Around The Intertubes

• The Blackwater debacle has certainly proved to be a multi-layered pile of controversy. We have the whole military industrial complex thing. We have the outsourcing of critical military functions. We have the resultant procedural and chain of command gaps. And now it appears those involved in the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians are immune to prosecution. Lack of accountability seems to be the norm for this administration. Maybe Bush will give the mercs the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  

• Obama sure has managed to piss off a great many among the gay and lesbian crowd. I'm not sure I've caught the whole of it but it seems his attempt to be black enough and religious enough has inadvertently aligned him against his homosexual supporters. This shouldn't be too difficult to straight talk his way out of... a president, after all, must serve a country that is constantly at odds with itself.
  

• It's going to be like this 4-ever more. Shoot me.

• People keep conveniently overlooking that Bush was asking Qwest (and other telecoms) to break the law prior to 9/11. I'm not sure why people have such a hard time grasping the fact that this administration has fancied itself above the law since it took office... using 9/11 as the excuse for breaking the law was just a convenient afterthought. It'll also be interesting to see if Bush actually complies with legal requests for documents in the ongoing warrantless wiretapping investigation or if he thinks he's above all that, too.
  

• This Sibel Edmonds case has been going on for years. I wonder if she'll get any takers in the media for her latest offer (my guess is no). I'd sure love to know what it is she has to say.
  

• Understanding our Middle East policy in context can be a full time job. I usually read an article here, an article there, etc, and then spend a lot of time trying to string the facts together for some kind of big-picture perspective of what's really going on over there. A usually reliable shortcut, Juan Cole gives good context in his latest Salon article.
  

• After 100 years, absinthe makes a comeback in the U.S. It's been added to my list of things to do/try.
  

• Can we really stop Iran from going nuk-u-lar? And if you think through what it would take to 'stop' them, under which scenario are we better off in the long term? Pakistan went nuk-u-lar years ago -- a country that's truly festering with rabid islamic extremists -- and yet we don't seem too concerned about invading them. I'd love to know why. It seems there's an agenda... and then there's the agenda. Trying to figure out which is which these days is getting to be quite a chore.