sputter

Rush, who seems to have had his attention on other things during meetings, on fearless self-evaluation and recovery and taking inventory for others on a volunteer basis:

He also talked at some length about the lessons of recovery, declaring: "I'm just like anybody else who has an addiction. I'm powerless over it, and I have to continue to recognize that and make sure that the things I've learned continue to be practiced. . . . I can no longer turn over the power of my feelings to anybody else, which is what I have done a lot of my life."

More than anything though, the talkmaster wanted to demonstrate his professional bravado remains undiminished. His show was full of the usual confident pontificating, the mocking voices he uses to deride his targets, and proclamations of his prowess.

And if the first few callers were any indication, he is being welcomed back with open arms. "We love your honesty, Rush," declared Rosemary from Wisconsin, who quickly segued from that greeting into an attack on Democrats.

That provided the opening for Limbaugh to tear into a familiar target. But he seemed to add a dose of recently acquired interpersonal insight. "The problem with liberals," he said, "is they don't like themselves."

Katherine Harris, who's been in contact with the lurkers in e-mail:

If Katherine Harris runs for the Senate next year, the White House and leading Republicans fear that her starring role in the 2000 recount would incite Democrats and hurt President Bush's reelection chances in the nation's biggest swing state.

But Harris has a competing theory: She would excite the GOP base even more and could use the recount to the party's advantage.

The former Florida secretary of state, widely considered one of the most polarizing forces in Republican politics, said in an interview that a Senate campaign would let her ''set the record straight'' on the Florida election battle that thrust her into international fame and made her a target for late-night comics and Saturday Night Live.

She wants to make it clear that ``the president was elected with integrity.''

''I'm getting a lot of anecdotal evidence at this point that it would help the president,'' Harris told The Herald.

''Certainly the Democrats have said they will make the recount the issue in Florida, regardless if I'm on the ballot or not,'' she added, ``and I'm the only one that has the opportunity to gut all the inane arguments that they make about the recount, which are really ludicrous.''

The party of personal responsibility, coming soon to a major media outlet near you.

the nerve

Probably not risking carpal tunnel or keyboard Jolt spills, but complaining anyway.

Reg Keys, whose son Thomas was killed in Iraq, is not on the list of family members of fallen British servicemen invited to meet George W. Bush this week, but he wishes he was: he has a message for the U.S. president.

"I'd love to meet him, but I'd refuse his hand," he said. "I'd say: 'I can't shake that hand. It's stained with the blood of my son.'"

Bush's meetings with families of soldiers killed in Iraq have been billed as one of the centrepieces of his state visit to wartime ally Britain this week.

But as Prime Minister Tony Blair has already learned, the president is likely to find them a difficult audience.

Over the past months, parents and widows of slain soldiers have emerged as some of the war's most potent critics, many trying to balance pride in their husbands' and sons' sacrifice with anger over what they see as false justifications for war.

Lance-Corporal Thomas Keys, 20, was one of six British Royal Military Policemen who was killed by an angry mob while training Iraqi police on June 24 in a town near the southern city of Basra.

"I want to challenge Bush to meet me," Reg Keys told Reuters by telephone from his home in Wales. "I think I know more about what's going on in Iraq than he does, from phone calls with my son who was on the ground out there."

In interviews ahead of his visit to London, Bush stressed his plans to meet the families of soldiers who died in Iraq, to "tell them their loved ones did not die in vain. The actions we have taken will make the world more secure and the world more peaceful in the long run."

But Bush's comments have been partly overshadowed by widows and parents, several of whom have said they want no part of what Keys called "a propaganda means for his re-election".

"I'm proud of my son. He died doing his duty," he said. "But what you have to bring out is: Was their duty justified?"

His son died believing he had gone to war to protect his country from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to be found, Keys said.

"I think we were all deceived and I think (Bush) has got a nerve to show his face after the deceit he's pointed toward us," he added. "My son goes off to war thinking he's protecting the country -- he's gone off deceived and lost his life deceived."