we cannot allow your site back online without some sort of changes to it, so as to prevent this from happening again.

My guy responded:

As I mentioned in my ticket reply, I'm not sure what sort of changes you'd like me to make to the site as you have suspended my access to it - I can't even make changes in Plesk. This does bring up another point however - comment spam is an ordinary occurance on any type of blog/forum and while that site does get it's fair share, it's certainly within normal limits for a site of it's size. If an extraordinary event occured overnight, could you at least provide me with some details as to who or what has suddenly taken a normal level of comment activity to such an extreme level that it put your server out of comission, so that we can work on some type of a realistic solution to your problem. That would seem like a rational second step for a reliable hosting company who has suspended a long time customer's domain without notice. You need to provide some support here beyond simply throwing your hands up in the air and hoping I'll come up with an idea based on incomplete information.

Meanwhile, my tech guy's wife was just admitted to the hospital, and I'm not sure how soon he'll be able to resolve this. Sorry, guys.
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ARGGHHH

The hosting service lost our files - all of them. They're now restoring them manually from the backups, and God only knows when it'll be finished. I'll be taking a break until that happens.

If you believe in Mercury retrograde, clap your hands...
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SITE HOSED AGAIN

Damned Mercury retrograde... they claim to be working on it, but I say it's a crual taunt. Who'd have thought that one day, I'd long for the days of Blogger?
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STONEWALLED

No surprise here:

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that President Bush personally blocked Justice Department lawyers from pursuing an internal probe of the warrantless eavesdropping program that monitors Americans' international calls and e-mails when terrorism is suspected.

The department's Office of Professional Responsibility announced earlier this year it could not pursue an investigation into the role of Justice lawyers in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency intercepts some telephone calls and e-mail without court approval.

At the time, the office said it could not obtain security clearance to examine the classified program.

Under sharp questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, Gonzales said that Bush would not grant the access needed to allow the probe to move forward.

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UPDATE

It's not me. It's either WordPress or my hosting service, I'll let you know when I hear something.
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PRINCIPLE

I'll believe it when I see it. Because much like Arlen Specter, Lindsay Graham loves to posture as a man of principle - but caves when it counts:

WASHINGTON, July 17 — Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina often plays the contrarian, the conservative Republican willing to poke a stick in the eye of the White House.

Now Mr. Graham is playing an even higher-profile variant of that role, as the Senate’s foremost expert on military law in the midst of the emotional debate over what rights to provide to terror suspects.

A former military lawyer who is also a reserve judge on the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals, his influence is shaping up to be pivotal in forming the Congressional response to the Supreme Court ruling striking down the White House’s plan for bringing terror detainees to trial.

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GO VOTE

My Al Gore post is on Yahoo News this morning. Go vote it up, please!
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MERCURY RETROGRADE STRIKES AGAIN

Well, I can't access the other site, and I think it's a problem with the DNS address on my router. But I don't have time to fix it because I have to go to work, so I'll post here instead.
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Stolen from Duncan



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Still On The Hook

Karl's still not in the clear:

Just as the news broke Wednesday about Scott McClellan resigning as White House press secretary and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove shedding some of his policy duties, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the CIA leak case and introduced additional evidence against Rove, attorneys and other US officials close to the investigation said.

The grand jury session in federal court in Washington, DC, sources close to the case said, was the first time this year that Fitzgerald told the jurors that he would soon present them with a list of criminal charges he intends to file against Rove in hopes of having the grand jury return a multi-count indictment against Rove.

In an interview Wednesday, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove remains a "subject" of Fitzgerald's two-year-old probe.

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