Interesting new direction in the Blackwater story from the Times: Blackwater’s shoot rate in Iraq is much higher than other similarly situated security firms in the country and among Americans and Iraqis the company apparently has a reputation as a “company that flaunts an aggressive, quick-draw image that leads its security personnel to take excessively violent actions to protect the people they are paid to guard.”

I’ll be honest, I don’t tend to watch these things much any more. Long story why, I’m not even completely sure myself. In any case, I’m watching the commentary on MSNBC. And the view, the consensus, seems to be that Obama had a bad night. And I have to agree. I was a little pained to see it. But he did seem unfocused and slow on his feet. If this was the first time I’d seen him, I wouldn’t have had a very good impression.

I’ve been both fascinated and disappointed that there seems to be this growing consensus that Hillary isn’t just the frontrunner but all but has the whole thing locked up. But I doubt Obama did himself a lot of favors this evening. (Howard Fineman said he had a cold or a flu this evening.)

I just saw the replay of Hillary’s response to the Iran-Israel nuclear strike question. And what struck me is that she seemed to confirm the theory that the Israeli strike in Syria was on a nuclear facility the Syrians had built with help from the North Koreans. I don’t think I’ve seen any government official or member of Congress confirm that and I still find it highly suspicious. What’d she hear?

Verizon: Naral’s Pro-Choice messages too “controversial or unsavory” to be texted over our network.

This has no direct technological connection to the net neutrality issue. But it shows pretty clearly what can happen when you have no ‘common carrier’ protections on the new telecom frontier.

Kristol tokes up and analyzes the Dem debate.

Late Update: TPM Reader MM chimes in: “Hi, have you got Bill Kristol home phone number? He’s offering 2 to 1 that the Republican nominee will win in November 2008, and I want in on that action!”

Four years and counting into the occupation, the Pentagon moves to step up oversight of its contractors in Iraq.

Here’s another issue we’re going to be looking at very closely in the whole military contracting/corruption nexus. In testimony yesterday, Sec Defense Bob Gates said that one of the issues he’s most concerned about is the way that private contractors in Iraq lure away active duty members of the military with promises of much higher salaries — often to do more or less the same stuff they’re doing in uniform. In fact, that problem is so bad that he’s looking into whether or not he can get soldiers to sign non-compete agreements to prevent them from getting headhunted by the private contractors who are allegedly there in Iraq working for us.

This really casts in a sharp, almost comedic relief what’s happening in the privatization of our military and what’s becoming of what we used to call the basis of state sovereignty — the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

But there’s also a more immediate and tangible issue. A short time ago I wrote a post in which I referred to but did not specify the standard reasons for our military’s increasing use of private contractors. And many of you wrote in to ask, Well, just what are those reasons?

We’re going to try to bring in some experts in this field who can give some more granular answers but there are basically two answers — one short term, one longer term. In the short run, often they have no choice. So for instance, why does the State Department have to hire Blackwater to protect its diplomats? Why isn’t there some sort of State security service which can do this? Or why isn’t there, say, a contingent of Marines specially equipped and trained for this task?

In many cases, bureaucrats have no choice. Because they need security protection for some sort of mission and the government simply has no capacity to provide it. But that begs the question of why that is so. And the reason is that over the last couple decades the military and State and other federal agencies have been progressively hollowed out because a policy decision was made to privatize many military and related functions.

Now why is this so? The reasons aren’t so different from those behind privatization in more domestic parts of government service. Cost-savings and — at least this is the argument — streamlining the functions that are core to the missions of various agencies and government institutions. Another, less frequently stated, reason is that working through contractors allows you to evade a lot of laws and accountability.

But let’s focus on the alleged budgetary savings. If private contractors are able to lure soldiers/marines away with far higher salaries and if you figure in the sizable profit margins of the contractors themselves, it’s not hard to see that the US government is paying a lot more to have the ‘contractors’ do whatever job it is than it would to simply have the Army or Department of State do the jobs themselves. And this is one of the keys to understanding what’s happening. A lot of what the contracting mega-issue is about is the US government paying contractors big bucks to do jobs the military (or other agencies of government) could do better and cheaper themselves.

And here’s a bonus. Who came up with this bright idea. It didn’t begin with him. But a lot of the key decisions were made by none other than Dick Cheney, back when he was Sec Def under the first Bush administration.

On Wednesday night the Democratic presidential candidates squared off at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for the first Dem debate of the fall season. Which candidate has the true plan for getting us out of Iraq? Which candidate believes the national army of Iran should be classified as a terrorist organization? And which candidate thinks Rudy Giuliani doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about? Find out all the answers and more in today’s Highlight Reel episode of TPMtv …

Matt Bai responds to the critics: You call that innovation?

And McJoan of Daily Kos offers her own analysis.

Late Update: Matt has been really digging into and responding to the comments to his posts, which we appreciate and which makes for a lively and interesting discussion. Take a look.

The decision to not allow text messaging on abortion was incorrect, a company spokesman tells The New York Times.