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.

The fairness of this rant might be doubted. But it is worth noting that males do tend to mature at latter age then females. That does have some consequences worth exploring.

And the Conservative base goes wild. Seriously wild.

Read this BlackFive Post and comment section to see how wild.

Read anyone of Rod Dreher’s posts on the subject (this one in particular). Keep in mind that he is someone who has said they would not vote for McCain.

Instapundit has a more balanced roundup of reactions.

The Volokh Conspiracy blows my mind with a collection of comments from Hillary supporters.

Regardless of the outcome, I am sorry that Palin was dragged into this election. It would have been better for her to stay in Alaska. But from McCain’s perspective, this was a good choice.

Sure he gives up the lack of experience line of attack. But he never could use this without reminding everyone that he an old man who has been in Washington forever. Besides, anyone who truly cared about experience was not going to vote for Obama anyway. So I don’t think McCain gave up a lot in that regards.

In return, McCain gets someone who can fire up the Republican base with out looking too scary to non base types, go head to head with Obama in both public speaking and good looks, and appeal to all those people for whom the gender of a candidate matters (except for those who think that nobody but a real man is fit for office. But what are they going to do, vote for Obama?).

One wrinkle on all this has not been mentioned is that Palin’s only real accomplishment has been to go after corruption in her own party. I wonder if this means that McCain wants to go after the rumors of corruption surrounding the political machine that put Obama in Congress. If that is true, I hope his people checked out the allegations that Palin was improperly involved in the firing of a trooper real throughly.

Edit: Here is the Wall Street Journal on the firing of the trooper….

He said afterwards that Gov. Palin and her husband had pressured him to remove a state trooper who was a former brother-in-law she and her family had feuded with. Gov. Palin denies that, saying she removed the commissioner she appointed 18 months ago because she wants “a new direction,” and offered him a job as liquor board director which he turned down.

The case stemmed from a messy divorce between the trooper, Mike Wooten, and his wife, Molly, who is Gov. Palin’s younger sister. In 2005, Gov. Palin alleged the trooper had threatened to harm her father and sister and that he had engaged in numerous instances of official misconduct, including using a Taser on his 10-year-old stepson and shooting a moose without a proper permit, according to state documents. In one instance, she told state investigators, she overheard him on the telephone threatening her sister: “I’m gonna f—shoot your dad. He’s gonna get a lead bullet.”

Mr. Wooten told investigators he tested a Taser on the boy at his request, thought he was within his rights to kill the moose and never threatened the Palins. An internal police investigation substantiated the moose and Tasering charges, but threw out most of the rest. He was ordered suspended for 10 days in 2006. He declined comment through a spokesman with the Public Safety Employees Association.

Many of Gov. Palin’s supporters dismiss the trooper matter as trouble being stirred up by her enemies. “Many of those who had been in positions of power and authority have been very envious over the past year and a half with Gov. Palin’s great popularity,” says David Carey, mayor of Soldotna, Alaska.

He tested a Taser on a boy and only got suspended for 10 days? If this is true I can see why McCain is not to worried about the whole thing.

From the Economist….

With its other smaller allies, the PPP-led government will not fold. And if Mr Zardari is elected president, with the dictatorial powers that the job confers, as seems likely, the government will look more solid. If so, Mr Zardari might be seen to have bested both Pervez Musharraf, the former president, who resigned on August 19th to escape impeachment, and Mr Sharif, leader of the PPP’s biggest rival. For a man who recently stepped into the shoes of his dead wife, Benazir Bhutto, the PPP’s murdered leader, and who is reported to have serious mental illnesses, this would be an Olympian achievement.

Spengler is not the best writer out there. His writing is often hasty, his facts are sometimes dubious (although not as often as some his detractors would have it), and he is not particularly consistent. But he has one merit that outweighs all these sins. His is an original thinker.

That does not make him right, but it does make him an interesting read. His latest essay Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess is no exception. Almost everyone in America from far right conservatives to far left liberals would disagree with his conclusions. But if you are intellectually honest, formulating why he is wrong will require you to rethink your own viewpoint.

Georgia at War: What I Saw

Report from Tbilisi

The Georgian Mess

Paul Krugman is smart. There is no denying that. But he has established a well deserved reputation for being unfair and vindictive. Thus we are surprised to find ourselves making one of his columns rant of the week.

But his column entitled “The Great Illusion” is right on the money. The points he makes have been made by many others, but rarely so concisely.