THIS IS WHY I TRY TO SLEEP IN ON SUNDAYS. On "Meet the Press" I saw a clip of President Bush delivering an oration with that fervency and straight-forwardness that his supporters love and which we have not seen in a while. He was defending Donald Rumsfeld. No wonder Bush is polling so low. When he defends the Iraq experiment he sounds like he's reading boilerplate, but he gets all hot talking about Donald Rumsfeld.

Then Mike Leavitt from Health & Human Services came on "The McLaughlin Group" to tell us that the problem with U.S. health care is that too many people are getting sick.

Speaking of health care, posting may be light over the next week as I am off to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD to submit myself for examination pertaining to my mutant tumor-suppressor gene. Ah, well, it could be worse.