Geez-- sorry I have to work for a living. I really am jammed up, but here's a reply to most of the recent issues.

One, I didn't see anyone insulting me personally-- I just don't like the threads where folks feel its necessary to launch personal attacks on others. I feel ideas are fair game, and I take no offense if anyone says my idea is faulty, but I don't like seeing the debate turn into personal sniping from either side. I've seen a lot of that from liberals AND conservatives and tend to lose interest in a thread quickly if it starts in that direction.

I do figure that Kerry and Bush are fair game for fair sniping since they are very public figures. I don't think it's productive to debate to be insulting about either the President or Kerry, but that's my opinion. While I might take "potshots" at Kerry defenders in general, I don't do it usually for any result but to show humor as in the above post, and I really try not to insult anyone (Kerry and Bush excepted, of course).

H20-- No, I didn't check anything out in snopes or moveon.org or make any attempt to do so, as I mentioned at the beginning of this thread. I was just passing along an e-mail I received.

Aunty-- I figured mocking GW's fans was your job...

As for promised links-- I just lost a post with three of them on it, and I'm not sure why. I'll try again later when I've actually produced something useful that will help pay my bills, since tax day is already past.

Two items popped up in the Peninsual Daily News that would apply to the "GW's administration is doing something to promote fishing" thread recently-- in today's Port Townsend edition, there was a stand-alone photo of work on the Hoh where they are re-installing log jams to help in flood control/salmon habitat (this ties into the "leading scientists thread") and yesterday (?) a piece on the moving of Caspian terns from the mouth of the Columbia (where the buggers eat something like $20,000 of ESA smolt each). Unfortunately, one of the places the dunderheads want to establish a colony is on Dungeness Spit. Neither has a link, though, so I guess they don't count.

And to be really fair to both Republicans and Democrats-- the stuff such as the two examples above, the bull trout thing I mentioned, all of the U.S.F.W.S. projects that GW can take credit for (using the logic of this board) would probably have happened under Kerry or Gore if he'd garnered the electoral votes he needed.

Well, work calls,

Keith