Our service provider is in the midst of a planned power outage that should be ending soon. It started at about 5 AM, and was planned for 1-3 hours, so fingers crossed, we should be back by 8 AM EST.
Dreamhost is moving the server postalnews.com is located on “down the hall”. They had estimated 20 minutes downtime for the move, which has just about gone by now, so hopefully we’ll be back soon.
We are down at the moment, thanks, apparently, to a memory upgrade at our service provider- hopefully we’ll be back soon! If you can’t wait, here are today’s headlines:
Thursday, October 26, 2006
San Gabriel Valley (CA) Tribune Comment
DMNews.com Comment
Clint Burleson commentary via postalnews blog
click here for more stories on today’s protests from around the country Comment (Note- the Burleson story links to our blog, which is also down at the moment!)
Postcards said to be purposely misdirected
Redding (CA) Record Searchlight Comment
Looks that way- no word yet from our hosting company, but we got a trouble report just after 6:30 PM EDT, and, sure enough, postalnews is unreachable- hopefully not for long- stay tuned…
Update: the outage was brief- our montioring service says we were back up by 7:06 PM.
That’s the way it seems, anyway, with the problems we’re encontering with our hosting service. Service has been spotty since Saturday, so we’ve moved postalnews.com to an alternate site, http://postalnewsbackup.blogspot.com/ . The postalnews.com address should start forwarding to that location soon.
Some features, specifically postalforum.com and the postalnews.com blog won’t be available until the server issues are resolved.
Looks like we’re down again- very frustrating, although it is a pretty slow news day so far!
The issue is a hardware problem at out service provider that has been going on since Saturday morning intermittently. The site was working fine earlier this morning.
Update: we’re back- keep your fingers crossed!
Our service provider is having problems with a server, which it expects to resolve shortly- based on their lat message, we should be back by 9:30 AM EDT. Stay tuned!
Check here- postalnews.info is hosted with a different service provider than postalnews.com or postalforum.com. We'll post information here if we run into problems that affect those sites.
The Washington Post reports that the Magazine Publishers Association’s efforts to thwart a rate increase in 2001 may be central to any prosecution of Tom Delay or others involved in the Abramoff scandal:
“The Abramoff plea agreement’s focus on the postal rate increase and Internet gambling bill signals that federal investigators are turning up the heat on [Tom Delay's Assistant Chief of Staff Tony C.] Rudy and his wife, possibly with DeLay as an eventual target, said Stanley M. Brand, a former general counsel to the House, who described DeLay’s legal problems as “extreme.”
“The U.S. Postal Service had proposed a 15 percent increase, triggering a fight from the magazine industry. With a lobbying contract worth millions, Preston Gates put its heavyweights on the team, including Abramoff, and then directed the MPA to make its $25,000 contribution to Toward Tradition, headed by Lapin, a longtime friend of Abramoff’s.
“On May 1, 2000, the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call quoted Rudy as saying, “We’re planning to do all we can so that the postmaster general sticks to his word” and reduces the rate increase. By December, the magazine publishers were claiming victory: The rate increase that went into effect in January 2001 was considerably smaller.
“The case could be significant for investigators, Brand said. Federal prosecutors need only prove there was an agreement to pursue official action in exchange for favors, and the Abramoff plea repeatedly states that such agreements existed. But juries often want to see that the action took place, and in the postal rate episode, that would be clear.”
Not really postal, but this one was too good not to mention:
This week Judicial Watch proclaimed that the whole Abramoff scandal (which it refers to as a ‘bipartisan’ scandal- guess it all depends on what your definition of ‘bi’ is) was Bill Clinton’s fault!
“The Clinton administration set a low mark for bribery and abuse of the public trust. In the face of all this lawbreaking, the Justice Department, under Janet Reno, simply refused to enforce the law. As a result, too many Republicans thought they could imitate the Clinton gang’s flouting of the bribery laws.”
The shock- innocent little Jacky Abramoff really was such a good boy until he started seeing what those nasty Democrat boys were getting away with! Who can blame him! Or the GOP politicians who sold their votes to him!
It’s like a Goofus and Gallant story gone horribly wrong!
