POLITICAL MACHINES:
Over at Opinions You Should Have is a news story which might become all too real, with unaudited on-line voting:

Missouri officials deny that spam or other email voting improprieties played any part in Missouri's election of Viagra and Cialis as President and Vice President in yesterday's national election.

GOOD OL' BOY:
Someone has posted at DailyKOS this report on "Bush's imaginary conversations":

But there I was, last week, hanging out with ol' George. And so I said to him, "well, how are you going to get our soldiers out of Iraq? And he said, with that frat-boy smirk of his, 'that's easy -- in body bags and wheelchairs.'" We cracked a few jokes about OB-GYN practicing their "love" on their patients, when I suddenly turned serious again....

THE PAPER CHASE:
I explained Monday why I thought the issue of old Vietnam records was irrelevant, but that was before I read the erudite Professor Michael Bérubé's careful dissection of the whole thing at "Conference report":

Moreover (and this should be dispositive), during the period 1967-71, Kerry routinely and repeatedly forged his own signature on letters, contracts, and checks....

MISERY LOVES COMPANY:
My own recent trouble with Blogspot was noted by Omnium, which has had similar difficulties:

I don't know if maybe it's because the archives run to almost 700 posts, but making changes to and even accessing this blog has become an enormous problem this summer. The glitches in the new Blogger program introduced last spring, far from being worked out over the last few months, have steadily gotten worse -- more annoying, harder to deal with, more persistent, more often.

My own archives had over 900 posts. I don't know if that was part of this. Omnium is frustrated enough to consider giving up blogging. I hope not, because that site, previously unknown to me, has lots of good stuff, like this discovery of a 2500-year old quote from Thucydides, which seems to apply to America today:

"What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. ... Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. ... Society was divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow."