Aw, Colonel Qadhafi, you shouldn't have! Condoleezza gets her bling on

I'd never thought of Condoleezza Rice as a diamond kind of girl. A string of pearls is more her thing, I'd assumed. Either I was wrong, or Condi's going to have to make a very quiet trip to a jeweler to exchange the $200,000 diamond ring in a wooden box given to her by Colonel Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi. Why did she accept this gift, you ask? Same reason as hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of gifts accepted by Rice and other Bush cabinet members: "non-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and U.S. Government."

Uh...huh. But lest we get excited, these gifts are all supposed to be turned over to the government; even those that would seem more at home in Texas -- or on the red carpet.