Whirlwind: I took a news break this weekend. I don't watch the Sunday shows anyway, and I managed to avoid radio, TV, and newspapers. So here we are. Gore's out. Cardinal Law too. And Trent Lott is hanging by a thread. Give me a chance to catch up. My gut take: 1) The GOP will back down on Lott, because they are afraid of him spoiling the party by resigning from the Senate. 2) The church is still in deep doo-doo, especially since the Vatican refused to eat crow and forced a watering down of the zero-tolerence abuse policy. 3) Joe Lieberman can be the Dems odds-on favorite in 2004 in a New York minute if he can find a way back to all the centrist positions he abandoned in 2000. The trick will be to do it without looking like a schlemozel for leaving that center for uber-schlemiel Al Gore. My money says he can't pull it off.

Update: Kissinger is off the 9/11 panel (so we can feel safe that the panel will not bomb Cambodia), and Michael Bellesiles got his Bancroft Prize taken away when Columbia U discovered that it was fiction. (Perhaps a Booker Prize in the works?) Not that all of these were unexpected developments, but ye gods -- what the hell didn't happen this weekend?