Morning News Roundup (13 Feb)

• If you haven't heard, the stories are true--Vice President Dick Cheney shot a man this weekend. OK, it was while hunting (WaPo):
  

  The shooting occurred late Saturday afternoon while Cheney was hunting with Harry Whittington, 78, a prominent Austin lawyer, on the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas. Hearing a covey of birds, Cheney shot at one, not realizing that Whittington had startled the quail and that he was in the line of fire.

  Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo has a good post about hunting etiquette, debunking the standard line from the Vice President's office that it was the victim's fault. Also, there was an 18-hour delay in getting this news out, and the initial report came from not the Vice President's office, but from the owner of the ranch where the shooting took place (Editor & Publisher).
  
  This really is the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
  
  
• I really try to pay as little attention to kooky crackpot Ann Coulter, but this really goes beyond the pale. RawStory reports that, as speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she unleashed a few "jokes" that are unfunny to say the least:
  

  "I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'"
  
  "If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?"

• The new Iraqi government is coming together, with current Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari being asked to stay on in that post (WaPo). The story notes, "The decision represents a setback for some Iraqis and U.S. officials who would have preferred a more secular leader."
  
  
• A study of the effects of an attack on Iran (by either the US or Israel) to stifle its alleged nuclear arms program would result in the deaths of thousands of military personnel and civilians as well as general chaos in the region and retributive attacks on the West (Reuters):
  

  An attack could lead to the closure of the Gulf at the Straits of Hormuz and would probably have a substantial impact on oil prices, as well as spurring new attacks by Muslim radicals on Western interests, the report said.
  

• In case you hadn't heard, Cracks insists its readers adhere to a Stalinist line of discipline to a liberal view of the world (David Brooks finally found out--see this tidbit from ThinkProgress), so let's get crackin'!
  
  
• And finally, Iraq by the numbers, via Salon's War Room:
  

  From Juliet Macur's remarkable profile of wounded soliders on the front page of Sunday's New York Times: "Explosions have killed 1,123 American service members in Iraq and have wounded at least 10 times more, often with a devastating combination of injuries -- ruptured organs and severed spines, obliterated limbs and burst eyeballs. Among the more than 16,653 Americans wounded in Iraq are 387 amputees . . . ."

  From a short item inside the Times' business section Sunday: "No matter how one feels about this particular conflict, war always has winners and losers -- on both sides." Some "indisputable winners" so far? Defense contractors. Courtesy of the Times, here are six top defense contractors and the percentages by which their profits have increased since 2004: Boeing (37.4 percent), Lockheed Martin (44.2 percent), General Dynamics (19.1 percent) Northrop Grumman (29.2 percent), Raytheon (108.9 percent), and Halliburton (292.9 percent).