Quick Hits

Just want to get some things off my chest.

• In 2005, the Indian government got the better of American negotiators and struck a deal on nuclear energy, where the Indians would get practically everything they wanted (keeping their nuclear weapons, getting civilian energy), and now the whole thing is about to collapse because of Indian Communists, who aren't allowing the pact to go through. So sensible policymakers have to thank Communists in India who don't understand the sweetheart deal they got.

• So Giuliani flip-flopped on gay marriage. They're all a bunch of pander bears on the right, so what else is new? In order to stave off a third-party fundie run, Rudy will re-baptize himself and call for the forced abstinence of the entire nation. I mean, the guy has fallen in line with plenty of conservative articles of faith that he once disavowed. The guy apointed George Soros to a pro-immigrant coalition when he was NYC Mayor.

• So, why exactly should we be giving billions and billions more to the war effort in Iraq when, time and again, billions are outright lost to contractors?

(CNN) -- The U.S. State Department is unable to account for most of $1.2 billion in funding that it gave to DynCorp International to train Iraqi police, a government report said Tuesday.

"The bottom line is that State can't account for where it went," said Glenn D. Furbish, who was involved in putting together the 20-page report for the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR).

This isn't the first dodgy contract, dozens of similar revelations have come to light.

• Speaking of the contractor issue, you know how the State Department ended up having to hire Blackwater? Because Don Rumsfeld didn't want to give them troops to do the job. So now the State Department, completely unequipped to handle a private army (or, as we have seen, even the contracting for it), has no idea what to do, even to the extent of forcing sensitivity training on the mercenaries. I'm extremely confident that would work; a 5-minute training seminar would certainly stop Blackwater employees from shooting Iraqi civilians in a murderous rage.

• I missed Valerie Plame's 60 Minutes appearance, but she seems to have confirmed the reporting that she was, indeed, working on counterproliferation efforts in Iran. Gee, that could come in handy. Apparently, the CIA did whatever it could to keep the revelations in the book to a minimum, redacting enormous amounts of copy. Plame's publishers kept the black lines in, and added an appendix based on public information written by Laura Rozen. Larry Johnson elaborates on some of this:

Because of a pending appeal in her freedom of speech case against the CIA, she cannot say anything about joining the CIA in September of 1985 fresh out of college. She cannot say anything about her initial impression of her Career Trainee classmates–such as Jim Marcinkowski, Brent Cavan, Mike “the Griz” Grimaldi, Precious Flower, and mois. She is proscribed from telling you about wandering the forests of Camp Peary learning land navigation and she certainly will not, at least for now, be able to tell you about being taken hostage and subjected to torture for two days.

This lady is an American hero who the White House spat on to get back at political enemies. It's honestly the most revolting thing that's happened in this depressing era of government.

• Nice article on Joe Trippi's rising influence in the John Edwards campaign. 'Course, I'm trying to remember what Joe Trippi has won over the years...

TTFN