This week’s rant of the week is Sippican Cottage’s rant on the man behind the curtain.

But I don’t think this will work. From Wired…

The secret-spilling site Wikileaks announced this week that it’s acquired thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But don’t look for them online. In a departure from its full-disclosure past, Wikileaks is auctioning off the cache to the highest bidder.

Wikileaks began soliciting bids from media organizations on Tuesday, for what it describes as thousands of e-mails and attachments from 2005 to 2008 that provide insight into Chavez’s management, CIA activities in Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.

The winner gets exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents, though Wikileaks will publish all of them eventually.

Not sure we want to get drawn into this, but here is Sarah Palin’s speech.

But it is a good political speech and they don’t come along every day. In fact, it is so good that people are trying to point out that it was not written by her but by President Bush’s speech writer in an effort to deny her credit. All I can say is that the speech writer must have been holding out on President Bush. He never gave a speech like this.

It is slow in the beginning but then it picks up steam for those who get bored by the beginning. That is because defending herself comes more naturally then praising McCain.

(h/t Stop the ACLU)

From New York Times….

Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.

Until now, allied forces in Afghanistan have occasionally carried out airstrikes and artillery attacks in the border region of Pakistan against militants hiding there, and American forces in “hot pursuit” of militants have had some latitude to chase them across the border.

But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.

This may be part of the US decision to give up on Musharraf. By letting go of Musharraf the US no longer has to worry about eroding his public support. As the New York Times says later in the same article….

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had weighed plans to kill or capture top leaders of Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld, for all his public bravado, wanted to tread cautiously in Pakistan for fear of undermining Mr. Musharraf. With Mr. Musharraf’s resignation, that issue is no longer a concern.

Needless to say, Newspapers in Pakistan are going ballistic. This from the Nation….

THE US has an ignominious record of violating Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty in pursuit of its targets, killing innocent tribesmen and not sparing even security personnel. The humiliations to which Pakistan has been subjected include repeated violations of its airspace by US drones, helicopters and warplanes, wanton rocket and missile attacks and shelling from the other side of the border. Over a dozen people had died and many more were injured in the Damadola attack two years back. In June this year, 11 Pakistani troops were killed in a US air strike on a checkpost in Mohmand Agency. Last month, 20 persons died in another strike in South Waziristan. The latest incident, wherein US commandos landed in a FATA village and killed 20 civilians, including women and children, and flew back with impunity, is the most outrageous. Like Kabul, Islamabad has not gone beyond an impotent protest.

Eventually, Pakistan is going to have to go beyond impotent protests or everyone is going to believe that a secret deal has been made. Which may in fact be the case.