Rep. Darrell Issa went on CSPAN’s Washington Journal this morning and had this to say about the House oversight committee’s investigation of Blackwater (via Atrios):

If Henry Waxman today wants to go to Iraq and do an investigation, Blackwater will be his support team. His protection team. Do you think he really wants to investigate directly?

Here’s the video:

Blackwater chief funded Greens to sandbag Dems in Pennsylvania.

You see below the clip from C-SPAN this morning where Rep. Issa (R-CA) made a veiled threat to Rep. Waxman (D-CA), suggesting Blackwater might not be able to provide perfect security to the congressman if he shows up in Iraq to investigate. Well, I’ve been looking at Issa’s record this afternoon. And he seems to have shown up really, really frequently carrying water for Blackwater each time they’ve come under scrutiny over the last few years. After today’s hearing, TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman asked Issa whether he’d ever met Prince before. And taking a dig at TPM as “another unaccountable dot-com,” he said he may have met him at an earlier congressional hearing.

Now here’s where Issa water-carrying for Prince got a little comical. Issa dedicated most of his question time to debunking Democrats’ claims that Blackwater is a Republican company — charges no Dems on the committee had made during the hearing. And in the course of his water-carrying Issa noted that Blackwater employees had actually donated money to the Green Party.

See the vid:

The only problem is that this was actually an effort by a clique of GOP activists last year to help Rick Santorum by making a rash of big money contributions to the obscure Green Party candidate in the Pennsylvania senate race last year — a story TPMmuckraker.com actually covered extensively.

Blackwater astroturf blog?

Late Update: Another one? Here’s “Blackwater Reporting” a blog “Devoted to accountability in reporting on Blackwater.” Very big into accountability. No information on who runs it.

Limbaugh defender Melanie Morgan lashes out at The Horse’s Mouth.

Everybody needs a trade association in DC, even in the private military contractors. Their outfit is the International Peace Operations Association. Their “mission is to promote high operational and ethical standards of firms active in the Peace and Stability Industry; to engage in a constructive dialogue with policy-makers about the growing and positive contribution of these firms to the enhancement of international peace, development, and human security; and to inform the concerned public about the activities and role of the industry.”

Mil contracting expert Peter Singer blogs about today’s hearing at Wired.com’s DangerRoom blog.

In today’s White House press briefing, Dana Perino described all that went on during the hour-long Oval Office meeting today between President Bush and Iraqi President Talabani. Apparently, not too much…

How are things going in Afghanistan? Have we botched things so badly that the Taliban are about to take over again? And since al Qaeda, the Taliban and nuclear weapons are all in Pakistan, what happens if Pervez Musharraf falls from power? We asked each of those questions to renowned Afghanistan expert Dr. Barnett Rubin in today’s episode of TPMtv …

Shoot first, ask questions later: The actual rates of private security contractor violence in Iraq are underreported.