Today's Post Has Been Brought To You By The Letter "Doh!"

"Morning Meeting" is a recap of our daily editorial meeting. If we had a show today, these are some of the stories you would probably hear.

This post is a little later and shorter than usual, because we've already spent much of the day in the studio assembling a Week in Iraq segment that will be posted shortly. Come back in a bit for that. But in the mean time, we did have an abbreviated morning meeting today, sans Luke, who you should check out hosting "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" this weekend. The BPP radar screen looks thus...

 

NEWSCAST: Rove and Gonzales under fire, Vick pleads not guilty, US & India complete nuke deal, TB guy released from hospital, Senate OKs homeland security bill, Raul Castro speaks in Cuba, and Noriega fights extradition to France.

WHAT UP WITH NASA?: It's not been a good few days for these folks. We told you yesterday that a GAO report found that NASA had lost $94 million worth of equipment in the last decade. Now we find out that an agency employee may have cut wires to sabotage a flight recorder, and that NASA let astronauts fly DRUNK on at least two occasions. What's next? Is NASA going to be pulled over for driving drunk, only to find out NASA happens to have a pocket full of cocaine? And when that happens, are any of us really going to believe that NASA was wearing someone else's jeans? In all seriousness, this seems an especially big string of bad news for this once-vaunted institution. We'd get someone on the show to explain exactly what's going wrong, and what needs to be done to get them back on track.

MMM...MOVIE: The Simpsons Movie opens today, and if you're like the BPP, you're pumped. I haven't even watched an episode of The Simpsons in years, but for a long time I was one of those annoying people who could only process the human condition through the lens of The Simpsons. ("What's that? Your cat died? I'm so sorry to hear that. You know, that reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons...") Here's a clip from my all-time favorite Simpsons episode, "Lisa On Ice," in which Bart and Lisa play youth hockey...

MAKE ME CARE: DOW TUMBLES: So the Dow went down a lot, and every major newspaper seems to have a different explanation of why. In contrast, the BPP crew is all on the same page—we have no idea why, and we're not convinced of why we should care. That means it's time for a little something we like to call "Make Me Care."

THE RAMBLE: PepsiCo, which produces the bottled water Aquafina, will spell out that the product is actually tap water that's been run through a filter. There's a brewing backlash against bottled water that we'd like to explore in more detail next week...A computer program can learn baby talk, which may help us to understand how babies learn to speak. There's a debate among doctors over how much is hard-wired and how much is acquired. This study makes the case that babies "systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language."...Leonard Nimoy will have a cameo in the new Star Trek movie, and Zachary Quinto (of TV's Heroes) will play Mr. Spock. But J.J. Abrams didn't say much about "Cloverfield."