The right thing to do

More of Bush’s brilliant argumentative skills, from the same press conference: asked why he now supported the creation of an intelligence tsar, he responded: "Because I thought it was the right thing to do." So that settles it.

The laughably unrealistic idea of Muslim countries sending troops to help occupy Iraq--and then putting them under US command--is going as well as such an idea can be expected to go. Pakistan has just announced that it will not send troops, which is too bad because the Pakistani military has always done such a good job supporting democracy in Pakistan.

Halliburton has lost 6,975 out of 20,531 items of US government property it was supposed to be managing in Iraq. Items that fell off the backs of trucks include computers, office furniture, and trucks themselves.

Russia is about to destroy the country’s pension system, converting rights old people now have to free medicine, transportation, etc. into a tiny cash payment. There have been protests by pensioners, mostly led by the Communist Party. Here’s a slogan from one placard that puts Russian history into perspective: "Hitler took our youth, Yeltsin and Putin took our old age."