Times Are Changing ...

And now the most captivating two minutes in television, the latest from the wartime grapevine:

Times Are Changing ...

The New York Times now editorializes that during the run-up to the Iraq war -- "the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives... severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies."

But back at the time, at the end of 2002 -- when the UN unanimously approved a U.S.-backed resolution sending inspectors back into Iraq and warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq refused to cooperate fully - the Times called it -- "a well-deserved triumph for President Bush, a tribute to eight weeks of patient ... American diplomacy."

Ratings Rise

After nearly two months of decline, President Bush's job approval rating appears to be edging up. A new poll out today shows 52 percent of Americans now approve of the president's job performance, compared with 49 percent earlier this month in the same poll.

The Gallup Poll also shows President Bush would very narrowly edge out Democratic front-runner John Kerry if elections were held today. Earlier this month, Gallup had Kerry beating the president by 7 percentage points.

Professors' Protest

One hundred professors from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania have unanimously passed a resolution condemning the USA Patriot Act for allowing campus police to monitor political activities on campus and allowing them to search students' rooms without notifying the students or the school.

But the Patriot Act never confers any such authority on campus police. Muhlenberg History Professor Anna Adams, who drafted the resolution, admits she has not read the Patriot Act. But, she tells the Morning Call newspaper, she has no plans to rewrite the resolution.

Conservative Estimation

Conservative students at Duke University are complaining that the school has a nearly all-liberal and all-Democratic faculty. But the chairman of Duke's philosophy department, for one, suggests the reason his department has so few conservatives is that most conservatives aren't smart enough to get the jobs.

Robert Brandon says -- "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may [also] go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia."

— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report