Convention notebook

• If Utah Sen. Bob Bennett loses his re-election bid, he probably can get a job as a pitchman for the Utah Travel Council.

During Tuesday night's convention ceremony, Bennett officially cast Utah's 36 Republican delegate votes for President Bush. But he did so only after pitching the state as the home of the Tony Award-winning Shakespearean Festival, the world-renowned Tabernacle Choir, the greatest snow on earth, the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics and five national parks.

Bennett called it an honor to cast the Utah delegate votes, "and kind of fun."

• Police arrested more than 500 people across the city as activists massed in the streets for a march to the site of the Republican convention. More than a thousand people have been arrested in convention-related protest activity since late last week, but the demonstrations have been largely peaceful.

• Jenna and Barbara Bush, the president's 22-year-old daughters, had a few things to say Tuesday about their dad's personal side.

Jenna poked fun at herself and at her grandmother, former first lady Barbara Bush. "People tell me I'm like her and my dad," she told the National Federation of Republican Women. "In my family, I'm known as Barbara's revenge on George."

• Filmmaker Michael Moore said he will return to the Republican National Convention where delegates roundly booed his presence on opening night. Moore is covering the convention this week as an opinion columnist for USA Today.

In an "NBC Nightly News" interview, the former President Bush, the current president's father, told anchor Tom Brokaw he would like to ask "guys like Michael Moore, this horrible fellow who misrepresents my family in every way," whether they want to bring back Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president deposed by the U.S.-led invasion.

• Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader crashed the Republicans' party Tuesday, dropping into Madison Square Garden just hours before the convention's evening session was to begin.

• Outside the midtown hotel where Texas delegates are staying, about two dozen protesters, depicting employees of "Hallibacon," grunted through plastic pig snouts Tuesday and wallowed in stacks of fake $100 bills bearing the images of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The protesters accused Cheney and Halliburton, the company he once led, of profiting from the war in Iraq and its aftermath.