Bush news report

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush said yesterday he will not identify the executives who met with him about energy policy.

"It's an encroachment on the executive branch's ability to conduct business", he said.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said later this was Bush's first sentence in public since the pretzel incident in which he used two words of more than two syllables. Upon further questioning, Fleischer admitted that Bush has used the word "president" in several sentences with another long word, and that Bush sometimes adds a suffix to a two-syllable word. Fleischer pointed to the word "eroded" in the press conference as an example of the latter case.

Whitehouse sources attribute the improvement to the renowned Russian speech-therapist and psychic Petrov. Petrov uses only one name. Sources say that it took less than an hour of coaching from Petrov before Bush could reliably pronounce the word "encroachment". Typical Bushism variants were: "inchment", "enrichment", "enronchment", "enroachment", and so on.

Fleischer vigorously denied that Petrov was using any psychic powers to control Bush's pronunciation during the press conference. When reporters pointed out that Petrov's lips had been moving in synch with Bush's, Fleischer said, "Well, we all do a little of that... kind of like bowlers who lean in the direction they wish the ball were going."

Petrov has also been working with Bush on chewing, sources disclosed. "I miss those pretsy thingies like water to a horse," the president said.