I just got back home to Denver and three days of e-mails, snail-mail, voicemail and now laundry. Aside from RoveGate news (Huffington Post has an excellent wrap-up of blogger views) there's an op-ed by the former Seattle police chief, Let Those Dopers Be, and news of the terrible murder of defense attorney Daniel Horwitz's wife and the Susan Polk murder trial he is in the midst of trying.

Until I settle in, I'll just turn it over to the readers for what else I've missed.

I'll be offline today. In case you're not, here's some space to keep a discussion going.

It's the lull before the storm. I'm going to take advantage of it and work. Chatter on.

We haven't had one of these in a while and I need to get back to work. Have fun.

That's Crooks and Liars' John Amato with actor George Clooney. Way to go, John.

A few weeks ago I wrote that my 9 month old Dell desktop's hard drive crashed out of the blue. It had my last 9 months of work on it.

Dell replaced it and then I had to decide whether to try a data recovery service to try and restore the files on the old one. They ran the drive and it had 130,000 errors on it but they could find 20 MG of data, which included some valuable stuff for--like old TalkLeft files that are no longer on the server, my Quicken files, my newer client files and my pictures. So, I told them to go ahead.

It cost $1,250.00 for the restore and another $100 for an 80 GB USB hard drive which I'm about to hook up and see how usable the files are. Bottom line: Back up your stuff. $1,350.00 could have bought me a new laptop or a vacation. Now I'll get neither. It sucks that I had to spend it for this. But, it's my own fault for not taking the time to back up onto a cd-rom or dvd.

It's back to work for me, here's a space for you.

The calendar says it's my birthday, so I'm off to do something different, like work out at the gym and go shoe-shopping. Here's a space for you - what's on your mind today?

• Jesus' General writes a letter.
• The Poor Man creates a cartoon.
• Arianna's Russert Watch
• Jane Hamsher on Daniel Schorr and Judith Miller
• Heretik on the Saint Patrick Four war protesters being found guilty only of lesser charges in Binghamton.
• TBogg on Ralph Nader

"It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap. We gotta get out while we can...."[Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run]

The New York Times:

.... as many as 2.5 million people jammed evacuation routes on Thursday, creating colossal 100-mile-long traffic jams that left many people stranded and out of gas as the huge storm bore down on the Texas coast.

Acknowledging that "being on the highway is a deathtrap," Mayor Bill White asked for military help in rushing scarce fuel to stranded drivers.

A bus carrying nursing home evacuees caught fire, killing 20.

Politics, hurricanes, crime, whatever's on your mind, here's a place to inform and vent.

Say Hello to the first official Daily Kos spin-off site, Street Prophets, about faith and politics. Markos of Daily Kos explains more about the site.

Instapundit and NZ Bear have come up with a non-partisan way for bloggers to help their states cut the fat in their budgets to fund the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.