You can imagine what the advisers are telling Junior Assad: "Your statues are much stronger than Saddam's. His were hollow, and bolted in place with inferior metal; yours are solid, and are anchored to a depth of three feet. Let the American tanks come! Their gears will strip and their engines whine in defeat as they attempt to pull down your statues!

Ah, if only the best place for storing embryonic stem cells was Yucca Flat.

I’ll feel that horrible feeling in my stomach you get when you’ve gone over to the Dark Side. But I’ll be fine. That’s the good thing about the Dark Side. Eventually, your eyes adjust.

When liberal celebs stammer out a litany of shopworn bleats about the administration's attempt to turn America into a theocratic prison state, people can't help but notice that these buskers and mummers seem unmoved by the horrors of actual prison states. (Saddam commissioned a copy of the Quran written in his own blood - but John Ashcroft is the real religious nut, don't you know.)

Calculus destroys self-esteem on contact.

Genius flames and dies, but amiable competence can live forever.

The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation.