SAY WHAT?

"The war is not over ... but it is decisively on its way to being won."

President George W. Bush, LEFT, at a news conference in Iraq Dec. 14. After an Arabic man with Egyptian television press credentials responded by throwing his shoes at the president, shouting, "This is your farewell kiss, you dog," Mr. Bush joked "It was a size 10."

"Our country is in peril. Taxpayer dollars are flowing into banks, but there is little evidence of what effect these hundreds of billions of dollars are having on the very obvious troubles facing us: mortgage foreclosures, restricted small-business lending and rising unemployment."

Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the special Congressional Oversight Panel created three weeks ago to figure out what's happened to the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have been handing to Wall Street's biggest banks. The panel held its first "field" hearing in Las Vegas Tuesday, targeting the city because of its status as "Ground Zero of the Housing and Financial Crises."

"I got three steps, and she goes, 'You go to the driver, I'm going to cut your ... head off.' I started wondering: copycat?"

Freelance music agent Joseph Egan of Winnipeg, manitoba, after encountering a drunken woman passenger and turning to walk to the front of a bus in which he was riding. Greyhound Lines Inc. has stepped up security on its Canadian cross-country routes after a passenger beheaded his seat mate while crossing the prairies west of Winnepeg earlier this fall.

"Obviously that's a strange circumstance, but we haven't really found anything that leads to anything conclusive."

Las Vegas police Lt. Lew Roberts on the odd coincidence that, hours after successful local small business owner Michael Maurice McDaniels was declared dead after being shot while sitting in his car at a red light at Owens Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard Tuesday morning, his brother and two daughters, ages 23 and 11, were held up at gunpoint and relieved of their purses and wallets upon visiting the dead man's home to retrieve some belongings.