I really like this crowd

On Larry King, Bush finally explains the 7 minutes: "I was collecting my thoughts and I was sitting with a bunch of young kids, and I made the decision there that we would let this part of the program finish." Collecting his thoughts? How long could that take? there are so few of them. On the other hand, they’re very tiny.

The attack on Najaf, which I believe is called Operation Sensitive Resolve, has been postponed in favor of trying to starve the city into submission, but sensitively, or as Colin Powell puts it, "Our forces in Najaf are squeezing the city." He says the insurgents "don't understand the spirit of peace and reconciliation" and therefore have to be starved, bombed and shot, in a spirit of peace and reconciliation.

The Vatican comes out against Turkey being admitted to the European Union, saying it should go play with the other Muslim children instead.

A detail I missed about Cheney’s speech in Albuquerque: Dick "Mr. Sensitive" Cheney told the crowd, who had been required to sign a loyalty oath, stand in lines in the hot NM sun and go through a metal detector, "I really like this crowd!" Sure, they’ll put up with massive amounts of crap, what’s for a politician not to like?

Speaking of being willing to stand in lines: I’ve suggested before that Argentinian ants might be the end of civilization as we know it. Of course we never heard another word about the ants in Europe, but a column of ants 60 miles wide was just discovered under Melbourne. As in Europe, the ants have stopped fighting among themselves, as they do in South America, so their numbers are growing exponentially. Aussies call the laid-back ants metrosexuals.