This week, spies caught The Prime Minister of Mongolia, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Good Charlotte, Bob Saget, Anthony Williams, Thomas Friedman, and Condoleezza Rice bumming around DC like common tourists. Their stories are after the jump.

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NY Times scribe David Sanger, on the Asian beat with the president’s entourage this past week, files a report on Bush’s moment of respite from the cares and worries that go with defending an unpopular war. Mongolia, it turns out, is a merciful waystation where “presidential entertainment is vivid”: MORE »

As Daily Kos and other have pointed out, Bush’s hat tip to local culture in Mongolia — drinking fermented yak’s milk — means that the poor guy is drinking. “Again.” The sad thing about Bush resorting to drinking yak’s milk isn’t that it’s yak’s milk, it’s that it’s only 3% alcohol. Look, we’ve gone all Kitty Dukakis at times as well but if you’re going to sink, make it count. Hairspray, paint thinner… as a friend told us, “Dude, I’ve drank NyQuil when there was nothing else in the house. Actually, it blends pretty well with grapefruit juice.” Surprisingly, so does yak’s milk. MORE »

• Michael Scanlon, partner to Jack Abramoff, pleads guilty to conspiring to bribe a lawmaker and other officials as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. [WP, NYT, WSJ, LAT]
• Cheney at the AEI: “Any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false.” William Kristol: “His numbers have dropped and he is probably not the best messenger to independents and swing voters, but in terms of managing an argument, he is good at it and his style lends itself to it.” [WP, NYT, LAT, WT, USAT]
• Cheney managed to celebrate “debate and criticism while declaring that a key element of that debate — whether the administration exaggerated prewar intelligence about Iraq — is off-limits.” [WP]
• Mongolia thrills Bush: “I’m here on an important international mission. Secretary Rumsfeld asked me to check on his horse.” [NYT, WSJ, , USAT]

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