P.J. Slinger is the politically progressive online editor of The Capital Times, and up until a couple of years ago he wrote a column for the paper about fantasy football.

The column was also syndicated, so Slinger established a Web site, pjslinger.com, to help market it. When he stopped writing the column, at the end of the 2006 football season, Slinger decided to let the domain name for his Web site expire.

Tuesday night, while relaxing at home, Slinger received a call from a friend, who asked if Slinger had checked on his expired domain name recently.

Slinger said he had not.

The friend told him to take look. "You 'll get a kick out of it. "

Slinger 's wife, Jana, was on their computer. He told her about the call. They typed in pjslinger.com and stared at the screen.

Jana said: "And you thought it couldn't get any worse. "

They were looking at the home page of "The Rush Limbaugh Show."

There was a color photo of the cigar-toting conservative radio host and news links to stories including one headlined: "Clinton Calls Purdum a Condom," a reaction by Bill Clinton to a critical article by Todd Purdum in the new Vanity Fair.

Slinger's feelings about Limbaugh are similar to how a fan of the Green Bay Packers feels about the Minnesota Vikings.

As you might guess from Jana's comment on seeing the smiling face of Rush Limbaugh, this week 's surprise was not the first that Slinger has received where his old domain name is concerned.

The first indication that something was amiss came last fall. By then it had been a year or so since Slinger had been active on the site, and several months since the domain name expired.

On a whim one day, Slinger typed in pjslinger.com, expecting to find some kind of brief instruction like "page unavailable " or "this domain available for purchase. "

Not quite.

What he got instead was the home page of Christian Voice, a group that describes itself as "a national political lobby and educational organization representing traditional American values. "

Since Slinger, in book reviews and other writings, has shown himself to be skeptical of religion, he did not think the Christian Voice home page was coincidental.

It appeared that someone who didn 't appreciate Slinger 's views on religion wanted to see how he liked having his name attached to a Christian Web site. Now, six months later, the politically progressive Slinger finds his name fronting Rush Limbaugh.

Increasingly in recent years, expired domain names have been purchased by both mischief makers and shady Internet operators looking to make a profit, often with pornography.

One expert told the Kansas City Star: "If you have a site that is in any way popular, it will be snagged the day it is let back in the public domain. "

Sometimes the domain name doesn 't even have to expire. On Wednesday, I spoke with Carmen Newman, city clerk in Chetek, a small city in northwestern Wisconsin, about the city 's recent problems with a hacker who somehow directed Internet searchers looking for the official Chetek site to a pornography site instead.

"We had a really difficult time, " Newman said, adding that Chetek was one of several small cities, all with domain names ending ".gov, " to experience the problem. It was eventually solved by changing Web site host companies, but as Newman noted, while it was happening it was "really embarrassing. "

P.J. Slinger, early during his own domain-name adventure, uttered the memorable words: "I could live with it being a porn site. "

On Wednesday, Slinger was able to determine that the same person or persons who originally purchased and redirected his old domain name to Christian Voice are also responsible for the new link to Rush Limbaugh. There isn 't much he can do about it. The good news is it is less upsetting the second time around.

"I guess I 'm less stunned than I was the first time, " Slinger said. "It 's more laughable now. Anyone who knows me knows I am not aligned with Rush Limbaugh. " He chuckled while saying that his father, who is also P.J. Slinger, is a big Limbaugh fan.

Slinger said the mysterious domain name interloper hasn't yet hit on the redirected site that would bother him most: "The Minnesota Vikings home page. "

It was interesting on Wednesday to note that the advertisement on the top of the pjslinger.com site -- actually the Limbaugh show site -- was for LifeLock.

"Guarantee your good name, " it said. "Stop identity theft. "

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.