W has booked a reservation to take a bike ride with Lance Armstrong.

Come on. When you take the access to really big weapons and the full time cooking staff and the private movie theater out of the equation, this is what being president is all about.

It’s like you get to be Tom Cruise without the crazy.

Former Colin Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson reflects on the Powell UN speech and describes it as the lowest point in his life.

I wish I had not been involved in it. I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life … (Powell) came through the door … and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, “This is what I’ve got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it.” It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose.

If this was the lowest point in his life, what was the next lowest? Waiting a few years to share that sensation with the rest of us?

As far as one-person political protests go, Cindy Sheehan’s is pretty damn effective. She really leaves Bush (who is a political master) with his hands tied. The best thing he can do, politically speaking, is to walk out to the street and give Sheehan a hug. But that is impossible. If he does that, he’ll have a line of protesters for every topic out there waiting in line.

But ultimately, the Sheehan protest tells us more about ourselves than it does about the principle characters involved.

First, we see the intense contempt and hate that is thrown across the aisle by extremists and pundits on both sides. Just pathetic. I could quote folks here, but why, you know this song by now.

Second, we’ve seen how the Sheehan story has pushed Iraq back into the headlines and stirred up unanswered questions. But you have to wonder, how can we be in a war and not have really been that focused on it during the pre-Sheehan months?

Quick, name the top issues being debated when it comes to the Iraqi Constitution…

We’ve grown bored with what is supposedly the struggle of an era.

But we ain’t too bored to blast away at Cindy Sheehan.

I once asked a relatively well-known French chef who was cooking a dinner for 12 in my kitchen why his vegetables tasted and looked so much better than mine ever did.

I was sort of expecting to hear a thick French accent explaining that such secrets couldn’t possibly be shared with a culinary civilian such as me.

But instead, the chef paused, picked up a knife, sliced off half a cube of butter and dropped it into a deep pot of steaming vegetables.

While I rarely employ that technique at home, we all sort of know that butter and fat is what makes stuff taste so good when we’re eating out. And while we may love to hear stories of fast food chains who are being pressured to offer lighter and healthier fare, the truth is that, as long as someone else is doing the slicing and dropping, we’re pretty cool with the just add butter strategy.

All this helps explain why restaurants that adopt a lighter menu often retreat to their old ways. The words of praise can only do so much. They need your mouth for another calling. And it turns out that we tend to talk out of one side of our mouth and eat out of the other.

Over the past day or so I’ve been collecting email addresses from those folks who have expressed interest in being part of a beta test for a new site I am about to launch.

So let’s take a look at the latest webmail and AOL numbers.

Here is a breakdown of email address percentages from the first thousand or so sign-ups (with the caveat that a large number of these addresses belong to designers, web developers and other early adopters).

4.5% of the addresses are from AOL.

7% of the addresses are from Hotmail.

15% of the addresses are from Yahoo.

25% of addresses are from Gmail.

It’s pretty amazing how quicky Gmail has become the webmail of choice for the cool kids.

And it’s equally amazing that so many people still can’t seem to shake AOL.

These numbers are ultimately all about page views for more ad words. So the Gmail lead is not insignificant.

Again, these numbers are all about early adopters (narrowed to those who have the good taste to want to beta test my new site), but they are worth noting. If Gmail could approach this kind of a breakdown in the mainstream, it would have a big impact on all involved.