A couple of cool things have come our way today.

First, I just discovered Ben Lando's Iraq Oil Report which has at the top of the blog a story about Hunt Oil coordinating with the US State Department before signing an oil exploration and development agreement with the Kurdistan Regional Government. Big can of worms here -- until Iraq can figure out whether it's a strong nation with weak states or a weak nation with strong states. We know the answer of course, but formalizing deals is where things get rocky.

Next, Scott Horton at Harper's "No Comment" Blog had a delicious treatment of trends in political media that built off of Hedrik Hertzberg's comments on blogs and the MSM in Radar. And thanks very much to Hertzberg for the shout out to The Washington Note.

Third, I just got a galley copy of Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons by Doubleday. It's really brilliant -- and has so much detail for any junkies who need to know about the rise and not yet fallen neoconservative movement. I'm going to do a blurb for it shortly, but I want to say here that this is a great, fascinating book that should be on the must read list of any TWN reader.

-- Steve Clemons