Children are famous for making excuses. Now Marc Morano, minority communications director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, forwards an alarming article written by a fourth-grade student correspondent, Zach Webster.

It begins: "According to the Shiloh Creek Running Club, global warming is getting bad. The kids involved in this club can't run as long or as far as they used to. They now have to carry two bottles of water."

THE THINKERS

It's being dubbed high-level thinking at high altitudes, and who better the thinker than Bill Clinton?

Tickets to the 2008 Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, which runs June 30 to July 6, sold out in only two hours. Besides Bubba, among the 250 headliners: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff; former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia; Austan Goolsbee, economic adviser to soon-to-be-crowned Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama; and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, policy adviser to the presumptive Republican presidential pick Sen. John McCain.

OOPS!

Rep. Todd Akin, Missouri Republican, now states for the record: "Madam Speaker, on the afternoon of June 18, 2008, I erroneously voted to override the president's veto on H.R. 6124, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act. I intended to vote 'nay' and sustain the president's veto."

HOPE STILL LIVES

That was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada introducing on behalf of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who recovers from brain cancer surgery, a bill to extend the programs under the Higher Education Act of 1965. The measure was promptly considered and approved.

As Mr. Kennedy once famously phrased it: "The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die."

OVER THE RAINBOW

As if on cue, a rare and magnificent double rainbow arched over the U.S. Capitol from the Senate to the House side Monday evening in the midst of a disaster-relief fund-raiser benefiting the victims of Iowa's recent floods. Continued...