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Oh, I really didn't want to go here. But because it seems we just can't avoid "what were you thinking?" news about politics and the bureaucracy today, check out this story from online magazine Salon about the Bush "bulge" in the first presidential debate that has conspiracy theorists in a dither. (It's worth signing up for a "day pass" from the magazine just to see it.) The article quotes Robert M. Nelson, a senior NASA scientist, who's conducted his own analysis of the videotape of the debate and decided that, oh, yes, the president may very well have had an electronic device strapped to his back. Now granted, Nelson did all his "investigating" (including experimenting with wearing various configurations of jackets and shirts and testing them under his bathroom light!) on his own time, using his own computers and software. But do we really need civil servants stepping into this mess at this late stage?

It isn't really all that likely that the IRS is engaging in a politically motivated attack on the NAACP by launching an investigation into the group's tax-exempt status. But this is one of those cases where the timing of its actions is guaranteed to raise questions. On Oct. 8, agency officials sent the NAACP a letter seeking more information about its activities, because the group's chairman, Julian Bond, had "condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush on education, the economy and the war in Iraq," at the NAACP's annual convention in July. (Tax-exempt organizations aren't supposed to engage in political activities.)

IRS Commissioner Mark Everson noted that "the IRS follows strict procedures involving selection of tax-exempt organizations for audit and resolution of any complaints about such groups. Career civil servants, not political appointees, make these decisions in a fair and impartial manner." Those career civil servants might have thought a little harder about the consequences of sending a letter raising such hot-button political issues less than a month before the election.

An alert reader notes that the National Archives and Records Administration seems to know a little more than the rest of us about what's going to happen next Tuesday. In an Oct. 6 bulletin, NARA announced it would conduct a "harvest" of federal Web sites by the end of January, under proposed regulations requiring "the capture and transfer of federal public Web sites at the end of an administration." Either that's just a slip of the tongue (which is likely, because earlier the memo refers to the end of an "administration term"), or the NARA folks need a reminder that the fat lady hasn't sung on this campaign yet.

Memo to OPM: You might want to broaden that HealthierFeds challenge. According to the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it's not just federal employees who are getting fatter by the minute. The average American adult weighs 25 pounds more than his or her counterpart in the early 1960s. But hey, look on the bright side: We're an inch taller, too. Take that, Homo floresiensis!

So I went to bed early last night, and had this bizarre dream: The Boston Red Sox, of all teams, won eight straight games in October and won the World Series. Weird, huh? All those who thought they'd ever see somebody in a Red Sox uniform and the words "I'm going to Disney World!" in the same commercial, please stand up. Liars. (Shameless effort to somehow tie this news to the management and operations of the federal government: The last time the Red Sox won, the Pendleton Act of 1883 was only 35 years old!)

When I opened my e-mail today, I was greeted with another one of those too-bad-to-be-true stories of outrage, this one (allegedly forwarded from Marine Sgt. Howard C. Wright), charging that Starbucks had told a group of Marines in Iraq that it wouldn't send them free coffee because the company didn't support the war. As usual, I went immediately to the terrific Urban Legends Reference Pages for confirmation that the story wasn't true. There's no evidence that the request was ever made, and Starbucks officials say they love the troops as much as anybody.

But the interesting part of the company's response is that they essentially acknowledge that if they did receive such a request, they would turn it down. Starbucks, the company says, "cannot directly donate to military personnel." Cannot? Try will not. It's not like there's a federal law stopping them. It's just company policy to focus on local charities. Oh, and they won't support "political or religious activities." But last time I checked, the military wasn't a political or religious organization. The best part: Starbucks is fine with its employees sending the troops the rations of coffee that they get as a perk of employment.

As if dealing with Janet Jackson and Bubba the Love Sponge weren't enough, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell had to endure a grilling from Howard Stern Tuesday, CNN reports. The infamous shock jock called in to a morning show on San Francisco's KGO radio on which Powell was appearing. Stern wasted little time in making things personal, suggesting that Powell only got his job because his father is Secretary of State. "I think it's a cheap shot to say just because my father's famous, I don't belong in my position," Powell shot back. Update: KGO has the audio of the exchange on its Web site, in RealAudio or Windows Media format. Update II: Colin Powell's take on Stern's charges: "Nonsense."

So I'm flipping channels between innings of the World Series game last night and happened to catch a great little scene on "NCIS," the CBS series about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. This is the show formerly known by the most redundant title on television, "Navy NCIS," and starring perennial B-grade actor Mark Harmon (who did play at least one great character in his career). But I digress. Anyway, on the show, the crack NCIS team takes down a mobster who asks if they're with the FBI, leading to the following exchange:

"No, NCIS."

"Meat inspectors?"

Ooh, those NCISers. The Rodney Dangerfields of law enforcement. (On the off chance you didn't get the joke, the food inspectors would be FSIS, the Food Safety and Inspection Service.)

The Jackson (Tenn.) Sun reports that federal authorities have charged Demetrius "Van" Crocker of McKenzie, Tenn., with attempting to obtain Sarin nerve gas and C-4 explosives for the purposes of launching attacks on federal buildings. "It would be a good thing if somebody could detonate some sort of weapon of mass destruction in Washington, D.C., while both the U.S. Congress and Senate were in session," Crocker told an undercover federal agent. (While we're on the subject, thanks to Washington writer Joshua Foer for reminding those of us who have chosen to raise our children in the Washington area that there's a big ol' target on our backs.)

Want some good news? NASA and its partners, Silicon Graphics and Intel, have pretty much obliterated exisiting supercomputing standards, both for power and speed of construction. The Columbia supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., built in just 15 weeks, has achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second. And that's with only 16 of its planned 20 systems installed.

OPM set the bar pretty high yesterday on sheer volume of jargon in a single press release. In the space of less than 150 words, the release manages to pack in the following terms: "task force," "business and architecture plan," "information technology solutions," "strategic management" (twice), "human capital," "cost-effective," "interoperable," "architectural deliverables," "customer service," and "strategic planning." Impressive. Indecipherable, but impressive.

Fresh off the campaign trail for President Bush, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney let fly with some pointed criticism Monday of the federal government's homeland security efforts, Reuters reports. During an appearance at a security conference in Boston, Romney lamented the uncoordinated communication efforts of agencies in the homeland security bureaucracy. "We're giving information to certain federal agencies about what we're hearing from other federal agencies," he said. "That doesn't make sense." Perhaps not the message the administration wants to get out at this stage of the campaign.

The Wall Street Journal uncovers a draft directive from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office instructing Pentagon officials to involve the State Department and other civilian agencies in future planning for postwar operations. (The text of the draft is here, if you're a WSJ subscriber.) Good move, but arguably a little late.

First Time magazine on Sunday, then The New York Times today, push a story that could raise new questions about Halliburton. Before the start of the Iraq war, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the top civilian contracting official at the Army Corps of Engineers, expressed concerns that Halliburton officials were allowed to sit in on a meeting to discuss terms of a contract to rebuild the country's oil facilities, and urged Corps officials (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to limit the contract to one year, rather than five.

In a letter sent to Army Corps officials and members of Congress last week, Greenhouse says that after she continued to raise questions about the contract, she was excluded from major contract decisions and threatened with a downgrade in her job. She is now calling for a high-level investigation of Halliburton's contracts, saying they may threaten the "integrity of the federal contracting program." The Army has referred Greenhouse's allegations to the Defense inspector general and warned the Corps of Engineers "to suspend any adverse personnel actions" against her.

The Associated Press reports that the Bush administration has deployed a "platoon of federal employees" to "trumpet" the president's accomplishments in the closing days of the campaign. Well, not exactly a platoon--it's mostly the same cadre of Cabinet officers that often hits the road to campaign for the boss at this stage. The efforts of a few folks in sensitive positions--such as Treasury Secretary John Snow, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge--are raising a few eyebrows, though. The ever-quotable Paul Light says the frenzy of activity is unlikely to prove decisive: "The only thing that could make a difference now is if Tommy Thompson went on the road with 10,000 doses of flu vaccine."

Note to CIA managers: Watch your backs. The Washington Post got its hands on a speech by new CIA Director Porter Goss in which he declares, "we must collapse bureaucratic layers. I say this with fervor." The layers headed for imminent collapse don't include the one Congress is about to add in the form of a new national intelligence director, one assumes.

Today, the American Enterprise Institute takes on the issue of how John Kerry would govern. Consensus: pretty hard to tell at this point. Interesting, though, that more than one panelist essentially endorsed a Bush campaign theme: Kerry's not much of a legislator. On the Hill, he's been more interested in investigations like Iran-Contra and the BCCI affair than in crafting bills. More telling is his experience as an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County, Mass., where he modernized a highly inefficient operation. "He's credited with being a really good manager," said Nina Easton, deputy Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe. "He's much more comfortable exercising executive judgments," added AEI's Norman Ornstein, who went on to make the analogy with the other JFK: wartime boat captain with a meager legislative record itching to run the whole show. (For the GovExec take on the issue, see Jason Peckenpaugh's July 1 Kerry profile.)

Margo Hammond, the book editor of the St. Petersburg Times, isn't too thrilled about the nomination of the on the 9/11 commission report for a National Book Award. Sure, the report is novelistic and all, she writes on the Web site of the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists), "but shouldn't we be disturbed that the five National Book Award judges in nonfiction ... think this is one of the best five books of nonfiction written this year? A book written by the government about its own failures?" When you say that the best thing yet written about 9/11 and its aftermath was produced by the government itself, that's hitting journalists where they live.

Pretty interesting panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington today on "How Would George W. Bush Govern in a Second Term?" The Brookings Institution's Tom Mann pointed out that in policy terms, second-term records in the modern presidency are less than spectacular. Even those presidents who aren't sidetracked by scandal (see Nixon, Reagan and Clinton) often come to realize that they've accomplished all the easy stuff in the first four years. Then their party usually gets smacked in the midterm elections and they ease on down the one-way road to Lame Duck Land.

That's even more true in the world of federal management, isn't it? Every recent president has had some sort of management initiative (Grace Commission, TQM, REGO, PMA), but those who manage to get themselves a second term usually lose any momentum their effort generated in the first. Most presidents simply tire of taking on the bureaucracy after four years, especially when they realize that management reform isn't the legacy-builder they hoped it'd be.

Get Off the Couch. Word from the Office of Personnel Management that registration for the HealthierFeds Physical Activity Challenge has been extended until Oct. 29. That can mean only one thing: not enough feds have stepped up to the plate (or maybe that should be away from the plate) and accepted the challenge of moving around for 30 minutes a day. C'mon folks, put down the Snickers bar and take the pledge. (But don't bother trying to call OPM to do it.) If you don't, Tommy Thompson's coming to get you.