Molly Ivins's column today is on the proposal to change North Dakota's name to Just Dakota. She says that since if they seceded from the US they'd be the third largest nuclear power, we should really let them call themselves anything they want.

I now have a position on this. I think it should change its name to Extreme Dakota! That exclamation point isn't my way of ending that sentence; I think it should be part of the name.

Bush Lite will be visiting Britain this week. In advance of that, the British ambassador will present him with a bust of Winston Churchill. He will spend the rest of the trip wondering why they gave him a bust of W.C. Fields.

The Pentagon finally got a successful Star Wars test the only way it knew how: it cheated. They gave their missile crib notes so it could distinguish a real from a fake missile. In real life this wouldn't happen, and the Star Wars system would flounder around like Bush after Cheney's fatal heart attack.

The front-runner to replace Hague as head of the Tory party is about to go down in flames. Michael Portillo, aka The Spaniard, will crash and burn because he's too reasonable for the party (and he's not that reasonable), because he's had sex with men, because his people claimed that he was backed by Margaret Thatcher, who was not pleased, loudly, and because he is a conniving little back-stabber, who leaked against Hague to the press during the last election. This should have come as no surprise. When John Major, in a stunt, resigned as party leader and told the party to back him or sack him, Portillo expressed complete support, but the BBC followed around British Telecom trucks and discovered that he was setting up a campaign office.