"I'm delighted they've asked me to come and share these special days with so many wonderful people who won the war," she says. "They did a magnificent job, all they went through. It makes me feel ... well, it makes me feel so many things."
ROVE TESTIMONY
Having dodged indictment in the CIA leak scandal, White House senior adviser Karl Rove Thursday will stand before a roomful of judges and lawyers - as keynote speaker of the Federalist Society's 2005 National Lawyers Convention.
Lisa Budzynski, spokeswoman for the convention, tells this column that Rove will speak on the subject of federal judges and the Supreme Court during his address at the Mayflower Hotel.
Other speakers include former Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III, former Texas Supreme Court Justice-turned-Republican Sen. John Cornyn, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and D.C. Court of Appeals Judge A. Raymond Randolph.
APOCALYPSE NOW
Good news for the embattled Republican Party: mass hysteria over theoretical doom - avian flu, global warming and other "acts of God" - effectively has placed politics on the back burner for most Americans.
"The list runs counter to virtually every (political) pundit's playbook," says Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor (GLM), which monitors, tracks and records this country's top political buzzwords.
"Watching the evening news, one might expect such words as 'Supreme Court,' 'insurgency,' 'filibuster,' 'quagmire' and 'out of the mainstream' to dominate the list. The lesson here might be that the 'talking heads' do not always reflect the reality," he says.
Rather, references to Hurricane Katrina dwarf anything the GLM has ever tracked, "surpassing the record set by the passing of Pope John Paul II, while the horrors of both climate change and a looming pandemic weigh heavily on the global mind," Payack says.
Top political buzzwords for the third quarter of 2005:
1. Hurricane Katrina
2. Climate change
3. Avian flu
4. Supreme Court
5. Global warming
Worth noting: The ongoing CIA/Valerie Plame leak case, he says, "barely squeaks into the Top 10" at No. 10.