And another thing …

DeLayed gratification. The ethical questions swirling around U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay are reminiscent of those that brought down former House Speaker Jim Wright in 1989. Sixteen years later, Democrats and Republicans have switched scripts.

That’s not to say that either man is being unfairly attacked. Wright abused his position of power, and DeLay appears to have done the same. He’s been admonished by the House Ethics Committee three times.

But if Democrats want to be taken more seriously, they’ll have to seek more than simple payback. While they’ve done a good job of outlining DeLay’s alleged abuses, they’ve done nothing to block other politicians from doing the same.

Yes, they are in the minority, but they can at least call for tighter guidelines when it comes to traveling, dining and playing on someone else’s dime.

Mail crawl. Prosecutor Bill Douglas and Marina Kalani lost the first round in their struggle to keep 889 Kootenai County e-mails between them private.

But they have wiggle room to stall the process further.

Judge John R. Stegner of Lewiston still must decide if public employees have an overriding right to privacy in this matter – now that he has determined that the state’s open-meeting law applies to county e-mail. If that decision also goes against Douglas and Kalani, they can appeal the lower court rulings. So, it might be awhile yet before the public sees the controversial e-mails, which were written during working hours, under a county policy in which employees waive their right to e-mail privacy.

Douglas can end the waste of time and money – and underscore his claim that nothing improper occurred between his former employee and himself – by releasing the e-mails.