I've been traveling for the past few days and, as is my custom, I do a lot of reading on planes and in hotel rooms, looking for interesting little tidbits to fill up the blog.

This time I came back with quite a haul -- starting with a news report that last Thursday, Ireland elected its first black mayor in a commuter town west of Dublin. That reminded me of an earlier occasion when Dublin itself elected its first Jewish mayor. When Yogi Berra heard about it, he is supposed to have remarked, "Only in America."

I was even luckier on Sunday. The Detroit Free Press published a digest of current political quotations that included these gems from two GOP presidential hopefuls.

"I don't even agree with me on everything." -- Rudy Guiliani

"Some of our folks went to Washington to dry the swamp and made partnership with the alligators." -- Fred Thompson

In each case, the phrasing could have been better, but the message was clear.