Internal Monologue

It seems like the US government can't do a damn thing in Iraq without the help of mercenaries. While investigating the Blackwater shooting incident, FBI agents working in Iraq will be protected by... Blackwater security agents . Why doesn't the FBI just do what the State Department did and outsource the investigation itself to Blackwater ? Time to quote Machiavelli's The Prince , chapter 12 : Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy.

We appear for about 1 second at 9 minutes, 8 seconds into this 10 minute video about Unitarian Universalism. No autographs, please.

I know from my super-top-secret contact in the State Department (codename: Maestro) that State is in a big personnel crunch right now, what with the passport backlog and all. So it's natural that it might turn to outside contractors for help. But please, when writing an initial report investigating the Blackwater shooting incident, please don't outsource the job to a Blackwater employee : A Blackwater contractor wrote an initial U.S. government report describing contractors' involvement in a September 16 incident in which Iraqi civilians were shot, government and industry sources told CNN. [...] Blackwater contractor Darren Hanner drafted the two-page spot report on the letterhead of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security for the embassy's Tactical Operations Center, said a source involved in diplomatic security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Hanner, listed on the report as the center's watch officer, was working for Blackwater at the time the report was written -- ju...

The power the residents of these states wield in selecting presidents is utterly ridiculous and completely unfair. What's more insulting is that they don't even take this responsibility seriously : Not only that, despite all the attention, Iowans know barely more about the candidates than citizens of other states, and don't discuss politics any more than anyone else (unless something has changed since this research was conducted in 2000). Yet around 200,000 of them, possessed of no greater wisdom or insight than the rest of us, will determine who presides over this nation of 300 million for the next four years. The problem isn't that Iowans aren't like the rest of the country ( 95 percent white , for one). The problem is that despite the extraordinary privilege of having the next president grovel before them, they're just as indifferent and apathetic as any other group of Americans. (HT: Atrios )

With as little fanfare as possible, Bush vetoed an enormously popular expansion of the SCHIP program that helps kids get health insurance. This is pretty disgusting. The fact that there are children in this very wealthy country who don't have health coverage is a travesty. Hundreds of billions for an immoral, fruitless occupation, but none for taking care of our own kids. If I were a Republican party trying to commit political suicide, this is the sort of thing I would do. There's enough votes in the Senate to override the veto. Apparently we need 19 more in the House to override. Some Democrats who voted against the expansion because it didn't go far enough would be expected to switch their vote to help override a veto. So only a few more Republicans need to switch to override Bush. I bet a lot of Republicans are pissed at Bush for making them the "no health care for kids" party.

OK, that just sounds colossally dumb on the face of it. Are the Italian police controlled by some cabal of sexy female cop costume fetishists? To make it worse, the high heels the female police were supposed to wear didn't even fit well . (HT: Feministing ) Here's a theory: maybe it was getting too easy to catch criminals, now that many of them are wearing those ridiculously baggy pants. So the Italian police thought they had to give their cops a corresponding disadvantage to maintain a proper balance of power and prevent overcrowding of jails. The male police could slow themselves down by wearing baggy pants, too, but the female police felt that baggy pants would be too revealing or unflattering, and opted to hobble themselves with high heels instead. But has the ridiculously baggy, low-slung pants thing infected Italy as well? I would hope Italian criminals would have the fashion sense to avoid such hideousness.

This is frickin' hilarious. Jon Stewart interviews Chris Matthews about his book, Life's a Campaign . Money quote: "I'm not trashing your book, I'm trashing your philosophy of life."