Some People Can Find a Dark Cloud in Almost Any Silver Lining

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Short Sleeves in January

Most northeasterners responded to the recent unseasonable seventy degree weather by wearing short sleeves and celebrating lower energy heating costs. But instead of celebrating, many took it as a sign of coming disaster, according to the Business and Media Institute.

From NBC's Meredith Veira, "I'm running in the park on Saturday, in shorts, thinking this is great, but are we all gonna die?"

Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote, "The weather is sublime, it's glorious, it's the end of the world."

And in the New York Times, "Yesterday the joys of wearing short sleeves were tempered with the anxiety of environmental disaster."

But according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, it's just El Nino, a warm current of water that appears every few years in the eastern Pacific Ocean that is responsible for the warmer temperatures.

Iraqi Female Spies

The news service Iran Focus reports that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is recruiting female spies in Iraq. Some 2,000 Iraqi women between the ages of thirty and forty are said to have trained in Iran in the art of intelligence gathering.

In Tehran, they undergo one month of training by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and then the women are sent back to Iraq where most have strong ties to Shiite groups, some of which have militias which are part of the sectarian strife.

"Denigrate Gandhi"

India has ordered two television channels in India to apologize for showing video of a man dressed as Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi shooting at people with an AK-47 and performing a striptease.

The Indian broadcasting minister said the two channels —IBN-7 and Sahara— tried to "denigrate Mahatma Gandhi."

But the managing editor of IBN said they had no intention of showing Gandhi in a bad light and only wanted to "share the outrage with the people of India." Gandhi is revered in India for his role in ending British colonial rule through non-violent means.

IBN says the video was shot in the U.S. and originally appeared on Youtube.com.

Didn't Understand Cost of War

And yesterday, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the President's Iraq policy, Senator Barbara Boxer made what some see as an unkind comment, when she asked who is paying the price of war: " I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Rice responded, "I talk to their families. I see it—" but was cut off by Senator Boxer.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow responded, "I don't know if she was intentionally that tacky, but I do think it's outrageous." And he called the incident a "great leap backward for feminism."

We asked Rice about that during our interview today: "I just found it a bit confusing frankly. But in retrospect, gee, I thought, single woman had come further than that. That, the only question is, are you making good decisions because you have kids?"

—FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.