Are we in for a fourth term of John Howard's decent and sensible (if unremarkable) leadership? Or will I spend the next four years apologising for my government?

I plan to go to sleep tonight without checking anything anywhere, and then tomorrow morning I'll take a look at Tim Blair's site. And spend the day re-installing my Linux box, either way.

My Windows box seems to... Work. Yes, I have it booting to a RAID-5 volume. Writing to RAID-5 is rather slow - the benchmark I ran only gave me 12MB/s. But reading from it, I sustained just on 100MB/s, which is all you're going to get from a standard PCI slot. Overall, not unhappy, once I got the BIOS and the drivers sorted out. (Yes, the drivers were also immensely sucky.)

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Anyway, Bernie Slattery has the inside scoop on what colour the Greens really are. Hint: You might as well call them the Watermelon Party.*

Don't miss their 40-point plan for new and increased taxes. including a 33% surcharge (on top of the current top marginal rate of around 50%) for people-who-earn-more-than-is-good-for-them. And the plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by - wait for it - 100%. Which means that all those cuddly animals will have to go - after all, we can't have them breathing, now can we?

I've touched on Bob Brown's insane policies before. This is what Slatts has to say:

They are political extremists whose policies borrow equally from the textbooks of Hitler and Stalin.

Of course, Australians are too sensible to put up with totalitarianism and should the Greens achieve any measure of power it would be short-lived.

But remember Whitlam. Much damage can be achieved in a short time by ideologues and their useful idiots.

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Here in Australia I haven't been nearly as comfortable, with Mark Latham, a character nearly as contemptible as Kerry, stubbornly refusing to self-destruct. Until this week, when he signed on to the Green's tree-hugging policies to secure their preferences (Australia uses a preferential voting system, where votes for a losing candidate are directed to one of the other candidates, until only two are left).

Unfortunately for Latham, the traditional constituency of his Labor Party is, well, workers. Including forestry workers. And the trade unions are very influential in the Labor Party as well. And Latham just pissed them off royally. Smart money says his greenie-grabbing tactics have scuttled his ship.

Which smart money? This smart money. Click on "Elections" in the left-hand menu.

A dollar bet on the Coalition (John Howard, the good guys) would return just $1.16 for a win (at 10 AM Wednesday October 6, just three days before the election). A dollar on Labor would return $4.50.

By comparison, a dollar on George Bush returns $1.50, against $2.40 for Kerry.

Tim Blair has more.

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Scaled Composites, led by Burt Rutan, has done it!

Transterrestrial Musings was live-blogging the event.

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Beginning Friday, PayPal will begin penalizing users who buy things it doesn't want them to: prescription drugs from unverified pharmacies, material with even a whiff of sex and gambling or lottery services. . . .

Its policy on adult materials is especially stringent, banning not only any material or services suggesting sexual activity but also "non-adult services whose Web site marketing can be reasonably misconstrued as allowing adult material or services to be purchased using PayPal."

I don't think Paypal give a damn about what you spend your money on; what they do care about is giving refunds. They hate giving refunds.

And note these paragraphs from the article at inernetnews.com:

A year ago, eBay paid $10 million to settle charges by the U.S. District Attorney that it violated the U.S. Patriot Act by transmitting funds earned through online gambling. When it announced the acquisition, eBay said it would stop PayPal's gambling payments.

Merchants using PayPal to sell pharmaceuticals online must be certified by the National Association Boards of Pharmacy's Verified Internet Pharmacy Practices Site program.

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After two injections of the vaccine, sheep burped 8 per cent less methane in a 13 hour test.

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After days of expressing unfounded confidence about the obviously bogus documents used in a deeply biased "60 Minutes'' report that might have raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service were the evidence in question not transparently false, CBS News officials finally have admitted to grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified because if this gets out they will lose their jobs, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins which was obvious to any reasonably bright nine-year-old. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from although here we are using the word intensive as the direct opposite of the term extensive, and people at the network said it was now finally possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report when anyone with the intelligence given to the average jellyfish would have canned it in the first five minutes. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air and that Dan Rather may not, in fact, have brought the commandments down from Mount Sinai as he previously claimed.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement and resume their absurd attempts at a bluff when they no longer hold any cards. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision and see if he was willing to go quietly. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night as he had to be restrained following the meeting.

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Three-year-old Sophia Parlock cries while seated on the shoulders of her father, Phil Parlock, after having their Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004, at the Tri-State Airport in Huntington, W.Va. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards (news - web sites) made a brief stop at the airport as he concluded his two-day bus tour to locations in West Virginia and Ohio. (AP Photo/Randy Snyder)

Update: LGF has more. Sharp-eyed lizards noted that the guy at the left is holding part of the girl's sign.

Update: Okay, everybody in the world had this story before me. So here's a picture of a kitty.

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You're dead. Fall down.

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I spent the day with my family. We had lunch, and talked, we saw a movie, we had dinner and watched videos.

But though I go on with my life as we all must, I shall never forget what happened in New York three years ago today.

Jennifer, Sarah, and Ted offer their thoughts.

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