USA Today brought the White House chief of staff to his knees recently. Following a meeting with the national newspaper's editorial board - just another stop in the Bush administration's "why can't we all just get along" meetings - an offhand remark turned into the next day's top headline.

It is easy to say that no one really pays attention to what is said in USA Today. It is disdained in the journalism community for its unofficial motto of, "All the news fit to print in 50 words or less," but that doesn't mean that it can't get people's attention. Especially when the top headline reads, "Bush to close offices on AIDS, race."

For some reason, a headline like that gets everyone's attention. Apparently, Chief of Staff Andy Card had told the editors of the paper that those offices would be reorganized, like the rest of the White House bureaucracy, and this was taken to mean that they would be removed.