opium

Palin Palin all the time, and never a peep of complaint. That's the long and short of the news cycle these past few days, but there are just a few stories on which I'd like to see some follow up. Take the one about Peter W. Galbraith, a former UN ambassador who advocated tirelessly for Kurdish independence through scores of op-ed pieces for the New York Times and other outlets, while never disclosing to readers -- or apparently, to editors -- that he stood to benefit, financially, from Kurdish independence. Now it turns out he had ties to a Norwegian oil company that scored an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan's oil fields -- a stake made possible by independence -- and worth something like $100 million to Galbraith. Or how about the story about Afghanistan, heroin and the CIA. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president, apparently gets regular payments from the CIA and has for much of the past eight years. The story that hung around for a day or two, then poof. It's disappeared. We participated ourselves, so no one's innocent, but think you can leave reporting to fend for itself? You can't.