What Caught My Eye Today

Iran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioned the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks and defended the right to cast doubt on the Holocaust in a tense appearance at Columbia University, whose president accused the hard-line leader of behaving like "a petty and cruel dictator." Ahmadinejad smiled at first but appeared increasingly agitated, decrying the "insults" and "unfriendly treatment." Columbia President Lee Bollinger and audience members took him to task over Iran's human-rights record and foreign policy, as well as Ahmadinejad's statements denying the Holocaust and calling for the disappearance of Israel. During a question and answer session, Ahmadinejad appeared tense and unsmiling, in contrast to more relaxed interviews and appearances earlier in the day. Bollinger was strongly criticized for inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia, and had promised tough questions in his introduction to Ahmadinejad's talk. But the strident and personal nature of his attack on the president of Iran was startling. "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about the leader's Holocaust denial. First of all, with all due respect to Ahmadinejad, wht kind of reception did he think he was going to get? Dude is not exactly in the running for Man of the Year, if you know what I mean. Secondly, for everyone who criticized Columbia University for allowing Ahmadinejad to speak, these folks are practicing and celebrating that which makes America great. You holier-than-thou politicians in Washington could learn a thing or two from these guys.

Social Security - A report issued by the Treasury Department said that some combination of benefit cuts and tax increases will need to be considered to permanently fix the funding shortfall. The Treasury report put the cost of the gap between what Social Security is expected to need to pay out in benefits and what it will raise in payroll taxes in coming years at $13.6 trillion. It said delaying necessary changes reduces the number of people available to share in the burden of those changes and is unfair to younger workers. "Not taking action is thus unfair to future generations. This is a significant cost of delay," the report said. In another key finding, the report said: "Social Security can be made permanently solvent only by reducing the present value of scheduled benefits and/or increasing the present value of scheduled tax increases." White House officials stressed that President Bush remains opposed to raising taxes. Bush had hoped to make Social Security reform the top domestic priority of his second term. He put forward a Social Security plan in 2005 that focused on creation of private accounts for younger workers, but that proposal never came up for a vote in Congress with Democrats heavily opposed and few Republicans embracing the idea. Is it just me or is this the first time in several years that the topic of Social Security has been raised by the White House. If this is Bush's idea of handling his top domestic priority, we might as well kiss off what little hope we have of seeing Social Security benefits when we retire.

2008 Presidential Race - President Bush, breaking his rule not to talk about presidential politics, says he believes Hillary Rodham Clinton will defeat Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries. Bush also predicts that Clinton will be defeated in the general election by the Republican nominee. The White House press secretary denied the notion that Bush was talking up Clinton's prospects to energize the Republican base against Clinton's candidacy. On the Republican side, Bush has expressed surprise that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner despite his liberal positions on social and cultural issues normally critical to the party base. Bush said Giuliani's popularity was a sign of how important the terrorism issue is to Republican voters. How much do you want to bet that the GOP is going to base its platform largely on scaring the beejeezes out of voters saying that we're all going to die in a terrorist attack if a Democrat is in the White House? Perhaps its a little far-fetched...but only a little.

Mime - Marcel Marceau, the world's best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences across the globe without uttering a single word, has died aged 84. One of his most famous sketches was "The Cage," in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape. I saw Marceau perform only once--on the Muppet Show. The man was simply a genius.

Global Warming - Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting. In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.Global warming — through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and warmer waters expanding — is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. All told, one meter of sea level rise in just the lower 48 states would put about 25,000 square miles under water. That's an area the size of West Virginia. The amount of lost land is even greater when Hawaii and Alaska are included. The Environmental Protection Agency, which studied only the Eastern and Gulf coasts, found that Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and South Carolina would lose the most land. Click here for a map showing the most at risk areas on both coasts.