Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK) managed to push through a multimillion dollar earmark via email, but the new-fangled technology still went to help his old cronies.

This week at the Book Club, The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt discusses her new book, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories. Joining her will be Garance Franke-Ruta, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, Chris Hayes, and Todd Gitlin. Katha starts things off by responding to the critique in The New York Times Book Review.

Pat Buchanan on the leading GOP candidates snubbing minority voters:

Yesterday at TPM I flagged Sy Hersh’s new New Yorker article on the Cheneyite push for war with Iran — an article as depressing as it is unsurprising. I want to focus in one passage from the piece about arch-Iran hawk Normam Podhoretz …

Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.”

So this is the threat. Iran overturns the current unipolar world order and replaces it with a new world order dominated by Iran. It’s really quite astonishing that people even write this garbage with a straight face. And yet there it is. Lost in all of this is that Iran is, what?, a third rate military power? Maybe?

Let’s see if we can line up this comparison: Hitler/Germany, head of industrial superpower in the heart of Europe, engaged in massive rearmament putting it back in place as the dominant land military power in the world. Ahmadinejad, head of country with an economy roughly the size of Alabama, a sizable but largely outmoded military.

Notice any differences?

Let’s assume Ben Stevens’ lawyer (Ben is the son of Ted) is less than happy with him at the moment. He lost his patience with a discussion of his legal problems on Alaska talk radio and resorted to the always-defense-counsel-endorsed tactic of calling in and discussing his case on live radio.

But this does give us an opportunity to return to a too-little-discussed aspect of the investigation into Sen. Stevens (R-AK). We hear a lot and we’ve told you a lot about Sen. Stevens’ home renovation courtesy of former VECO CEO and now convicted briber Bill Allen. But there’s, well, so much more. Another choice part of the investigation is how Sen. Stevens set up something called the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board. He then put his son and a former staffer on the board, which meant they were in charge of doling out big money to fisheries companies. And then they — just coincidentally, one assumes — collected big consulting fees from the same companies they were awarding grants to.

We review some of the details here.

This must be why senate Republicans are rushing ahead with an ethics investigation into Sen. Craig.

A couple of weeks ago, when President Bush declared that 36 nations were among the coalition of the willing in Iraq, we discovered that one of those was Iceland, which had a single person in its Iraq “contingent”–until today. That lone Icelandic soldier is now going home. His singular service is chronicled in this spoof (via Americablog).

Murtha fights long twilight struggle to keep Dems in contention on pay-for-play legislation.

We’ve been talking a lot here about the growing role of private contractors in the military. But to make the discussion complete we also need to focus on the role of contracting in the US Intelligence Community. It’s a small part of the overall equation, or hopefully a small part. But it’s worth remembering that the growth in private contracting in the intelligence budget was the angle that Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes — the bribers of Duke Cunningham — used for all their shenanigans. There may not be much accountability or oversight of military contracting. But the thick layers of classification in the intelligence budget meant there was virtually none in the intelligence budget. As long as they had a congressman on the take, Wilkes and Wade could have a field day. They only got caught because someone stumbled upon Duke’s outrageous house deal bribe.

Texas oilman Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr., pleads guilty in the Oil for Food scandal, suddenly switching his plea in the middle of trial.

A few days ago the State Department released what it called a “first blush” report on the Blackwater incident in Baghdad, a report which largely exonerated the Blackwater personnel involved.

I noted at the time that “first blush” was something of an understatement since the report was based exclusively on statements the State Department took from Blackwater operatives on the scene. In other words, the Blackwater employees who did the shooting gave State an account that largely exonerated themselves. A truly shocking development.

But it seems that I was behind the curve on the level of caricature and self-parody that is the military contracting biz in Iraq these days.

The report was written out of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the folks who hired Blackwater to provide security for US diplomats in Iraq. But it turns out that the State Department employee who interviewed the Blackwater folks and wrote the report, Darren Hanner … well, he wasn’t a State Department employee. He was another contractor from Blackwater.

So yes, you’ve got that right. We’ve now reached what can only be called the alpha and the omega of contracting accountability breakdown ridiculousness. We’re outsourcing our investigations of Blackwater to Blackwater.