By Brian Williams, Anchor and managing editor

Apparently while I was in the air en route home from Florida there was some traffic on the Internet about last night's grassy knoll "whispered moment" right after this question from Tim Russert to Mitt Romney during the debate: "Will you do for Social Security what Ronald Reagan did in 1983?" With the benefit of an earpiece on stage, I distinctly heard what some viewers apparently heard. Someone said in a whisper, but audibly:

"He raised taxes..."

I remember looking around the stage with a start - scanning the faces of the candidates, trying to figure out who had just said that. Apparently, others heard it, too. We're actually polling all of our folks (those who were anywhere near an open mike) and watching all of our iso tapes (where we record camera angles that isolate individual candidates) to see who the whispering bandit is. Its not as if anyone committed any offense - in fact, whoever it was was both fast on the draw and correct about where Tim was going with his question. It was just an oddly disjointed, not-immediately-identifiable voice, thus the mystery.

Back in New York, I'm here to tell you today's Continental Airlines flight 700 from Ft. Lauderdale to Newark was one of the worst I've ever been on. This time it wasn't the airline's fault. It was the people on the plane: nasty kids, even worse parents... a situation made that much more nightmarish by the continuing horror of the discovery I made boarding our flight to Miami two nights ago: My iPod was in its charger - in my office - and not in my briefcase. The prospect of traveling without it terrifies me, and during the opening 30 minutes of today's flight I would have done anything to have had just ONE of my 2,500 songs. I've never been so happy to see my home state come into view, as we circled over Soprano-land on final approach over the urban jungle of northern Jersey prior to landing.

I was driving through Las Vegas ten days ago with producer Subrata De (on our way to a redeye to New York, I recall - it all tends to run together) when I motioned toward a cluster of existing high-rise hotels, adjacent to some new construction, the Monte Carlo hotel among them. I mentioned the struggle of the Las Vegas Fire Department to stay ahead of the construction boom (there are 40,000 new hotel rooms currently under construction) and made some sort of vague, dark prediction akin to "one of these days, one of these is gonna go up..." And by the time we landed this afternoon and arrived in the newsroom, every television was showing live pictures of the fire at the Monte Carlo. It took a long while to get water on that fire today, and I imagine there will be a long investigation into how it happened and how quickly it spread. Note the jet-black smoke that came from the initial incursion of the fire into those hotel rooms: That's the carpeting, wall coverings, fabrics, furniture, electronics - all the synthetic materials and surfaces and fabrications that make up today's commercial construction. I don't envy the Battalion Chief who was the first to roll up on the scene of that one today. Considering how it might have ended, a lot of people have a lot of blessings to count today in Las Vegas.