Monday Mash-Up for July 9, 2007

This Thursday, the New America Foundation is hosting a discussion on the very interesting report from RFE/RL on Sunni insurgent media blogged here earlier.

Meanwhile, Clark Hoyt, the new “public editor” for the New York Times, looked at the Administration’s media strategy of aggregation: everything is Al-Qaeda.

While Al-Qaeda is probably happy with the brand promotion by Washington, America must do a better job of changing its media image. Our office of public diplomacy might consider reading Washington Post’s Susan Kinzie and Ellen Nakashima look at “reputation management” as relabeled public relations that works at a most granular level: person to person. 

In Iraq, the mini-Americas that double as bases are might be confused for suburban malls if you take away the guns according to the Los Angeles Times’ Molly Hennessy-Fiske. She writes about the (too) expansive menus of “fattening fare, from cheese steaks to tacos and Rocky Road ice cream” that is causing hungry soldiers to gain more than 15 pounds on a deployment.

And if the money spent on fattening up our warfighters with unhealthy food, and the lives endangered by transporting all of that crap, isn’t enough, consider IraqSlogger’s post on Colin Powell describing his two and a half hours trying to convince President Bush not to go into Iraq.

Randomly, here are the top 5 Google searches used to find MountainRunner on July 5th, 2007:

cheetah cubs
arab mobile email reports
somalia uranium
ivory coast private military
the worst directors in nollywood

Brief reminder, if you want to read MountainRunner on your Google homepage, get the MountainRunner gadget. Comments on the gadget are welcome.