Jim

Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft's testimony before the 9-11 Commission on April 13, 2004.

It's the perfect listen for your morning commute! In the time it takes you to get to work, you'll hear a digest of the day's top stories, prepared by the editorial staff of The New York Times. Each edition includes articles from the front page, as well as the paper's international, national, business, sports, and editorial sections.

In the East Room of the White House, on April 13, 2004, President George W. Bush held a news conference, partly to address the situation in Iraq, as well as pre-September 11 intelligence.

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again - this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.

If you are driving, pull over. If you are at work, close your door, unless you don't mind your colleagues seeing you doubled over, in tears, on your office floor. With this recording, taped before a delirious sold out audience at Carnegie Hall, you are there as David Sedaris performs new stories from his upcoming book. A parrot who mimics an ice maker, lovers quarreling over a rubber hand, and a Santa Claus who moonlights from his job as bishop of Turkey, the cast of characters is like no other.

Finding logical inconsistencies, factual errors, and doublespeak wherever he looks, Al Franken takes on and destroys the myth of liberal bias in the media, hoists the Bush White House on its own rhetorical petard, and punctures the mean-spirited sanctimony of such media darlings as Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly. Timely, provocative, unfailingly honest, and always uproarious, Lies is sure to raise hackles and spark hilarity inside the Beltway and from sea to shining sea.

"It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown...." Garrison Keillor first did his monologue in 1974 to an audience of 20 in a St. Paul theater. Today, more than 2.2 million people tune in each week to hear the tall tales and sweet stories about the citizens of this small Minnesota town. Get the latest issue or subscribe!