The President's Speech
While President Bush finally set a price tag on the cost of the Iraqi effort, he still has not done nearly enough to level with the American people.

The Failuremongers
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
How best to answer the merchants of dismay who are against our occupation in Iraq? By staying the course and reporting our accomplishments.
[p6: The upshot-"Neener-neener, I can't hear you…"

Corporate shell games

NOBODY LIKES paying taxes but it's an indispensable duty in a society that hopes to maintain firefighters, police and other emergency services, and to keep roads passable, children educated, hospitals open, streets lighted and more.

So it's unsettling and unacceptable that some corporations are dodging taxes by artificially relocating offshore.

These "inversions" occur when a company moves -- on paper only -- to a place like Bermuda to evade taxes. Having a mail drop beyond the "water's edge" makes a company tax-exempt -- though their plants, workforce and markets are still on U.S. soil.

Though legal, it's an accounting sham, a shell game that brings to mind Enron and other corporate scoundrels.

Difficult to Draw a Bead on Issue of Targeted Killings
By Michael Walzer

No one can be happy about the targeted killings that are now official policy in the war against terrorism. Israel has made the practice notorious, but the United States, after criticizing Israeli policy, has also adopted it. And I suspect that other countries have done so as well, or will, under terrorist threat.

Cartoons

Click the image, follow the link to the whole cartoon. Trust me.

Plus:
Tom Toles on the perils of identity theft.
Pat Oliphant sums up yesterday's Bushit.
Tony Auth sums up the REASON for yesterday's Bushit.