Running down the press:

Post: 'ROCKE-FAUX-LER WED JUST TO GET GREEN CARD'

We've entered the rococo phase of headline-writing about Clark Rockefeller. More importantly, this guy is really in Deutsch now. Waste your time on the Post story if you want, but for details of the creepy murder case that may involve this weak-chinned schnook, go back to yesterday afternoon's Post or to this morning's mundane AP story: "LA authorities: 'Rockefeller' is wanted German."

Better still, see this morning's BBC story, "Child-snatch suspect is 'wanted.' "

Daily News: 'Enquire-ing minds want to know who fed Edwards tips'

A non-story about a semi-non-story. Let yourself go, if you want. It's slightly less unhealthy than a pint of Ben & Jerry's.

Daily News: 'Fiends armed with badge of shame'

Good story from cops reporter Alison Gendar:

Los Angeles Times: 'Michael Phelps' victory dance is innate, scientists say'

The best Olympics piece so far:

Newsday: 'A reminder of New York's GOP convention 4 years ago'

Weak headline, good story that actually applies historical context to a current event. More of a reminder than a scoop. Apparently unafraid to piss off those big bad NYPD officials, Rocco Parascandola plucks this one back from the memory hole:

Times: 'Police Want Tight Security Zone at Ground Zero'

Via Charles V. Bagli's story:

Disheartening, but is anybody really surprised by this?

Even if there had never been a 9/11, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who purchased the mayoral job, would support making this gloriously disordered city a gated community. And the NYPD, the most massive and powerful police bureaucracy in the country, loves the idea of hiring more troops for these security zones.

Everybody's happy.

By the way, Bloomberg adds, put out that cigarette.

New Yorker: 'Changing Lanes'

Elizabeth Kolbert's piece blasts McCain for swerving away from integrity. That's not such a big deal for any candidate, but her story's intriguing because it defends high gas prices. An excerpt:

Slate: 'The Afterlife for Scientologists: What will happen to Isaac Hayes' legendary soul?'

Nina Shen Rastogi's "Explainer" confirms that, according to Scientology officials, Chef's soul will be "born again into the flesh of another body."

Dibs!

NY Observer: 'What's Doctoroff Saying to City? It's a Secret'

Nice dig by Eliot Brown on his attempted dig for info:

NY Observer: 'Rangel on Immigration, Bad Guys'

Azi Paybarah points out a Charlie Rangel video performance in which the vet congressman does some shrewd truth-telling:

Times: 'Cost-Cutting in New York and London, a Boom in India'

Heather Timmons's story notes:

Yeah, it's a "food chain." Ridiculously overused metaphor, but interesting story for what it accidentally reveals about corporate jargon and, more importantly, what passes for "entry-level" jobs on Wall Street:

B-school grads stepping into six-figure jobs. You don't have to be a radical to note with grim humor the astounding inequity of wages on Wall Street for bullshit money-moving jobs vs. wages for the rest of us around the country who do more vital work (myself not included).

If Wall Street is smart (and recent events don't support that), it will start pouring more money into the McCain campaign, because there's no doubt that Barack Obama is less sympathetic to those six-figure B-school grads and more in tune with the rest of us.

Whether Obama would actually do anything about this inequity is another matter altogether, but there would be zero chance of such change under McCain.

Los Angeles Times: 'Kuwait royal family member sentenced to death'

The story about royal drug trafficker Talal Nasser al Sabah, now sentenced to death, notes:

In other words, if he's executed, it will be a step toward democracy. Only in the Middle East — and the U.S.

Actually, the best move for this guy would be to flee to the U.S. Yes, we have the death penalty, but George W. Bush could add him to his list of pardons for the end of his term.

You can be sure that this president, despite his having been the hangingest governor in U.S. history, will have an extremely interesting list of pardons. That list probably includes convicted spy-for-Israel Jonathan Pollard and a host of financiopathological miscreants.

Wall Street Journal: 'McCain Bristles Over Russia's "Aggression" '

Careful, old guy, don't get yourself aggravated. The Journal — worth the piddling online-subscription money for its superior news stories and analyses — recognizes that McCain's bluster, which it calls "an increasingly hard line against Russia over its military operations in Georgia," is a ploy to separate himself from Obama by focusing on foreign policy.

But it also points out that McCain has always been a hardliner:

Shrewd strategy. This provides an out for white voters in thrall to the Mandingo Complex but unwilling to say it aloud: They can tell themselves that it's not a racial thing, that they really do prefer McCain because of his foreign-policy stances — ignoring his bellicose stance on the Iraq Debacle, with which they don't agree.

They can tell themselves that McCain has much more foreign policy experience, even though most of his experience was as a prisoner of war.

White voters can't say it's race — that would be impolite or it would be speaking ill of themselves. (For more on that, see what I pointed out yesterday: New York magazine's package on the color-coded campaign.)

Some of this internal thought process is conscious; some of it takes place in the subconscious. Whatever the case, this presidential race is about race. Bear with me while I remind you of this about a thousand more times before November.

Jim Yardley's dispatch from Beijing this morning in the New York Times, "China Sets Zones for Olympics Protests," notes that China's authoritarian rulers are setting up roadblocks, via permit requirements and the like, for protesters at the Olympics.

Bureaucratic obstacles? Designated areas for protesters? Monitoring of dissidents? Sound familiar? Here's part of Yardley's story:

For China, these plans represent a drastic loosening of its reins. Still, Beijing's Finest are acting the way New York's Finest did in 2004, and Liu Shaowu sounds like Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Remember the 2004 GOP Convention? The Times doesn't.

Don't blame Yardley. His editors should have at least put in some reference to how similar Beijing's restrictions for 2008 are to New York's for 2004, when protesters at the GOP convention were herded like cattle, faced insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles, and weren't even allowed to gather in Central Park.

Just a sentence or two in this morning's story to remind readers of the restrictions in New York City during a similarly large, politically charged event. Is that too much to ask? Yes.

The Rooskies are rolling out the hardware once again.

Everybody's talking tough these days. Hillary threatens to nuke Iran and now Vladimir Putin is launching the kind of "Victory Day" parade on Red Square that hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Here's how France 24's Nick Coleman described it today:

Vlad the Paler may be stepping down as president, but he's still the prime minister, in every sense of the word. He ain't giving up anything.

He's rolling out the big guns, just like in the bad old days when thousands of missiles, troops, and weapons paraded in the square before the doddering conservatives who called themselves Communists.

Coleman's story goes on to note Putin's explanation of how the current display of planes, trained soldiers, and airplanes isn't anything other than peaceful:

Everybody loves a parade. That's an order.

Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.

Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.

That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.

In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.

This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."

Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:

Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.

Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."

It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."

Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.

Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.

As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,

Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.

Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:

As I wrote on August 8:

That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:

Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:

Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."

The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:

These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:

Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.

Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.

$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.

Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:

Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.

It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.

How about "large armies of foreign mercenaries"?

Regarding the army of mercenaries I wrote about in "Dreadlock in Baghdad" (September 18), Harry Byrne writes from Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania:

Thanks for reading, Harry, but look, this sounds like some typically liberal claptrap. Anyone can lift a quote from Jefferson. What's the context?

Oh, wait, it's from the Declaration of Independence.

U.S. officials already banned from travel in Baghdad.

Despite Sunday's gun battle in Baghdad in which 20 civilians were killed by Blackwater mercenaries, there are new reports that the Iraqi government may not cancel Blackwater's contract after all.

No surprise there, because Iraq's foundering government seems to have been canceled.

Radio Free Iraq reports that the Iraqi Parliament called off its September 18 session because a majority of its members didn't show up for work. The parent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news service says in today's roundup:

U.S. officials have already been forbidden to travel outside the Green Zone. Iraqi officials, targeted by insurgents, don't want to travel either.

Bring in more mercenaries! That seems to be the message. Tel Aviv-based Dominic Moran of Zurich's International Relations and Security Network (ISN) reports today:

Providing a good roundup of U.S. mercenary work, Moran also notes: