Billmon is back from a week's hiatus, beginning with a superb and depressing overview of where we stand in Iraq, which was depressing enough even before a former CIA tool with no domestic constituency was named presumptive Prime Minister, and started naming his colleagues on the IGC to cabinet posts. (Josh Marshall wound up a few day's worth of frenzied parsing of newspaper accounts from mutually contradictory anonymous sources by thinking that the prime mover in that was the IGC itself -- which, as Marshall notes, would be a good thing if the IGC had any credibility with the Iraqi public at large, but it doesn't).

And Billmon's return is just as well, because I'm feeling talked out. This isn't the day or the occasion for posts on privatization and, of all things, the principle of comparative advantage that I've researched, but find I don't have a whole lot of energy to actually write. But reading through his comments, one finds even more depressing stuff.

It's a weekend set aside to show respect for the troops, who defend this nation and the principles on which it was founded. And perhaps, though I've never been terribly religious, an occasion for prayers for both...