Lagniappe - Although the recent Katherine Harris resignation imbroglio is an old story by now, every time I think about it, I find it to be more and more ironic. Here we have the Florida Secretary of State, responsible for managing and enforcing election laws, either (1) ignorant of the very laws she is responsible for administering, or (2) contemptuous of this law, or (3) just plain stupid, or (4) all of the above. Sour grapes about her role in the 2000 Florida recount aside, she is a joke - and a bad joke at that. I mean, listen to the absurdity of her reality: she forgot to resign as the law demanded, so she resigned retroactively; only, she didn't really resign because she was still "de facto" Secretary of State after she quit. Can any rational human being make any sense of this tomfoolery? Well, for the sake of argument, let's just assume that her resignation really wasn't a resignation (very Clintonian of her, don't you think?), and that she still was Secretary of State during the interim period between her surreal resignation date and the real resignation of her duties two weeks later. (If you're interested, you can read her resignation letter.) The most hilarous apsect of this scenario, which is what she herself has designed, is that, as "de facto" Secretary of State during the interim period after her retroactive resignation date and the real termination of her duties as the chief implementer and enforcer of electoral law in Florida, she herself should have invalidated her own candidacy for not having resigned on time as the electoral law required. I'd like to see any Republican with any shred of intellectual dignity try to justify Katherine Harris's behavior on this one, especially after having been so publicly insistent on observing the letter of the state's electoral law during the 2000 Florida recount. Katherine Harris screwed up. Forget that, as a screw up, she's unfit for office. The simple reality is that, by law, she shouldn't be permitted to run for office. Period. As "de facto" Secretary of State, I hope she signed and mailed a certified letter to herself to that effect. And if she's not happy with the contents of the letter, perhaps she can sue herself in court.