Hear What Russia's Top General Is Calling the U.S.

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Evil Eye

Russia's top military commander says his country has no obligation to defend other countries against what he calls "evil Americans."

Russia's state news agency says General Yury Baluyevsky was responding to a reporter's question about whether the world could depend on Russia to defend it from what the interviewer called "insidious American plans." The general said no — but he did say U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe are directed against and aimed at Russia — not Iran.

He said Americans want the ability to use their weapons without the possibility of being targeted in return. And he compared the American missile shield plan to a facetious suggestion that Russia deploy defensive missiles in Venezuela.

Left vs. Right

A new study by the American Enterprise Institute concludes that left-leaning professors far outnumber conservatives on American college campuses because of the psychological phenomenon called groupthink.

The study by professors at George Mason University and Stockholm University says conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered two-to-one in economics — more than five-to-one in political science — and more than 20-to-one in sociology and anthropology.

The authors say groupthink leads organizations to choose and reward only those people who think and act like the group's dominant members.

Spin Cycle

The association that represents state department Foreign Service officers is urging its members to try to get a positive message out to the public — after press reports of its members' negative reactions to the possibility of forced assignments in Iraq.

The American Foreign Service Association says it has taken "a severe beating in the media." It has e-mailed members asking them to write letters to local newspaper editors — in the hopes of getting them published.

It has provided a list of talking points — including — Most people in the Foreign Service spend the majority of their careers in increasingly difficult and dangerous hardship posts and, "unlike the military, our members are courageously volunteering to serve as unarmed civilians in a combat zone."

Monkey Business

While the world worries about the crisis in Pakistan, there's a serious situation in neighboring India, where wild monkeys are rampaging in the capital city of Delhi.

The deputy mayor was killed when he fell off his balcony in a scuffle with a monkey. Another monkey reportedly scratched, bit and mauled 25 people. There are thousands of them in the city, and there is a program to round them up and get rid of them.

But a senior municipal official, A.K. Singh said — "The difficulties are a shortage of monkey catchers. We're not able to take full action at full speed."

In fact, the city's metro train authority tried using larger monkeys to scare off the smaller ones which cause most of the trouble. They tried this after a monkey boarded a train and scared passengers by scowling at them for three stops.

— FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.