“I want to apologize to you for what happened,” he said, looking earnest and speaking as if he felt pretty badly about it all. “But I can’t. Because I did nothing wrong.”

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.

For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country’s roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

Great. Now nationalized health care is screwed.

[via.]

On June 16, 2008, John Zimmerman, chief financial officer of Tomkins, gave nearly $7,000 in campaign contributions to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Lo and behold, nary two months later Obama’s in Springfield, Missouri, suggesting drivers inflate their tires to save gas (and, by the way, curb CO2 emissions). Coincidence? We think not. Does it come as any surprise that Tomkins owns the Syracuse Gauge Company, which bills itself as manufacturing the “largest selection and variety of tools in the United States for filling tires [and] checking tire pressure”?

Of course the mainstream media ignored this development, leaving it to the blogosphere to bring the big money and big pressure of the PSI lobby to light.

Ah, the nefarious PSI lobby… always thwarting us from whipping “inflation” now.

Bronx-born swimmer Cullen Jones didn’t just help power the U.S. relay swim team to Olympic gold – he just may have shattered the stereotype that blacks can’t swim.

Although Jones isn’t the first African-American swimmer to make the Olympic squad (he’s the third), or the first to win a gold medal (he’s the second), he figured in one of the most exciting races in sports history.

And that thriller will be replayed on Olympic highlight reels for generations to come. “I hope this exposure from the race today, a kid can see this and say, ‘Wow, a black swimmer – and he’s got a gold medal,’ ” Jones, 24, said. “The stigma that black people don’t swim ended today.”

*Update: And models!

There’s something poetic about the news that India’s Tata Motors is buying the Land Rover and Jaguar brands from Ford. The Land Rover was the car that was used to conquer, colonize and maintain british control over India, and now it’s owned by an Indian company. We are truly in the post-colonial era.

Photo: Winston Churchill with a Land Rover.

Political campaign season is upon us and that means one thing: really bad political ads on TV. There are 50,000 public elections every year in the United States. And an estimated $3 billion will be spent on political TV ads alone in 2008. Spot Runner wants to get in on the action, and maybe even raise the quality of the ads a little, by turning its self-serve TV advertising platform over to politicians. Today it is launching a political section of its site, where both national and local political campaigns can create TV ads for as little as $500 and run them in highly targeted cities and even neighborhoods. It has also assembled a high-powered political advisory board that includes former Senator Bill Bradley and political strategists Mike Murphy, Dan Schnur and Bob Shrum.

Spot Runner so far has focused mostly on making it easy for local businesses and national franchises to buy TV ads on both cable and network TV. To keep costs down, the company shoots different ads which can be modified by each customer, and lets them target the ads by neighborhood. The ad selection and media planning is all self-serve and automated over the Internet. Now the company wants to help level the playing field in political campaigns, especially local ones that may not have as much money for TV ads. CEO Nick Grouf tells me:

One reason we started Spot Runner was during the 2004 campaign we found out you can do better targeting using TV than the Internet. The two big barriers were the cost of creating an ad, and challenges around the fundamental media buying and planning that need to occur.

He believes Spot Runner has begun to solve those challenges. To start with, Spot Runner has created 22 generic ad templates that can be further modified, which cover issues ranging from taxes and education to immigration and leadership. Campaigns add video images of the candidate and tweak the script any way they like. Spot Runner will record the voiceovers. And if new footage needs to be shot of the candidate on the campaign trail or working hard in Congress, Spot Runner can supply the camera crew (in January it purchased GlobeShooters, a network of about 1,500 video professionals).

Obviously, some kind of negotiated settlement seems in order. However, by the time the convention rolls around, both candidates may be so damaged–and their supporters so angry–that no reconciliation or compromise will be possible.

At that point, what do the Democrats do? Who can we turn to as a candidate? Whose reputation isn’t poisoned among the Clinton’s party faithful and Obama’s new generation? Who has national campaign experience and a message similar to Obama and Clinton’s positions?

Ah. There we go.

The collision of the lame pun and journalistic-headline-writing-comma-sytle makes for a funny juxtaposition.

Sadly, the actual article opts for a longer, less hilarious headline.

Then there is Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is perfectly filling the role Alan Alda played, Arnold Vinick, the older maverick Republican senator from the West (California in the show). Due to his willingness to buck Republican Party orthodoxy from time to time, Sen. McCain, like Alda’s Vinick has trouble with the right wingers who are accustomed to having much more influence with the GOP nominee.

Kinda. Vinick always struck me as a kind of Hollywood-fantasy version of John McCain: the pro-life senator from Arizona became magically transformed into a pro-choice senator from California. This of course, served the show well in its desire to sneer at religious conservatives, but it also made Vinick’s nomination far less plausible. The most senior Democrat in America right now, Harry Reid, is pro-life, but you’d never see the equivalent heterodoxy at the top of the Republican party.

(The social liberalism really was the only thing keeping Bartlett from being a full-blown neocon, IMO. The guy did order the assassination of another country’s defense minister, for crissakes.)

Downside? Well, it will make it that much harder to find out how much blow you all used last weekend (so maybe that’s an upside, actually?).

John McCain told voters this morning he’s only looking four years into the future, when asked if he has the stamina and health to be President for the next eight years.

“If I said that I was running for eight years, I’m not sure that would be a vote getter,” the 71-year-old Republican senator from Arizona told about 75 people at Pembroke Academy.

Players were yelling something a whole lot nastier than “You’re blind, ump!” at baseball games in the 1890s.

And it’s all there in writing, on a withered 1898 document called “Special Instructions to Players” that’s up for bid by a New Jersey auction house.

“In terms of language,” says the Robert Edward Auction Web site, “it is the most offensive official major league baseball document that we have ever seen.”

In one scorching, asterisk-free passage, the document reads: “Such brutal language as ‘you c- – -sucking son of a bitch!’ ‘You p- – -k-eating bastard!’ ‘You c- – -lapping dog!’ ‘A dog must have f- – -ed your mother when she made you!’ . . . and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players to intimidate umpires and opposing players.”