So you’re a multimillionaire who wants to get into security contracting for the US government… how to get started?

The instructive tale of Blackwater’s Erik Prince.

M.J. Rosenberg on Tom Lantos blocking promised aid to Lebanon. Sometimes you really have to wonder what Israel’s soi disant friends in Washington think they’re doing. The idea that we should engineering a situation where Lebanon’s economy and infrastructure have been battered by U.S.-made Israeli weapons and then rebuilt through Iranian dollars funneled through Hezbollah is going to serve our interests or Israel’s is daft.

Boyd Blundell plays the Katrina “blame game” (a.k.a., holding people accountable for their actions) and does it well.

The government spends or gives away hundreds of billions of dollars each year. But there’s no easy way to see where it goes.

Two senators have championed a searchable database of federal spending and grantmaking. But now that it’s on the brink of becoming law, an anonymous senator has stepped in to block it.

Help unmask the culprit.

Update: We’ll be updating the post as reader responses come in.

Jon Chait has a smart column about how U.S. politics isn’t a zero sum enterprise. It’s perfectly possible for conservatives to keep failing to make the government smaller without that meaning that liberals are achieving our goals.

Folks would do well to consider the applicability of this observation to the international realm as well. Lee Smith, for example, takes Hassan Nasrallah’s statement of regret that the recent Israel-Lebanon war as evidence that the CW is wrong and Israel did just fine. Noam Scheiber leans a bit in the direction of embracing that interpretation as well. I suspect the truth is more depressing. War is typically a negative sum endeavor that leaves both sides worse off than they would have been had the war not begun. Think of Iraq — the US seriously damaged our interests by invading, but Saddam Hussein didn’t benefit at all from the war.

It sounds sufficiently dippy that I hesitate to express the view, but the simple fact of the matter is that going to war is rarely a good idea. The benefits of international cooperation — or simple lack of active conflict — are sufficiently large that there are almost always alternatives that would have been more conducive to both sides’ interests.

Update on the “masked senator” effort: TPM readers have helped gather denials from 50 lawmakers who say they aren’t the ones obstructing the Obama/Coburn anti-pork legislation. Add the co-sponsors to that total, and we’ve got just 47 more to call before we learn who’s keeping us from finding out where our tax money goes.

Update: Our official tally is here.

From the annals of irrationality, reader T.T. tells me “enough with the links to TNR and Weekly Standard.” Why?

If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were working for AIPAC given the number of links you’re putting up to their media wing(s) today over at TPM.

Please stop it.

A previously loyal TPM reader,

But I linked to those articles in order to criticize them.

In the spirit of non-seriousness, what’s the deal with AIPAC’s website? It’s pretty crude, no? You’d think they could do better. The ideologically similar Israel Project, by contrast, has an elegant site courtesy of Kintera.

Late Update: T.T. writes again — “That was a joke…”

And I, it seems, am an idiot.

“The Yes Men” strike in New Orleans: political hoaxsters create fake persona of a HUD official to announce millions in public health efforts, and billions in private grants for wetlands rebuilding. The administration calls the stunt “sick, twisted.”

Obviously, it’s my name and email address posted up there at the top of the page. Nevertheless, a certain number of the posts are actually written by Paul Kiel or Justin Rood of TPM Muckraker. If you have something to say about one of the projects they’re working on (this mystery senator business, for example) you crshould send your email to tips at TPMMuckraker dot com rather than to me. Sorry for the confusion, but just check for the byline at the end of the post and you’ll see who wrote it.

A whistleblower uses YouTube to expose flaws in Homeland Security technology. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.