On the day that Iraq's shaky government forces assumed control of the war that the U.S. government started six years ago, the first day of a heralded auction of Iraq's massive gas and "sweet oil" fields started leaking trouble. The first round of bidding for the giant Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq stalled when the companies balked at the government's offer of a fixed $2 a barrel — not a share of the profits.

Eight of the world's top 10 non-state oil companies jumped in to bid. But not one of them bid for a major gas field in still-violent Diyala province, west of Baghdad.

And adjacent to the country's northern fields, Mosul was in chaos. Judges and lawyers went on strike Monday, protesting abuses by police. Security forces are being attacked and killed every day. A dead policeman is worth $100 and a cell phone, Al Jazeera reports in video and print coverage much more sophisticated than that in any American press outlet. Security forces protect themselves by driving "at very high speed" and are armed with rocket launchers and machine guns.

"Iraqis danced in the streets and set off fireworks Monday in impromptu celebrations of a pivotal moment in their nation's troubled history," the Washington Post overstated in a story that didn't back that up. Yes, those who dared to venture outside were dancing.

The situation's so shaky that even many Iraqis are protesting the U.S.'s mostly symbolic pullout. Indoors and, in some areas, outdoors, citizens and government officials protested the pullout, pointing out that Iraq's own troops aren't capable of maintaining the semblance of order that now exists.

There are still 130,000 U.S. troops in the country, but they've backed off from their visible presence on the country's city streets. By tomorrow, the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, and other cities will be empty of the Americans' hulking vehicles and troops, Iraqi and U.S. officials said. But yesterday, those streets were already mostly deserted by Iraqis too fearful to step outside.

Dick Cheney, known for going where the oil is, no matter the danger to others, was not believed to have been present for the auction.

Climate-change activists are parading in front of the Brandenburg Gate today as German Chancellor Angela Merkel flies off to D.C. for talks with President Barack Obama.

But the climate between Merkel and Obama has already changed. "Obama, Merkel to meet under cloud of disagreement," reads a typical headline in the U.S. press.

More to the point, the German press's love affair with Obama has definitely cooled. Der Spiegel has no qualms about pinning the donkey's tail on Obama, doling out harsh criticism of U.S. economic policies in "German Chancellor Visits the Debt President."

"The president may have changed, but the excesses of American politics have remained, the German mag's Gabor Steingart writes. "Barack Obama and George W. Bush, it has become clear, are more similar than they might seem at first glance."

Yikes.

Obama even has his own Dick Cheney, Steingart contends:

Obama and Merkel disagree not only about how to quell the global economic crisis but also on Germany's role in fighting the Afghan War. Merkel may be grandstanding a little when it comes to her criticism of the U.S.'s trying to spend its way out of the recession; she faces an election this fall and wants to look tough, as the AP and other U.S. outlets note. But she and many other European leaders no doubt are miffed by such episodes as one that Steingart's story points out:

Steingart isn't laughing. He goes on to list what he calls the "Obama administration's five errors." All of them revolve around our spending money we don't have.

Obama may be a smoother talker than any of us could have imagined. The appointment of Roemer, a Democrat in name only, as ambassador to growing superpower India should be shocking to lefties and even moderates. So far, not a peep out of environmentalists about what you would think would be a controversial appointment to one of the world's biggest and most important countries.

Unless they've forgotten the furor in 2004 when the Wall Street Journal revealed the major role the tiny Mercatus Center (largely funded by the oil and gas industry) played in helping George W. Bush dismantle EPA rules and other government regulations on business and industry.

Go back and re-read the WSJ story, "Rule Breaker: In Washington, Tiny Think Tank Wields Big Stick on Regulation":

Now, five years later, Obama's crew House has spun the truth clean out of this, describing Mercatus — the bane of the EPA — this way in the White House's mini-biography of Roemer in the official notice of his appointment:

Mercatus is regularly described by environmentalists as evil. The Clean Air Trust, for example, described Mercatus during the Bush Era as "an increasingly influential, anti-regulatory 'think tank' created by and subsidized by polluter money." That was in 2002, when the Clean Air Trust named former Enron board member Wendy Lee Gramm, the director of the Mercatus "regulatory studies program," as its "Villain of the Month." (Gramm is the wife of fanatical anti-regulator ex-senator Phil Gramm, who played a major role in abolishing the protections of the Glass-Steagall Act.)

Time for your Two Minutes Hate (or, in this case, your Eight Years Hate).

If Cheney's sweating probes of the Bush-Cheney Era, this is a good time to dredge up the Kazakhstan bribery intrigue.

Amid all the bonus talk and other financial news, some people are still wondering why Dick Cheney chose this month to throw acid in Barack Obama's face on CNN.

As always, follow the money.

Yes, Time's Bobby Ghosh has a valid reason for ruminating:

Yes, yes, yes, torture, torture, torture. But maybe we can also look at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), under which several probes of alleged U.S. corporate bribery overseas are proceeding with little publicity. Some of the cases began during the Bush regime; others predate it. It's for sure that the Bush-Cheney people weren't exactly eager to pursue many, if any, of them.

FCPA Blog has a nice little roundup — "Unfinished Business" — of some of the probes (including one in which the government is calling out Avon's business practices in China).

But the one I'm thinking of is the long-delayed U.S. v. Giffen, a bribery case swirling around oil-rich Kazakhstan that I wrote about several years ago because of its possible connection to Cheney and/or other U.S. government officials.

There's a murky Cheney angle regarding Kazakhstan (so murky that we don't know if he has a direct connection to Giffen's alleged wrongdoing).