Archive for August, 2008

Russian President Medvedev stated in state controlled “Vesti News“ today that his nation will follow five principles in international affairs. In short,”multipolarity”, as he names it, in the world is fine, but unipolar decisions–even when issued by such a “powerful and authoritative” country as the US are unacceptable. Medvedev goes on to say that Russia does not seek conflict with any nation, US or Europe—BUT that it is an unconditional truth that Russian citizens living abroad will have their rights enforced.

He states further that Russia will develop positive relations with America “as feasible”.

The Marshall interprets this as “we will take Abkhazia and Moldova, beware in the Baltic States”. Diplomacy only succeeds to the extent of one’s military industrial might multiplied by its willpower [Clauswitz].

Multiple sources point to Iran mine laying in Gulf, military exercises, bellicosity, and determination to be nuclear power at any cost.

A report from London says Western intelligence sources report Iran has engaged in a series of intensive exercises designed to enhance combat readiness for a war in the Gulf. The sources said Teheran has been steadily testing both regular military units as well as those of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Gulf sources say Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has been planting mines in the Gulf. Gulf Arab officials said most of the mines were placed in Iran’s territorial waters they also say Iran is preparing for war.

The U.S. Navy and its Western allies plan to deploy at least one additional strike carrier group in the Gulf and it is expected to arrive by mid-September.

At the same time a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies said Iran continues to supply weapons to Shi’ite militias in Iraq that continue to attack U. S., Iraqi and allied forces there.

First official acts as governor was to sell on eBay a posh gubernatorial jet because it was wasteful.

Known, at times, as “Sarah Barracuda” because of her ferocity on the high school basketball court. As co-captain her senior year, Sarah Palin was a point guard who lead her team to its first state championship.

The nickname resurfaced when as a 28-year-old political novice City Council member she turned on a veteran blocking a bill that would have steered business to his garbage-hauling firm.

The moniker was revived again in 2003, when Alaska’s governor, whom she would later unseat, appointed her to a state oil-and-gas commission. As a brand-new member, she challenged the ethics of the panel’s leader, the chairman of state’s Republican Party, forcing him ultimately to resign.

Since long before she became Alaska’s youngest — and first woman let alone mother of five  – governor 20 months ago, Sarah Louise Heath Palin has been making her mark as an unlikely upstart. Friday, she did it again, accepting Sen. John McCain’s surprise offer to be his VP running mate.

A Saturday Washington Post article describes how Palin rose to the statehouse by challenging the corruption that has become endemic in Alaska, even if it meant taking on the Republican establishment there, including the former governor and the state’s congressional delegation.

Born in Idaho, Palin became an Alaskan as an infant when her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, hauled their young family and their belongings up the Alaskan Highway. They settled eventually in Wasilla, about 45 miles north of Anchorage. Palin’s official biography describes it as a place with a “reputation for junky yards and cranky land-owners who didn’t mind using the serious end of a shotgun to run off trespassers.” Ivan Moore, a veteran political pollster in Anchorage, described Wasilla as “the most fearsomely conservative region of the state.” It is Alaska’s fastest growing city and where Sarah grew up and entered politics.

Her Dad was a science teacher and her mother became a school secretary. The family would go on camping trips to hunt moose, bear and sometimes wild sheep Palin likes to salmon fish in nearby Bristol Bay. She is a lifetime NRA member.

Her father was her track coach, and she played on the softball team, but her real passion was basketball. “She doesn’t like sitting on the sidelines,”says a friend. She was runner-up in Miss Alaska beauty pageant.

As a further example of Palin fitting the McCain maverick model her first official acts as governor was to sell on eBay a posh gubernatorial jet because it was wasteful.

Six more Iranian nuclear reactors are to be built, according to Iranian and Israeli [Haaretz] sources. Iran, with an abundance of oil and other power solutions is building more reactors [peaceful purposes ?] just as the facility at Bushehr will come on line later this year with Russian help.

Iran boasted that its fighters can now strike Israel and return without refueling. This in a week that has seen Iran launch a dummy satellite from a new two stage rocket. Other claims have been made about shutting down the Straight of Hormuz–watch for $300 oil– and an implied ability to hit not only Israel but US bases in the middle east. Except for the extra reactors, none of this is new. Informed sources are betting on WAR. The only dispute is when and by what means.

Ray Charles could see this one coming.

In my last article about women voting for McCain, I said that the candidate was banking on women not finding out his real position on issues such as abortion and birth control. Apparently, he also believes that his choosing a female running mate will help him win him the female vote; that it won’t matter where Governor Sarah Palin falls on women’s issues. Ladies, in short, John McCain thinks you don’t use your brains. I don’t believe for a minute that John McCain will fool the women of this country, and I cannot see Hillary Clinton’s supporters being star struck by his selection.

There’s not much to know about Sarah Palin’s background. Project Vote Smart sums it up on a single sheet. She was elected Governor of Alaska in 2006. Prior to that, she was the part-time Mayor of Wasilla City, Alaska, population 9,000. She holds a degree in Communications/Journalism from the University of Idaho. So, let’s get this straight: John McCain has been spending the better part of a year harping on Barack Obama’s youth and lack of foreign policy experience. Then he goes out and chooses a running mate younger than Obama with absolutely no foreign policy experience and precious little national political experience. (I don’t think a minor in political science counts.) Today John McCain turned 72. What happens if McCain becomes incapacitated during his term and we have to rely on President Palin? Think about it. How would she deal with, say, the two wars? How would she deal with Nouri al-Maliki? Or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? These are legitimate questions, given McCain’s age and his repeated bouts with melanoma, one of the most virulent forms of skin cancer. For the record, he has never fully come clean with his medical records. That issue, of course, just dropped by the wayside, deemed insignificant.

Here’s why John McCain thinks his choice will help him pull the wool over our eyes:

(1)Governor Palin is broadly viewed as a ‘reformer’ who exposed ethics violations in Republican state government. This, my friends, is the old ’straight talk express’ thing again. You know, McCain the Maverick. Now, he supposedly has a female straight talker. Yes, he told the media that he’s been seeking a running mate that can “best help me shake up Washington.” Who is he kidding? John McCain isn’t interested in shaking anything up. He has voted in step with George Bush more than 95% of the time. His plan is to follow through with and expand upon Bush’s eight years of failed policies.
(2)John McCain thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. He sees Governor Palin as a way to tempt disenfranchised Hillary Clinton supporters and pander to the Christian conservatives. In McCain’s warped mind, women are vacuous enough to support a woman simply because she’s a woman. Sarah Palin is an Evangelical Christian, a pro-creationist, an anti-abortionist, and a forced childbirth activist. I could be wrong, but I don’ t think her vision is shared by the majority of American women, let alone Hillary Clinton supporters.

The choice of Sarah Palin is living proof that McCain knows he must have the support of conservative Christians in order to move into his new digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Ralph Reed is positively gushing about Palin. “This is a home run. She is a reform governor who is solidly pro-life and a person of deep Christian faith.” He went on to describe Palin as one of the “bright shining new stars” in the Republican party. The GOP is barely recognizable anymore. It has become a party so tightly entwined with conservative religious ideology that it no longer carries the vision of serving all Americans.

A dose of reality

McCain professes “Country First” on his campaign web site. Let’s face it, people, this wasn’t a selection made with America’s best interest in mind. It may sound like a cliché but this is indeed a woman who is a heartbeat away from the presidency, a self-described “average hockey mom” with not one whit of real-world experience in foreign affairs, terrorism or the armed forces. Yet John McCain has boldly stated that she’s ready to be president. What’s he going to do? Send her to some kind of intensive training course for the first few months?

As recently as one month ago, Governor Palin didn’t have anything positive to say about the position she so willingly accepted today. She said the VP position didn’t seem “productive.” She also confessed that she doesn’t know much about what a vice president does. Although the Los Angeles Times refers to Palin as well-spoken, the convoluted reply she gave when asked about the possibility of being McCain’s running mate puts her right on par with George Bush in command of the English language:

“As for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here for the rest of the U.S., before I can even start addressing that question.”

Huh? I’d say the jury is still way out on how well-spoken she is.

Her whistleblower status is also at risk. Governor Palin is now herself under investigation for abuse of power. She is accused of firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan because he would not succumb to pressure and fire an Alaska state trooper involved in a nasty divorce from Palin’s sister. While she denies the allegations, the legislature has voted to hire an independent investigator to look into the matter. She has remained loyal to Senator Ted Stevens.

We simply can’t hear enough about Palin’s solidly Christian family life. She eloped with her childhood sweetheart. At 44, she’s the mother of five children ranging in age from 18 to 4 months. She’s known to Christian conservatives because of her refusal to have an abortion in spite of the fact that she was carrying a child (the 4 month old) with Down syndrome. Her eldest son is in the service and will be heading to Iraq on, you won’ t believe it, September 11th. In somebody’s mind, hers is the perfect embodiment of the American family unit. She will attempt to lure the female vote by claiming Hillary Clinton’s mantra about cracking the glass ceiling as her own. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, ladies. Governor Palin is no greater a friend to women than is John McCain.

Palin is unwaveringly pro-life and does not support a woman’s right to choose. She is prominent member of Feminists for Life. She wants creationism taught in the classroom and is a forced childbirth activist. She is a woman who has no problem selling out womens’ rights. Does she sound like the type of candidate that the majority of American women would support? I think not. She is undoubtedly a choice designed to solidify support from the Republicans’ Christian conservative base.

So, now the Republicans have their hunk of history, and all I can say is I hope we don’t have to test her in the driver’s seat. McCain’s supposedly ‘bold’ move is less about putting a woman on the ticket than putting a Christian conservative on the ticket. If McCain wanted to shake things up by presenting a powerhouse ticket, he could have chosen Kay Bailey Hutchison or even Olympia Snowe. While even their selection would still not be enough to make me vote for McCain, these are at least women with proven track records and credibility. Their only drawback is that they do not share Sarah Palin’s ideology and extremism and were, therefore, unacceptable to McCain’s Christian base.

Welcome to hypocrisy.com .

Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been mentioned before in this column. In the segment of that opus entitled The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the remark is made that in order to cover the phenomenal cost of an evening at the restaurant, all one has to do is deposit a penny in a savings account before leaving one’s own era. Even at low interest, an unimaginably great amount of money will have been accumulated in the course of several billion years. (Never mind that many planets, including the earth, would have burned up in the interim, complete with their banks. This is comic science fiction, after all.)

This morning I asked a group of friends I was having coffee with what point in time they would choose to visit if they could travel to the past. Mostly they were bewildered by the question, but some thought in terms of going back to an earlier point in their lives to remedy some error that had negative effects. The possibility of going back with a little information about what was going to happen in certain real estate markets was brought up.

Being the student of the Bible that I am, I said one moment in time that I would dearly love to witness is the one related in Mark 7:24-30, in which a Gentile woman from Syrian Phoenicia approaches Jesus to ask him to come and heal her daughter. Jesus answers her in mock-prejudiced terms, telling her it just isn’t right to give the children’s bread to dogs.

This is a bright and spunky lady, though. She picks up on the fact that he doesn’t use the word for “dog” that the Jews usually use for Gentiles, meaning a filthy, mangy scavenger. Rather, he uses the word for a little lap dog, a pet. She says, I’m sure with an ornery glint in her eye, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Jesus obviously loves her answer, and tells her to go home because her daughter is well. I’m convinced that Jesus was doubled over laughing when he told her he was granting her request. That is why I’d like to see that scene as it took place.

Many people, though, would like to go back to certain turning points in history and watch, for example, a great general going through the agony of trying to out-think his adversary, perhaps bringing his knowledge of chess to bear. I would love to see Alexander the Great debating with his trusted second-in-command, Parmenio, before the Battle of Gaugamela, about what to do when King Darius’s chariots charged. One might even speculate that Alexander’s father, Philip, whose name means “lover of horses,” wasn’t named in vain, and that he had told Alexander that horses would not charge into an enclosure surrounded by lances. In any case, what a moment of inspiration it must have been when the idea was put forward of directing those chariots into U-shaped formations in order to stop the horses and chariots and slaughter their occupants. For that matter, I would like to see Alexander’s face as he made the hard decision to return and support Parmenio, who was in trouble, rather than pursue and kill Darius.

Following the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington called it “a damned close-run thing,” and some practical people might well choose to go back to tip the scales on other “damned close-run things,” so that some of the worst horrors of history might have been avoided.

Of course, some physicists have felt time travel into the past must be impossible for the simple reason that, what with the butterfly effect in operation (a butterfly in Beijing today may affect weather conditions in New York City a month from now), any slight change in the events back there would radically change our circumstances today. The example most often given is that of a deranged person’s going back to kill his/her father before he could generate a child. The thing ends in paradox. Those who hold to the many-worlds theory, though, have no such problem; in an event of that sort the world without the patricide simply splits off from the one from which the time traveler departs.

Where some serious hypocrisy might enter the picture, however, is if someone imbued with radically postmodern values might travel back to the point at which the United States Constitution is being generated and make an impassioned speech about how many points in it will be considered embarrassing in what he firmly believes is a more enlightened, relativistic age. It’s something to think about.

“It’s nonsense not to tap a safe domestic source of oil. I think Americans need to hold Congress accountable on this one,” Gov. Palin (R) Alaska

While serving as Mayor of her hometown SARAH PALIN grew frustrated with Alaska’s “good ol’ boy” style of governance — so she did something about it. in 2006 running against and defeating popular former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles by a 5 to 4 margin.

This former beauty queen is no shrinking violet she is a woman who hunted moose with her Dad; is a lifelong NRA member, hunts, fishes, was an aggressive, champion basketball point guard; is pro-life and believed in a strong military and sound energy policy including getting government out of the way.

Palin is Alaska’s first woman chief executive, and at 42-years old its youngest Governor ever. The now 44-year-old mother of five adds a strong conservative presence to the GOP ticket. Palin tells Newsmax that it’s high time Congress allows the development of Alaska’s wealth of oil and gas. She doubts global warming stems from human activity, and she considers herself both a fiscal and social conservative.

Palin told NEWSMAX for its September issue “It’s nonsense not to tap a safe domestic source of oil. I think Americans need to hold Congress accountable on this one.” During her agreement speech to become the first woman ever to be the Republican party’s Vice Presidential slot Friday morning she said she will “take the message of reform to every corner of America.”

What do we not believe about Irans' promise to destroy Israel?

A couple of decades back, Time had an essay on everyone’s inviolable right to be silly.

Some pretty good examples were given, and I recall being impressed with the idea.  Over the years since then I’ve noticed, too, that the tendency is becoming pronounced.  I mean, do we really believe that buying the product being advertised on the TV screen will change our lives from black and white to color?  Does the average golfer really believe that a $3000 set of clubs will improve his game?

For that matter, look at World War II and the events preceding it.  Neville Chamberlain decides to ignore Hitler’s Mein Kampf and brings back a piece of paper in which Der Furor (sic) assures him that he has no intention of implementing Operation Sea Lion.  Then there was that grand tradition of Russian heads of state who believed anything German heads of state told them:

“Don’t worry, Alexandra my love.  Yes, it’s true that we have to hide the girls when Wilhelm is here for a visit, but he’s my cousin!  Wilhelm would never attack my country.  We grew up playing together.”

KABOOM!

So, following the lead of Nicolas, Stalin ignores Mein Kampf and makes a mutual non-aggression pact with Hitler, even though he’s not sure he can really trust him.

KABOOM!

The French, for their part, feel immensely secure behind their formidable, heavily-manned Maginot Line.  (Maginot is French for “imaginary.”)  Picture the scene in Nazi headquarters:

“Well, gee whillikers, Heinz, whatever shall we do about the Maginot Line?”

“Golly, you don’t suppose we could go around it, do you, Fritz?”  Lots of knee-slapping laughter here, along with crude comments with drunken Umlauts on them.

Then there was the Polish cavalry.  You have to give them credit, because they were brave beyond belief, but charging horses into the face of German tanks, after all, fellas.  I’m told it had to be done because normal Polish strategy was inextricably bound up with charging horses.  Still, didn’t it occur to anyone to change that procedure before the Panzers got there?

As the Allies move on east, SHAEF headquarters receives word that the Germans might counterattack.  “Naw,” says the staff, “they’re too weak to bring it off.”

“Uh, say, General, we seem to be looking, you know, at a whole lot of German ghosts from World War I or something, rumbling through these here, you know, impassible forests?  By the way, can ghosts blow our vehicles fifty feet in the air?”

INCOMING!

Battle of the Bulge.  Didn’t anyone in that office remember that a fundamental principle of German warfare is that after you retreat the first thing you do is counterattack?  I mean, get out a copy of Clausewitz, guys.

Then there were silly weapons.  The Japanese sent those balloons over in hopes that they’d ignite all the forests in the northern United States and seriously cripple the country.  Hey, trust me, Tojo, if our lightning-induced forest fires don’t do it, little items from your fireworks warehouses certainly won’t.  Oh, yes; there were those pigeons that were supposed to nest in wooden Japanese houses so their incendiary bombs would set the places afire, and in tests they nearly burned a nearby military base down.  And what is this about B-29s bombing a moving Japanese fleet from several miles up?  It was probably a coincidence that some of the bombs came within a mile or two of the ships.

The raid on Anzio wasn’t all that bright either, and there’s at least speculation that it was doubts about its efficacy that caused the Brits to send Canadian troops in there to be slaughtered wholesale.  That’s pretty hypocritical silliness if you ask me.

But when the radical Muslims say about a hundred times a month that they’re going to destroy Israel and then the United Stat