Palin Palin all the time, and never a peep of complaint. That's the long and short of the news cycle these past few day 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 United States ambassador who advocated tirelessly for Kurdish independence. Galbraith wrote 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. That's eyebrow-raising stuff. For your other eyebrow, how about the story about Afghanistan, heroin and the CIA. Is it Vietnam redux? Just maybe. 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. According to current and former American officials, the CIA pays Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitaries and stationing special forces. The hitch -- Karzai's long accused of being one of the country's chief narcotics dealers and Afghan opium sales are through the roof. If it sounds familiar, it should -- while the CIA operated in Vietnam, CIA assets controlled the world's heroin trade. Now it's Afghanistan. The story that hung around for a day or two, then poof. It's disappeared. Leave your news to the cable pundit shows and Palin's an easy, constant diet. We participated ourselves, so no one's innocent, but think you can leave reporting to fend for itself? You can't. This week it's Palin, last week it was Murdoch. Sitting for a television interview with Sky News Australia, he agreed with the claim made by Glenn Beck that President Obama (aka "this guy") was a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." That's just out there, too.... But now back to Palin's book. The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

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