Steven Harper: Just Doing What Junior Would Want

Posted on August 15, 2008 by RagBlog


Canada to evict US deserter
by Nick Kyonka / August 14, 2008

First soldier to head north to avoid Iraq war loses refugee bid, mulls plea to Federal Court

American war resister Jeremy Hinzman has been ordered out of the country after a four-year legal battle to earn a home in Canada.

A U.S. Army deserter, Hinzman was the first post-Vietnam War resister to file for refugee status when he arrived in Canada in January 2004 while fleeing a scheduled deployment to Iraq.

Several bumps in the road later, he received a deportation order yesterday from the Canada Border Services Agency after an immigration officer rejected a pair of his last-ditch attempts to remain in the country.

He and his family have been ordered to leave by Sept. 23.

“I’m tremendously disappointed,” Hinzman said yesterday, apparently fighting back tears following the decision. “(But) life goes on and we’ll make the most of it wherever we end up.”

Friends and family joined Hinzman yesterday morning outside the Mississauga offices of the border services agency where he received the decision.

His wife, Nga Nguyen, cradled the couple’s three-week-old daughter, Meghan, while their 6-year-old son, Liam, smiled and ran around in circles as his father hugged crying supporters.

A native of Rapid City, S.D., Hinzman joined the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in January 2001.

He fled to Canada in 2004, just weeks after learning of his scheduled deployment to Iraq to fight in a war he says is both illegal and immoral.

After his initial refugee application was denied in March 2005, Hinzman launched a series of court appeals, all of which were rejected. A bid to take his case to the Supreme Court was rejected in November 2007.

Yesterday’s decision slammed the door on two of his remaining options to stave off deportation – a pre-removal risk assessment and a humanitarian and compassionate review.

Either could have seen him granted permanent residency had the officer reviewing the case found he would face persecution, torture or otherwise unfair treatment if returned to the U.S.

If returned, he could face a return to his unit or a court martial for desertion – a felony offence that would come with possible jail time.

Despite his uncertain future, though, Hinzman said had no regrets about deserting his unit in the name of a principled stand.

“(Iraq) was an unjust war based on false pretenses,” he said.

“Every soldier who refused to fight has probably saved a lot of lives.”

He said he would now consider whether to appeal the decision, a path taken by fellow resister Corey Glass, whose deportation order is on hold while the Federal Court decides whether to review his case.

Meanwhile, Lee Zaslofsky, of the War Resisters Support Campaign, said his group would continue to fight for Hinzman and the estimated 200 other resisters living in Canada.

“We’re going to be appealing to all Canadians to let the government know that this kind of thing has got to stop,” he said, noting a non-binding opposition bill passed in Parliament earlier this year that called on the government to allow resisters such as Hinzman to stay.

A nationwide poll conducted in June found two-thirds of Canadians would support a decision to allow the resisters to stay.

“(The government) must implement the will of Parliament and the people of Canada,” Zaslofsky said.

© 2008 The Toronto Star

Source / Toronto Star

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Why McCain Would Be a Mediocre President

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

John McCain campaign staff and early model of the “Straight Talk Express.”

‘A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job’
By Rex Nutting

WASHINGTON — In his frivolous Paris and Britney ad, Sen. John McCain has asked the right question: Is Barack Obama ready to lead this country?

Since last January, Sen. Obama’s fitness for the presidency has been the only question that matters in American politics. The pollsters and pundits agree that if Obama can show the voters that he’s up to the job, he’ll win. If not, he won’t.

But that begs another question: Is McCain fit to lead America?

That question hasn’t been asked, nor has it been answered.

The assumption seems to be that McCain’s years of experience in the military and in Congress of course give him the background and tools he’d need in the White House.

As Britney might say, “Duh! For sure he’s qualified!!! He’s Mac!!!”

But is that true? Does McCain have the right stuff?

A careful look at McCain’s biography shows that he isn’t prepared for the job. His resume is much thinner than most people think.

Here are some reasons why McCain would be a mediocre president.

Lack of accomplishments

Like the current occupant of the White House, McCain got his first career breaks from the connections and money of his family, not from hard work.

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, he attended Annapolis where he did poorly.

Nevertheless, he was commissioned as a pilot, where he performed poorly, crashing three planes before he failed to evade a North Vietnamese missile that destroyed his plane. McCain spent more than five years in a prison camp.

After his release, McCain knew his weak military record meant he’d never make admiral, so he turned his sights to a career in politics. With the help of his new wife’s wealth, his new father-in-law’s business connections and some powerful friends had made as a lobbyist for the Navy, he was elected in 1982 to a Congress in a district that he didn’t reside in until the day the seat opened up. A few years later, he succeeded Barry Goldwater as a senator.

McCain hasn’t accomplished much in the Senate. Even his own campaign doesn’t trumpet his successes, probably because the few victories he’s had still rankle Republicans.

His campaign finance law failed to significantly reduce the role of money in politics. He failed to get a big tobacco bill through the Senate. He’s failed to change the way Congress spends money; his bill to give the president a line-item veto was declared unconstitutional, and the system of pork and earmarks continues unabated. He failed to reform the immigration system.

Every senator who runs for president misses votes back in Washington, so it’s no surprise that McCain and all the others who ran in the primaries have missed a lot of votes in the past year. But between the beginning of 2005 and mid-2007, no senator missed more roll-call votes than McCain did, except Tim Johnson, who was recovering from a near-fatal brain aneurysm.

Shallow

McCain says he doesn’t understand the economy. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t understand the workings of Social Security, or the political history of the Middle East. He doesn’t know who our enemies are. He says he wants to reduce global warming, but then proposes ideas that would stimulate — not reduce — demand for fossil fuels.

McCain has done one thing well — self promotion. Instead of working on legislation or boning up on the issues, he’s been on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” more than any other guest. He’s been on the Sunday talk shows more than any other guest in the past 10 years. He’s hosted “Saturday Night Live” and even announced his candidacy in 2007 on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

McCain has not articulated any lofty goals. So far, his campaign theme has mostly been “McCain: He’s None of the Above.”

In the primaries, he campaigned on “I’m not that robotic businessman, I’m not that sanctimonious hick, I’m not that crazy libertarian, I’m not that washed-up actor, I’m not that delusional 9/11 guy.” In the general election, he’s emphasized that he’s not that treasonous dreamer.

No leadership

McCain has frequently taken on near-impossible missions that go against the grain of his party. It’s the basis of his reputation as a maverick. But McCain has never been able to bring more than a handful of Republicans along with him on issues such as campaign finance reform or immigration. Democrats on the Hill have accepted McCain’s help on some issues, but except for a few exceptions (John Kerry and Joe Lieberman), they’ve never warmed to him.

To achieve anything as president, McCain would have to win over two hostile parties: The Democrats and the Republicans.

Living in the Sixties

McCain is still fighting the Vietnam War. But he’s not fighting the real historic war, which taught us the folly of injecting ourselves into a civil war that was none of our business. We learned that, in a world where even peasants have guns, explosives and radios, a determined and popular guerrilla force can defeat a modern army equipped with the mightiest technology if that army has no vital national interest to protect.

Instead, McCain is fighting an imaginary Vietnam War, where a sure victory could have been achieved with just a little more bombing, just a little more “pacification,” just a little more will to win at home. This fantasy clouds McCain’s judgment on foreign policy.

Most of the other high-profile politicians who fought in Vietnam — Colin Powell, Chuck Hegel, John Kerry, and Jim Webb — aren’t stuck in the past, and they don’t view the Iraq War as a chance to get Vietnam right.

No principles

After years of honing a reputation as a guy who’ll say the truth regardless of the political consequences, McCain has crashed the Straight Talk Express. On almost every issue where he took a principled stand against the Republican line — taxes, immigration, oil drilling, the Religious Right — he’s changed his views.

We ought to like politicians who change their mind when the facts change; it shows maturity, judgment and flexibility. But politicians who change their mind to suit the prevailing winds show the opposite.

The bottom line

Successful presidents come from two molds: visionaries, or mechanics. The visionaries — think Reagan or FDR — see what others can’t and say ‘Why not?” to inspire the country. The mechanics — think LBJ or Eisenhower — know the ins and outs of government and are able to harness the power of millions of humans to accomplish great things, or at least keep the wheels from coming off.

McCain fits neither style. He’s neither a dreamer, nor a detail guy. His major accomplishment, in Vietnam and in the Senate, has been merely to survive.

Just surviving doesn’t make you’re a hero, or a decent president. America needs to do more than survive the next four years.

[Rex Nutting is Washington bureau chief of MarketWatch.]

Source / MarketWatch / Wall Street Journal / Posted August 7, 2008

Thanks to Ruth Roberts / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

It Is the World That Junior Has Helped Build

Posted on August 14, 2008 by RagBlog

Vladimir Putin (right) of Russia and George W. Bush arrive at a summit on the Black Sea, April 5, 2008. Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque.

Putin’s war enablers: Bush and Cheney
By Juan Cole

Russia’s escalating war on Georgia reveals the consequences of the Bush administration’s long assault on the international rule of law.

Aug. 14, 2008 The run-up to the current chaos in the Caucasus should look quite familiar: Russia acted unilaterally rather than going through the U.N. Security Council. It used massive force against a small, weak adversary. It called for regime change in a country that had defied Moscow. It championed a separatist movement as a way of asserting dominance in a region it coveted.

Indeed, despite George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s howls of outrage at Russian aggression in Georgia and the disputed province of South Ossetia, the Bush administration set a deep precedent for Moscow’s actions — with its own systematic assault on international law over the past seven years. Now, the administration’s condemnations of Russia ring hollow.

Bush said on Monday, responding to reports that Russia might attack the Georgian capital, “It now appears that an effort may be under way to depose [Georgia’s] duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.” By Wednesday, with more Russian troops on the move and a negotiated cease-fire quickly unraveling, Bush stepped up the rhetoric, announcing a sizable humanitarian-aid mission to Georgia and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region.

While U.S. leaders have tended to back Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, there are two sides to every dispute, and in the ethnically diverse Caucasus it may be more like a hundred sides. Abkhazia and Ossetia are claimed by Georgia, but they have their own distinctive languages, cultures and national aspirations. Both fought for independence in the early 1990s, without success, though neither was Georgia able to assert its full sovereignty over them, accepting Russian mediation and peacekeeping troops.

The separatist leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia now speak of Saakashvili in terms reminiscent of the way separatists in Darfur speak of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Sergei Bagapsh of Abkhazia and Eduard Kokoity of South Ossetia have come out against conducting any further talks with Georgia, calling instead for Saakashvili to be tried for war crimes. Kokoity told Interfax, “There can be no talks with the organizers of genocide.” The Russian press is full of talk of putting Saakashvili on trial for ordering attacks on Ossetian civilians.

All sides have committed massacres and behaved abominably. There are no clean hands involved, notwithstanding the strong support for Georgia visible in the press of most NATO member countries. (Georgia has been jockeying to join NATO, something Moscow stridently opposes.) Still, not everyone in NATO agrees that Saakashvili is a hero. While traveling with the negotiating team of President Nicolas Sarkozy, one French official observed that “Saakashvili was crazy enough to go in the middle of the night and bomb a city” in South Ossetia. The consequence of Russia’s riposte, he said, is “a Georgia attacked, pulverized, through its own fault.”

An emboldened Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sarcastically likened Russia’s actions to Bush’s foreign policy. Pointing to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Putin said, “Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages … And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed 10 Ossetian villages at once, who ran over elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilians alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush officials repeated ad nauseam the mantra that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people. Thus, they helped create a case for unilateral “humanitarian intervention” of the sort Putin says Russia is now pursuing. Washington had failed to get a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing a war on Iraq, and Iraq had not attacked the United States, so no principle of self-defense was at stake. But since all governments (even the United States under Abraham Lincoln) repress separatist movements, often ruthlessly, Bush was turning actions such as Saakashvili’s attack on South Ossetia into a more legitimate cause for an outside power (especially one bordering it) to wage war against Georgia.

Indeed, Putin’s invoking Bush’s Iraq adventure points directly to the way in which Bush has enabled other world powers to act impulsively. With his doctrine of preemptive warfare, Bush single-handedly tore down the architecture of post-World War II international law erected by the founders of the United Nations to ensure that rogue states did not go about launching wars of aggression the way Hitler had. While safeguarding minorities at risk is a praiseworthy goal, the U.N. Charter states that the Security Council must approve a war launched for this purpose or any other, excepting self-defense. No individual nation is authorized to wage aggressive war on a vigilante basis, as Bush did in Iraq or Russia is now doing in the Caucasus.

Eight years ago, the United States would have been in a position to condemn Russia for its unilateral war without necessarily seeming hypocritical. After all, even the Korean War had been sanctioned by the United Nations, and President Dwight Eisenhower had condemned the 1956 tripartite attack on Egypt by Britain, France and Israel for violating the U.N. Charter.

Bush’s recent argument, that a democratically elected government should not be overthrown (no matter what its behavior, apparently), was intended to sidestep comparisons between his own unilateral wars of aggression and ones such as the current Russian intervention. He was implying that his invasion of Iraq toppled a government that lacked the legitimacy enjoyed by Saakashvili’s.

In fact, Bush’s foreign policy includes a long list of actions intended to undermine elected governments.

Whether the United States was actively involved in the attempted coup in 2002 against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, or merely cheered it on, it is clear that Venezuelan popular sovereignty meant nothing to Bush if it resulted in a government unfriendly to and critical of Washington.

An even more egregious example came with the destabilization and overthrow of the Hamas government, which won control of the Palestine Authority in January 2006. Bush insisted on allowing the participation in elections of Hamas, a fundamentalist party with a covert paramilitary that has struck at Israeli targets, including civilians. When the party unexpectedly won, however, Bush refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new government, denying it funds and sympathizing with the Israeli attempt to overthrow it. Israeli security forces kidnapped elected Hamas representatives and cabinet ministers, and harmed civilians by blocking medical aid and food that might go to people via the Hamas government.

In 2007, Bush and the Israelis supported a takeover in the West Bank by forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization, lead by Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Similar attempts were made in Gaza, but they failed, leaving the elected Hamas government in charge of the small territory. Palestinian popular sovereignty, and Hamas’ victory in what were widely judged to have been relatively free and fair elections, were disregarded by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Bush.

Bush and Cheney also repeatedly sided with military dictator Pervez Musharraf against elected civilian politicians in Pakistan. Even when the Pakistani Parliament, elected in open polls last February, initiated impeachment proceedings against Musharraf earlier this week, the Bush administration came out against the idea of Musharraf’s going into exile if convicted, urging that he be allowed to stay “honorably” in Pakistan if he stepped down.

Bush’s exceptionalism, whereby he implicitly maintained that no international laws or institutions would be allowed to constrain U.S. actions taken in the name of national security, grew out of the sole superpower status of the United States after fall of the Soviet Union. A unipolar world is, however, an exceedingly rare circumstance in modern world history, and it was unlikely to last very long. China may soon have the economic and technological clout to go toe to toe with the United States; and Russia, fueled by the energy boom, is recovering from its economic disaster of the 1990s.

The collapse of the Soviet economy produced tremendous misery and downward mobility. Uncertainty made couples unwilling to risk having children. In one of the great demographic reversals in history, the Russian Federation’s population fell by 10 million in the years after 1991. Russian need for U.S. foreign aid and goodwill led Moscow to acquiesce for a time in the expansion of U.S. influence into Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Russia is now reemerging and flexing its muscles. The run-up in the price of oil and gas has filled Moscow’s coffers, since it is one of the great producers of natural gas in the world (prices of natural gas tend to track with those of petroleum). Russia has reasserted its influence in countries such as Uzbekistan, which had briefly licensed a base to U.S. forces but then kicked them out, and in Turkmenistan, which recently agreed to pipe its natural gas through Moscow. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin are increasingly acting like Gulf emirs, flush with petrodollars and assured of political leverage because of their control over energy resources.

In a unipolar world, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war allowed Washington to assert itself without fear of contradiction. The Bush doctrine, however, was never meant to be emulated by others and was therefore implicitly predicated on the notion that all challengers would be weaker than the United States throughout the 21st century. Bush and Cheney are now getting a glimpse of a multipolar world in which other powers can adopt their modus operandi with impunity. Bush’s rhetoric may have sounded like that of President Woodrow Wilson, but his policy has often been to support the overthrow or hobbling of elected governments that he does not like — and that has not gone unnoticed by countries that also count themselves great powers and would not mind following suit.

The problem with international law for a superpower is that it is a constraint on overweening ambition. Its virtue is that it constrains the aggressive ambitions of others. Bush gutted it because he thought the United States would not need it anytime soon. But Russia is now demonstrating that the Bush doctrine can just as easily be the Putin doctrine. And that leaves America less secure in a world of vigilante powers that spout rhetoric about high ideals to justify their unchecked military interventions. It is the world that Bush has helped build.

Source / Salon

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Maureen Dowd on Hillary and the Dem Convention : Yes She Can

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Hillary Clinton campaigning for Barack Obama August 8 in Henderson, Nevada.

‘She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps’
By Maureen Dowd / August 12, 2008

While Obama was spending three hours watching “The Dark Knight” five time zones away, and going to a fund-raiser featuring “Aloha attire” and Hawaiian pupus, Hillary was busy planning her convention.

You can almost hear her mind whirring: Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

Now they’ve made Barry’s convention all about them — their dissatisfaction and revisionism and barely disguised desire to see him fail. Whatever insincere words of support the Clintons muster, their primal scream gets louder: He can’t win! He can’t close the deal! We told you so!

Hillary’s orchestrating a play within the play in Denver. Just as Hamlet used the device to show that his stepfather murdered his father, Hillary will try to show the Democrats they chose the wrong savior.

Her former aide Howard Wolfson fanned the divisive flames Monday on ABC News, arguing that Hillary would have beaten Obama in Iowa and become the nominee if John Edwards’s affair had come out last year — an assertion contradicted by a University of Iowa survey showing that far more Edwards supporters had Obama as their second choice.

Hillary feels no guilt about encouraging her supporters to mess up Obama’s big moment, thus undermining his odds of beating John McCain and improving her odds of being the nominee in 2012.

She’s obviously relishing Hillaryworld’s plans to have multiple rallies in Denver, to take out TV and print ads and to hold up signs in the hall that read “Denounce Nobama’s Coronation.”

In a video of a closed California fund-raiser on July 31 that surfaced on YouTube, Hillary was clearly receptive to having her name put in nomination and a roll-call vote.

She said she thought it would be good for party unity if her gals felt “that their voices are heard.” But that’s disingenuous. Hillary was the one who raised the roll-call idea at the end of May with Democrats, who were urging her to face the math. She said she wanted it for Chelsea, oblivious to how such a vote would dim Obama’s star turn. Ever since she stepped aside in June, she’s been telling people privately that there might have to be “a catharsis” at the convention, signaling she wants a Clinton crescendo.

Bill continues to howl at the moon — and any reporters in the vicinity — about Obama; he’s starting to make King Lear look like Ryan Seacrest.

The way the Clintons see it, there’s nothing wrong with a couple making plans for their future, is there? That’s the American way and, as their pal Mark Penn pointed out, they have American roots while Obama “is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

The Clintons know that a lot of Democrats are muttering that their solipsistic behavior is “disgusting.” But they’re too filled with delicious schadenfreude at the wave of buyer’s remorse that has swept the Democratic Party; many Democrats are questioning whether Obama is fighting back hard enough against McCain, and many are wondering, given his inability to open up a lead in a country fed up with Republicans, if race will be an insurmountable factor.

Some Democrats wish that Obama had told the Clintons to “get in the box” or get lost if they can’t show more loyalty, rather than giving them back-to-back, prime-time speaking gigs at the convention on Tuesday and Wednesday. Al Gore clipped their wings in 2000, triggering their wrath by squeezing both the president and New York Senate candidate into speaking slots the first night and then ushering them out of L.A.

Wednesday will be all Bill. The networks will rerun his churlish comments from Africa about Obama’s readiness to lead and his South Carolina meltdowns. TV will have more interest in a volcanic ex-president than a genteel veep choice.

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women … dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.

Besides the crashing egos and screeching factions working at cross purposes, Joshua Green writes in the magazine, Hillary’s “hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.”

It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

Source / New York Times

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Type your summary here



Type rest of the post here

Source / jeffamandalayla

The Rag Blog


Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment

SPORT : An Elegy for Skip Carey

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Atlanta Braves annuncer Skip Carey kissing a baby. Photo by jeffamandalayla.

‘There will be no more Skip Caray to bring me laughs and great baseball announcing in the summers’
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2008

Back in the late ’70’s I was out every night on the music scene. When I would return home I would customarily turn on the TV to wind down for awhile before retiring. Not much on TV in the wee small hours so I started watching re-runs of Atlanta Braves games.

The team wasn’t much good but I really enjoyed the sharp wit of one of the Braves announcers, Skip Caray. So, night after night I would tune in the game and Skip and have some laughs. This became a habit. He was really good, irreverent and salty but quite knowledgeable. Definitely not your average sports announcer.

Ted Turner’s TV empire eventually grew to the point that it no longer needed to show all the Braves games twice to fill in air time, but it did show them nightly. I got a job which took me to the deep south for 5 years and took up temporary residence near Atlanta. I continued to listen to or watch the team and be entertained by Skip, even attended a few live games at the old stadium. Then the team got to be good, even won a World Series, with Skip and his sidekick Pete “The Professor” Van Weiren calling the shots, no longer from the cellar but from the top of the league. It was a grand time for Turnerville. The networks became first class, the team built a new stadium, winners every year, won their division 14 years in a row. I even wore a Braves cap for a few summers.

I wound up in deep New Mexico, still a Braves fan, but without a TV. Then the internet came along and sure enough, I could listen to the broadcasts through a stream broadcast. What a break! Skip and Pete were still at it and the Braves were a good team and these broadcasts became a regular part of my summer routine. Couple of years ago Skip got sick and missed several weeks. This was a void in my life. At the beginning of this season it was announced that he would no longer accompany the team out of town and no longer appear on TV, just radio for the home games. Last week he died, couple of years younger than me, salty and sharp to the end.

Now I definitely feel that the changes wrought by the passage of time are taking away my favorite people. There will be no more Skip Caray to bring me laughs and great baseball announcing in the summers. I will surely miss him, and suspect that this will be the last year I follow baseball, one of the joys of my life since age 8 or 9. So long, Skip, and thanks for 30 years of your wit and companionship

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Cooter and Barack Obama. Photo courtesy The Onion.

‘Since Cooter’s emergence on the national scene, the Obama campaign has downplayed the brothers’ relationship’
August 14, 2008

BOONEVILLE, KY—Barack Obama’s once-commanding lead in the polls slipped to two points Monday, continuing a month-long slide that many credit to the recent appearance of the Democratic candidate’s heretofore unknown half-brother, Cooter Obama.

Long kept a family secret, the overalls-clad, straw-chewing Kentuckian first entered the public spotlight in July, when he drove his 1982 Ford flatbed pickup through the press corps at an Obama rally in order to inform his brother that he caught the skunk that had been living under his front porch. According to witnesses, Cooter’s skunk proceeded to spray Washington Post political reporter Michael D. Shear in the face.

Cooter Obama attempted to pay for damages to the Capitol lawn with homemade jerky.

“Sorry ’bout that, mister! Some tomater juice’ll take care of the stank,” Cooter said as his mortified younger brother led him off the stage. “Shoot, Barack, you didn’t tell me you was runnin’ for president!”

Since Cooter’s emergence on the national scene, the Obama campaign has downplayed the brothers’ relationship. A statement issued last week by Obama’s top adviser, David Axelrod, claimed that the two lived together only for a brief period in 1981, shortly before Barack left to attend Columbia University and Cooter had to drop out of chicken-killing school because an air conditioner fell on his head.

Nonetheless, political experts said Cooter’s increased visibility in recent weeks has hurt Obama’s polling among urban, upper-middle-class, non-straw-hat-wearing voters. The Obama camp has scrambled to control the damage caused by Cooter’s penchants for loudly practicing his banjo during Obama’s speeches, repeatedly referring to Barack by his childhood nickname, “Ol’ Jelly Legs,” and chasing his troublemaking pig, Mbogo, in the nude in the background of Obama’s CNN interview on the importance of education.

The problem came to a head last week, advisers said, when Cooter arrived unannounced at a $100-a-plate fundraiser, slipped past security, and proffered a jug of moonshine to the high-society donors, claiming it would “straighten their curlies.” In addition, dozens of would-be attendees at a Cedar Rapids, IA town-hall meeting Sunday were turned away at the door by the elder Obama, who was sitting at the entrance in a rocking chair and brandishing a double-barreled shotgun.

“What Sen. Obama’s half-brother meant to communicate was that he was pleased that the candidate’s message of change is fostering vigorous dialogue,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said following the incident. “In no way was his proposal to ‘fill y’all’s backsides with rock salt’ intended to be taken in any other way.”

In the past two weeks, Obama has lost support from such groups as PETA, which withdrew its endorsement when Cooter punched a swan in the face, claiming it was “one of them mean ones”; the Clean Energy Group, which protested Cooter’s recent attempt to fry a squirrel in a flaming 20-gallon barrel of diesel fuel; and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), whom Cooter mistook for an outhouse Monday and urinated on for 35 seconds.

“I thought we would be able to escape controversy by leaving the country for a week and visiting Iraq and Europe,” an unnamed source in the Obama camp told reporters. “Little did we know that Cooter would command just as much attention back home by getting drunk with the Russian ambassador, lighting off fireworks, and crashing Obama’s campaign limo into a creek in the Ozark Mountains.”

Despite the setbacks he has caused, Cooter has secured a small but devoted following, and has occasionally managed to reflect well on the campaign. At a speaking engagement to which Obama arrived two hours late, Cooter kept the crowd’s spirits up by breaking out a washtub string bass and a washboard and holding an impromptu hoedown.

Although his primary focus has been to support his brother, Cooter Obama said he is not without political aspirations of his own.

“Shoot, I’m helpin’ because I love my brother,” Cooter said. “Maybe if he gets elected he can make me Secretary of Moonshine. Course, that don’t mean I ain’t votin’ for the other fella. Ol’ Jelly Legs wants to take my guns away.”

Cooter chases pig on White House lawn. Photo courtesy The Onion.

Source / The Onion

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Homeland Security Hard at Work

Posted on August 14, 2008 by RagBlog


Hack your local subway
by Grant Martin / August 13, 2008

Frequent travelers on any metropolitan subway system know that the two major means for fare tracking and billing are via magnetic strip and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And every nerd and his RPG character know that those systems can be both readable and exploitable.

To see how secure the Boston subway system was, several MIT students decided to run an analysis on the security of the infrastructure; what they found was a little disturbing. By simply wandering into unlocked doors, opening unlocked cabinets and peering around they were able to find keys to the system, get access to network hardware and find and copy employee identification.

On looking into the security of the magnetic and RFID systems, they were able to reverse engineer the code on the magnetic stripes and reconfigure the data to post $653 to a subway card. Similarly, the group analyzed the RFID contents and were able to disassemble the code.

The students point out that numerous transportation systems around the globe use these systems and technology.

Naturally, all of this quite illegal — the students were just illustrating a point to the MBTA that there are security vulnerabilities in the system that can fairly easily be exploited. Hopefully, they and the company that makes subway infrastructures perks up and makes some serious security changes as a result of this reserach.

Check out the full 87 page presentation on the execution hosted at MIT.

Source / Gadling

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Undemocratic and Dangerous to American Women

Posted on August 14, 2008 by RagBlog

I got an e-mail from a friend who said that anyone who tries to convince another person not to practice birth control, or refuses to provide or fill a prescription for a birth control pill, should have to adopt 4 orphans. She figures it would sure turn them around pretty quick, in supporting such a decision. To me, it seems quite impossible to ‘abort’ something that never existed. The egg isn’t aborted; it just is never produced. The sperm goes on its merry way unaffected.

I sent that article to probably 60 people (most were women), and what a pile of mail I had in my in-box – all were stunned, and I truly hope this insane bill isn’t put into law.

This is the one time I hope ‘politics’ and ‘political careers’ that might be on the line, will cause Bush’s attempt to be shot down, because I doubt if there will be very many female voters who’d appreciate having this bill passed, and on top of it, a reversal of Roe versus Wade. If they want to get the women of this country fired up, this will do it.

Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2008

Redefining abortion: Federal officials considering a rule allowing health care workers to refuse to provide contraceptives
Aug. 10, 2008

The Bush administration has consistently opposed providing funding for international birth control programs, but until now has not tried to limit the use of contraceptives inside the United States.

That could change in the president’s final months in office. Health and Human Services officials are considering a draft regulation that would classify most birth control pills, the Plan B emergency contraceptive and intrauterine devices as forms of abortion because they prevent the development of fertilized eggs into fetuses.

The rule, which does not require congressional approval, would allow health care workers who object to abortion on moral or religious grounds to refuse to counsel women on their birth control options or supply contraceptives. It would forbid more than half a million health agencies nationwide that receive federal funds from requiring employees to provide such services. Pharmacists could use the rule as a justification for refusing to fill birth control prescriptions, and insurance companies could cite it as a basis for declining to cover the costs.

An existing regulation allows health care providers with objections to abortion to abstain from providing it to patients. By extending the definition of abortion to cover contraceptives, federal officials are attempting to create by administrative fiat what would fail by a wide margin in Congress.

In fact, the draft rule could void laws in 27 states that require insurance companies to provide birth control coverage for women requesting it. The rule also could counter laws in 14 states requiring that rape victims receive counseling and access to emergency, day-after contraceptives. It would also require federal agencies and states to provide funds for sham family planning clinics that provide women only abstinence counseling.

The enactment of such rules would have an immediate impact in Southeast Texas, where state health officials estimate more than half a million women are in need of affordable family planning services. Rochelle Tafolla, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas Inc., warns that enactment of the regulation would endanger women’s health.

According to Tafolla, “In a time when more and more families are uninsured and feeling the financial strain of a bad economy, it’s pretty incredible that the Bush administration is actually trying to put up roadblocks for women trying to access basic health care.” Planned Parenthood strongly opposes the proposed rule “and will be fighting to preserve women’s access to health care information.”

Planned Parenthood is not alone in its opposition. The American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and a bipartisan group of 112 members of Congress have weighed in against the draft regulation.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has signed a letter of protest written by a group of U.S. senators. (Republican candidate John McCain has not taken a position.)

Health and Human Services officials issued a statement claiming the regulation would not alter existing rules and is simply designed to protect health care workers from discrimination based on their views of certain medical procedures. That ignores the fact that defining some forms of contraception as abortion is a radical departure from the status quo.

As with a spate of administrative regulations undermining environmental enforcement that the administration has pushed as its time in office grows short, this one is a payoff to social conservatives who oppose abortion and contraception. Since polls show that an overwhelming percentage of the American people support birth control, such backdoor tactics are the only way such restrictions could be considered, let alone enacted.

Justifying these draft rules as an anti-discrimination measure would be laughable, if it weren’t so undemocratic and dangerous to American women. If HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt is irresponsible enough to approve the regulation, Congress and the next president should make sure it is short-lived.

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Source / Houston Chronicle

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Oh, Lighten Up Already !!

Posted on August 14, 2008 by RagBlog


Three elderly men are at the doctor for a memory test. The doctor says to the first man, “What is three times three?”

“274,” was his reply.

The doctor says to the second man, “It’s your turn. What is three times three?”

“Tuesday,” replies the second man.

The doctor says to the third man, “Okay, your turn. What’s three times three?”

“Nine,” says the third man. “That’s great!” says the doctor. “How did you get that?”

“Simple,” says the third man. “I subtracted 274 from Tuesday.”

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Sisters, This Is an Election We Can’t Sit Out

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Senator Barack Obama with Oprah Winfrey in Des Moines. Photo by Jason Reed / Reuters.

The visceral, gut-wrenching pain expressed by Clinton’s supporters is real, and at least in my case, has caused me to confront my own response, not just to the challenges of the primary campaign, but to sexism and racism.

We must overcome both racism and sexism and come together to elect Barack Obama
By Rev. Valda Jean Combs / August 13, 2008.

Rev. Combs, a Texas native, is a Methodist minister in Fort Worth.

Near the end of the primary season, some of Sen. Barack Obama’s black supporters circulated an e-mail about boycotting the general election if Obama was not the Democratic nominee.

I knew this would never happen. Black voters are in too much trouble to sit this one out. There’s high unemployment, sub-prime mortgages and a broken public education system to consider. Nonetheless, on a personal level, I knew I would be wounded deeply if Obama did not win.

Could I swallow my anger at what I considered to be racist jabs thrown by Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Could I overcome the pain of being confronted with the unequivocal fact that large numbers of primary voters were not ready for a black nominee?

And what about the mainstream media that gleefully repeated every rumor and nasty innuendo about Obama and his wife? Politics divide. That is a given. I would love to say I could put aside my bitterness and put on my big-girl panties. I hope I could have done it, but we’ll never know. My candidate won.

But we can all still be troubled by public rancor and downright ugliness. I saw it during the primary, but I must admit that I was so tuned in to the first viable African American candidate that I missed much of the sexism. I was so furious with Clinton by the close of the primary contest that I turned the volume down each time she came on TV.

Sound familiar?

Racism’s Deafening Pain

I watch three news networks, including Fox. I read political Internet sites and blogs. I spend lots of time talking politics. However, it was not until Clinton’s supporters began to express their grief and anger that I heard some of the egregious things both said and done. I wonder what made me so hard of hearing?

I’m still working that out. This political race has forced me to try and separate the ways I have experienced sexism and racism. A recent medical experience caused an epiphany.

I had a steroid injection in my back to help manage chronic pain. When I got home, I found that my shoulder hurt. When I called the nurse, she said this was common; that our brains can only process a certain level of pain. That the pain in my back was all my brain could bear, until that pain was relieved.

Is it possible the pain of racism makes it difficult to process someone else’s pain?

The visceral, gut-wrenching pain expressed by Clinton’s supporters is real, and at least in my case, has caused me to confront my own response, not just to the challenges of the primary campaign, but to sexism and racism.

I reject the notion that we should settle for racist or sexist remarks as acceptable political discourse. Each time I hear a talking head tell me about political races that have been nastier and bitterer, I am offended. Why should we accept that the lowest common denominator is the norm? Still, if we only feel the pain when it is our candidate (race, gender, religion . . .) we will never rise above our own stuff, and the promise of a fair and just society cannot be achieved.

Unspoken Agreement Among Women

Reflecting on the primary, I realize there was an unspoken agreement among the women in my circle that we could discuss politics in general, but not which side we were on.

It wasn’t until the primary was over that I knew my own sister supported Sen. Clinton!

Among my friends, particularly white women, we sensed that our unity was too tenuous to support the issues this campaign brings to the surface. As committed as we were, and are, to our respective candidates, we recognized that the work we do together for the benefit of all women is too important to jeopardize.

Clinton sisters, I feel you. I know how it feels to lose. I know how it feels to have a dream deferred. I know how it feels to believe that your time has come, only to have someone else take your place.

In third grade I was bigger and taller than most of my classmates, certainly blacker. I remember standing in line for recess when I heard my teacher call me a “big, dumb nigger.”

On more than one occasion I have walked into a courtroom in rural counties only to have the bailiff yell at me to get behind the rail, apparently unaware that lawyers look like me.

I recount these experiences not because I dwell on them, but because they shaped me.

I could recite a litany of such experiences, but what I hope you understand is that

I know how it feels when your dream gets kicked around.

Paying a Price to Sit Out

But if anger and disappointment cause some women to sit out this election, other women will pay the price.

Think of elderly women whose pension and Social Security checks can’t stretch enough to cover food, medication and rising utility bills. Obama’s plan eliminates income taxes for seniors making less than $50,000 and cuts the cost of prescription drugs by allowing imports. Sen. John McCain’s campaign senior adviser Taylor Griffin says, “Sen. McCain believes this is so important that we do not politicize this debate during an election season.”

Think of youngsters like my 16-year-old daughter and her friends who, with the hubris of youth, fall in and out of love and make poor life choices. Supreme Court justices nominated by McCain will certainly overturn Roe v. Wade.

In my congregation, several young mothers are raising families on their own. Neither they nor their children have health care. McCain voted against reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides crucial coverage to children in many working families that really need it. Obama’s plan ensures medical coverage for these families.

Obama has experienced the pain of growing up in the home of a single mother on food stamps. His Blueprint for American Working Women and Families includes paid sick days for low-income women and flexible work arrangements for working moms.

Perhaps the outcome of this election will not change your life in any meaningful way.

Perhaps you are financially stable and can’t see how this election could impact your life. Maybe there’s no threat that your job could go overseas, or the value of your home could plummet. Could be your daughter or son will never need to rely on a Supreme Court ruling for life or liberty. If that is the case, I hope you know how blessed you are.

My prayer is that you will consider the rest of us. The women and girls who suffer the slings and arrows of this economy and who flinch each time they see that the price of a gallon of milk has increased since the last trip to the grocery store.

Please come home for our sake. We need you.

Source / Women’s eNews

Thanks to Dorindo Moreno / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Puppet Masters Behind Georgia President Saakashvili

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Georgia president Mikhail Saakashvili.

‘Saakashvili was deliberately placed in power in one of the most sophisticated US regime change operations’
By F. William Engdahl / August 12, 2008

The controversy over the Georgian surprise military attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia on 8.8.08 makes a closer look at the controversial Georgian President and his puppet masters important. An examination shows 41 year old Mikhail Saakashvili to be a ruthless and corrupt totalitarian who is tied to not only the US NATO establishment, but also to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The famous ‘Rose Revolution of November 2003 that forced the ageing Edouard Shevardnadze from power and swept the then 36 year old US university graduate into power was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community.

Mihkail Saakashvili was deliberately placed in power in one of the most sophisticated US regime change operations, using ostensibly private NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) to create an atmosphere of popular protest against the existing regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edouard Shevardnadze, who was no longer useful to Washington when he began to make a deal with Moscow over energy pipelines and privatizations.

Saakashvili was brought to power in a US-engineered coup run on the ground by US-funded NGO’s, in an application of a new method of US destabilization of regimes it considered hostile to its foreign policy agenda. The November 24 2003 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of Shevardnadze’s regime to the operations of “a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western foundations.” These NGOs, said the Journal, had “spawned a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms” who were instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.

Coup by NGO

But there is more. The NGOs were coordinated by the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, who had just arrived in Tbilisi fresh from success in orchestrating the CIA-backed toppling of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, using the same NGOs. Miles, who is believed to be an undercover intelligence specialist, supervised the Saakashvili coup.

It involved US billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Georgia Foundation. It involved the Washington-based Freedom House whose chairman was former CIA chief James Woolsey. It involved generous financing from the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s to “do privately what the CIA used to do,” namely coups against regimes the US Government finds unfriendly.

George Soros’ foundations have been forced to leave numerous eastern European countries including Russia as well as China after the 1989 student Tiananmen Square uprising. Soros is also the financier together with the US State Department of the Human Rights Watch, a US- based and run propaganda arm of the entire NGO apparatus of regime coups such as Georgia and Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. Some analysts believe Soros is a high-level operative of the US State Department or intelligence services using his private foundations as cover.

The US State Department funded the Georgia Liberty Institute headed by Saakashvili, US approved candidate to succeed the no-longer cooperative Shevardnadze. The Liberty Institute in turn created “Kmara!” which translates “Enough!” According to a BBC report at the time, Kmara! Was organized in spring of 2003 when Saakashvili along with hand-picked Georgia student activists were paid by the Soros Foundation to go to Belgrade to learn from the US-financed Otpor activists that toppled Milosevic. They were trained in Gene Sharp’s “non-violence as a method of warfare” by the Belgrade Center for Nonviolent Resistance.

Saakashvili as mafioso President

Once he was in place in January 2004 as Georgia’s new President, Saakashvili proceeded to pack the regime with his cronies and kinsmen. The death of Zurab Zhvania, his prime minister in February, 2005, remains a mystery. The official version-poisoning by faulty gas heater-was adopted by American FBI investigators within two weeks of the killing. That has never seemed credible to those familiar with Georgia’s gangland slayings, crime, and other manifestations of social decay. Zhvania’s death was followed closely by a functionary of the Premier’s apparat, Georgi Khelashvili, who allegedly shot himself the day after his chief’s demise. The head of Zhvania’s research staff was later found dead as well.

Figures allied with Saakashvili reportedly had a hand in the premier’s death. Russian journalist Marina Perevozkina quoted Gia Khurashvili, a Georgian economist. Prior to the fatal incident, Mr. Khurashvili had published an article in Resonans newspaper opposing the privatization and sale of Georgia’s main gas pipeline. Ten days before the prime minister’s body was found, Khurashvili was attacked and his editor-in-chief-citing pressure from ‘security service’ figures he refused to name-issued him a warning.

The late premier’s position on the pipeline issue was believed the direct reason for the murder of Zhvania. Zhvania’s brother, Georgi, also told Perevozkina that not long before Zhvania’s death he received a warning that someone was preparing to kill his brother. Saakashvili was reportedly livid when the US State Department invited Zhvania to Washington to win a Freedom Medal from the US Government’s National Democratic Institute. Saakashvili tolerates no rivals for power it seems.

Saakashvili, who cleverly marketed himself as “anti-corruption,” appointed several of his family members to lucrative posts in government, giving one of his brothers a position as chief adviser on domestic issues to the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline project, backed by British Petroleum and other oil multinationals.

Since coming to power in 2004 with US aid, Saakashvili has led a policy of mass-scale arrests, imprisonment, torture and deepened corruption. Saakashvili has presided over the creation of a de facto one-party state, with a dummy opposition occupying a tiny portion of seats in the parliament, and this public servant is building a Ceaucescu-style palace for himself on the outskirts of Tbilisi. According to the magazine, Civil Georgia (Mar. 22, 2004) until 2005, the salaries of Saakashvili and many of his ministers were reportedly paid by the NGO network of New York-based currency speculator Soros- along with the United Nations Development Program.

Israel US military train Georgian military

The current military assault on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in violation of Saakashvili’s pledge to seek a diplomatic not military solution to the territorial disputes, is backed by US and Israeli military “advisers.” Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that on August 10, Georgian Minister of Reintegration, Temur Yakobshvili, “praised the Israel Defense Forces for its role in training Georgian troops and said Israel should be proud of its military might, in an interview with Army Radio. ‘Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers,’ Yakobashvili told Army Radio in Hebrew, referring to a private Israeli group Georgia had hired.”

One of the targets of Russian bombs near Tbilisi was, according to IsraelNN.com, “a Georgian military plant in which Israeli experts are upgrading jet fighters for the Georgian military Russian fighter jets bombed runways inside the plant, located near Tbilisi, where Israeli security firm Elbit is in charge of upgrading Georgian SU-25 jets.”

Israeli Foreign Minister and candidate to succeed ousted Israeli Prime Minister, Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, proclaimed on August 10 that “Israel recognizes Georgia’s territorial integrity,” code for saying it backs Georgia’s attempt to take South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The reported 1,000 Israeli military advisers in Georgia were not alone. On July 15, the Reuters news wire carried the following report: “VAZIANI, Georgia – One thousand U.S. troops began a military training exercise called “Immediate Response 2008,” in Georgia on Tuesday against a backdrop of growing friction between Georgia and neighboring Russia. The two-week exercise was taking place at the Vaziani military base near the capital Tbilisi, which was a Russian air force base until Russian forces withdrew at the start of this decade under a European arms reduction agreement… Georgia has a 2,000-strong contingent supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and Washington provides training and equipment to the Georgian military. The United States is an ally of Georgia and has irritated Russia by backing Tbilisi’s bid to join the NATO military alliance… “The main purpose of these exercises is to increase the cooperation and partnership between U.S. and Georgian forces,” Brig. Gen. William B. Garrett, commander of the U.S. military’s Southern European Task Force, told reporters.”

With Russia openly backing and training the indigenous military in South Ossetia and Abkhazia to maintain Russian presence in the region, especially since the US-backed pro-NATO Saakashvili regime took power in 2004, the Caucasus is rapidly coming to resemble Spain in the Civil War from 1936-1939 where the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and others poured money and weapons and volunteers into Spain in a devastating war that was a precursor to the Second World War.

In a curious footnote to the actual launch of military fighting on the opening day of the Olympics when Putin, George W. Bush and many world leaders were in Beijing far away, is a report in IsraelNN.com by Gl Ronen, stating that “The Georgian move against South Ossetia was motivated by political considerations having to do with Israel and Iran, according to Nfc. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili decided to assert control over the breakaway region in order to force Israel to reconsider its decision to cut back its support for Georgia’s military.”

Ronen added, “Russian and Georgian media reported several days ago that Israel decided to stop its support for Georgia after Moscow made it clear to Jerusalem and Washington that Russia would respond to continued aid for Georgia by selling advanced anti-aircraft systems to Syria and Iran.” Israel plans to get oil and gas from the Baku- Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from the Caspian.

Although as of this writing Russian President Medvedev has announced Russia is halting its military response against Georgian targets, the situation is anything but stable. The insistence of Washington in bringing Georgia into its geopolitical sphere and backing an unstable regime around Mikhail Saakashvili may well have been the straw which broke the Russian camel’s patience if not his back.

Whether oil pipeline disputes or Russian challenges to Israel are the proximate trigger for Saakashvili’s dangerous game, it is clear that the volatile Georgian and his puppet masters may have entered a game where no one will be able to control the outcome.

[F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Associate and is author of
A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation www.globalresearch.ca. He may be reached through his website.]

Source / rense.com

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments