Washington, D.C.– U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today asked four presidential scholars for their opinion on former White House Counsel John Dean’s statement that President Bush admitted to an “impeachable offense” when he said he authorized the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

Boxer said, “I take very seriously Mr. Dean’s comments, as I view him to be an expert on Presidential abuse of power. I am expecting a full airing of this matter by the Senate in the very near future.”

Woody Allen has been playing himself for so many years now that one wonders if his personality might, at some stage, actually run out. He admits that when he is filming he grows tired of his image and, for the past few years, audiences have tired of it too. But when asked if he worries whether he might, one day, stop being funny he says, "Well, no. Because if I wake up, I'm going to be funny, because it's me. It's not that I put on a thing to do it; I wake up in the morning and I can write. I roll out of bed and I can write; I can write - that's what I do, that's me. So it would have to be a complete personality change for that to happen."

"Oh, clearly. Without any question I think life is tragic. There are oases of comedy within it. But, when the day is done and it's all over, the news is bad. We come to an unpleasant end."

The death of Allen's own parents was, he says, a relatively "minor" event; his father was "slightly over 100"; his mother was "95, and, you know, it had no resonance, or trauma. These were elderly people who had led long, good lives, and were in decline in their last years." This isn't to say that he has reached an accommodation with himself over the prospect of dying. "No, I haven't. And getting older has no redeeming quality. I haven't mellowed, I haven't gained any wisdom, it's a bad thing. You don't wanna get older, it has nothing going for it."