Around The MOB: Peace Like A River
By Mitch Berg
Jeff Kouba is one of the best writers on the Twin Cities blog circuit. He’s written for not a few blogs, including Truth Vs. The Machine, but Peace Like A River Peace Like A River (“PLAR”) has been his home joint for a long time now.
PLAR was, at one point, the host of an awful lot of really fantastic writing; Kouba is as good as it gets when writing about politics (especially Eastern Europe) and religion.
It seems that Kouba, with a platoon of young kids and a busy job, has scaled back some of his original writing, becoming a bit of a rarity at TvM lately. But rather than letting PLAR go fallow, he’s turned it into…
…one of the better aggregators of online news you’ll find.
A random sample:
United States & the Americas
- Pentagon briefing – Clearly, Iran is — when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan, they continue to be duplicitous at some levels, wishing to engage with the government in others, trying to undermine their authority, their sovereignty; clearly trying to make the lives of our — of the coalition forces that are trying to bring peace and stability to those two countries much more difficult. In some case they — cases, more often in Iraq than in Afghanistan, they have posed a deadly threat to those forces. They clearly continue to pursue a missile program. They have a very large arsenal in that respect.
- DNI – Office of the Director of National Intelligence Fifth Year Anniversary Celebration
- Washington Independent – Philip Mudd, one of the intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was associate executive director of the National Security Branch. Mudd confirmed in an email that he left “about six weeks ago,” but didn’t immediately respond to additional questions about his departure
- AP – A U.S. military jury cleared a Navy SEAL Thursday of failing to prevent the beating of an Iraqi prisoner suspected of masterminding a 2004 attack that killed four American security contractors.
- Al Jazeera – Pro-government protesters in Nicaragua have blockaded the country’s parliament in an effort to prevent opposition politicians from overturning a controversial presidential decree. The supporters of Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s leftist president, took to the streets for a second day on Wednesday following violent protests during which cars were burned and three opposition politicians were lightly injured.
Miami Herald – Paraguay’s leftist president wants to impose military rule in the northern half of the country to help soldiers put an end to attacks by a group of leftist guerrillas. Fernando Lugo is asking Congress to declare a state of emergency in five of Paraguay’s 17 departments.
Hopefully it’s a placeholder until Jeff finds the time to do more of his trademark writing. Either way, it’s a worthwhile stop on your daily trip around the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers.
April 28th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Thanks for the kind words. Indeed, when everything takes their bite out of the hours in the day, and I’m tired, it’s hard to muster the will for something that offers little in the way of material rewards, at the expense of other hobbies, whatever.
But, I am trying to figure out a way to get back to more substantive posting while maintaining the roundups, which do have a following (though not exactly rock star status) in the military, State Dept, Australia DoD, Europe, and elsewhere.
(And I’m disappointed Kermit doesn’t have a crush on me, too.)