Sensing Weakness Putin Acts; Timid Recoil; U. S. Faces Threat, and Sides Are Being Picked

On a day when Russia is threatening a harsh response, beyond the diplomatic, to the placement of U. S. anti-missile radar and missiles Paul M. Weyrich Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation blames, if obliquely, cold warriors including George H. W. Bush for the wreckage in Georgia. His thesis is Russia should have been invited into NATO after the former USSR collapse and that would have prevented such aggression.

 As unlikely as such deterrence seems; Weyrich’s contention is that had his advise and that of Edward (Ed) Lozansky, president of the American University, in Moscow, William S. (Bill) Lind, and Russian Parliamentarian Arkady Murashev been followed Russia’s paranoia would have been satisfied and such border wars avoided. Weyrich says that Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected president of Russia said he was open to the idea. That maybe true but the conditions mot think including NATO members would be onerous.

President George H. W. Bush’s advisers were absolutely against this idea. If he had had the foresight to disregard their counsel and push for our idea how different history very probably would be today.

Weyrich recalls visiting with Bush in the Oval Office after Dr. Robert (Bob) Krieble and I returned from Moscow, where we had found that Mikhail Gorbachev, the political rage at the time over here, was not popular in Russia. Yeltsin was much more popular. He says he told Bush if Gorbachev were replaced, his replacement could be someone more to our liking but H. W. Bush said he feared a replacement would be a Stalinist.

At that time Russia was in turmoil. It was broke. The old Soviet system was struggling to somehow stay relevant; Russia had been exposed as a paper tiger unprepared for conventional conflict but armed to the nuclear teeth, and in any case hindsight is while precise-moot. Plus former Soviet satellites had turned to the West as savior and barely scabbed over from decades of Soviet brutality and repression, and were loath to let the recently caged Bear loose into their bailiwicks.

“Is it now impossible for us to start over? Must Russia be our enemy? If it were, would we be prepared to fight another war? I don’t have the answers but it seems to me we must begin to think outside the box. Surely we must have new advisers with new thinking. The alternative is to risk sinking into the abyss of a new war with Russia. Do we need this? “asks Weyrich. Answering ,”No.”

Unfortunately Weyrich skips the key point that the U. S. and its allies need not be Russia’s enemy for it to be ours. So much so that I detect a surging optimism on the extreme left that it maybe time to reconnect with Russian cash to resurrect the American Progressive Party aka., Communist Party USA, or likely by another name and a willingness in some dachas outside Moscow to try it because they have the cash to do it.

Howard “The Scream” Dean Gnaws His Foot Off At The Ankle.

Inexplicably Democratic Party Committee chairman Howard “The Scream” Dean called the Republican Party the “white party” during a speech on Friday stunning even Democrat Party loyalist igniting a firestorm of protest from both the left and right.

The first woman to be nominated for Vice President Geraldine Ferraro aid on Fox News that her only explanation is that maybe Dean was trying to be funny. Perhaps but his humor is as funny as a rubber crutch and only entertains who think watching cripples crumble to the pavement would think so.

Most others think Dean exposed himself pulling his pants down on what is become the core issue of the November Presidential election.

Dean has a habit of periodically playing the buffoon - all one needs do is wait for Howie to insert his size 12s squarely into his mouth, and now his reputation can remain intact.

Brazil vs. Nigeria in the final game of group play at Workers’ Stadium in Beijing, there was a spectacular goal that I just happened to get on my camera. Check it out:

UPDATE: Something about copyright infringement.

Maybe it’s the crowd — ours was announced at 51,112 — or maybe it’s because we happened to catch two good games with seven goals scored between them, but the experience of soccer at a live venue really is different from watching it on TV. I enjoyed the heck out of it, for tickets that cost 150 kuai each (not expensive at all). (Actually, Zhang Wei bought them for myself and Mingyu, so they were free.)

There were fans, excitement, marchers and Fuwas… what else could one want?

Later on the concourse I saw a poor, defenseless white girl holding a Visa sign get swarmed by hordes of picture seekers, most of them Chinese. The first person who did it probably truly wanted a picture of a foreigner, and this was an easy target. The second one was thinking the same thing. Thirty minutes later, well… let’s just say people were doing it to amuse themselves. The expression on her face said “Help me.”

I started taking video because this was much too hilarious to go undocumented:

The late game saw Sweden beat Canada 2-1. There’s not much to report — a couple really nice goals — except the pre-game offered something… different.

Because we all like cheerleaders, here’s the Beijing cheerleading squad dancing to Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop the Music” and a tune from High School Musical, “We’re All in This Together.” Time (surprisingly) has a better video for you here.

A fun night all-around.

The shiny new basketball arena is a glittering achievement, more so when you step inside and realize they’ve imported everything you know about the West’s basketball product — including dancers and stunt teams — to Beijing. I elaborate in ESPN The Blog.

I was there for two sets of doubleheaders: Spain-China and South Korea-Brazil in the afternoon with Wang Kexue (which means “science”), U.S.-Czech Republic and Russia-Latvia for the nightcap with Zhang Peng.

Two thoughts that weren’t used in my ESPN entry:

1. Have you seen Brazil’s uniform? Let’s just say that when that team took on Australia a couple days later, it was a sight that could’ve made fashion designers blind.

2. For all the talk of this being a “sold out” Olympics, there were lots of empty seats for the opening of this basketball tournament. Granted, it’s women’s basketball, but still — I was surprised to see so many seats, especially for the Spain-China game, which turned out to be a thriller. In fact, three of our games were close — Brazil-South Korea went into overtime, and Latvia-Russia had several momentum shifts — and the other game, U.S.-Czech, was great for the way the Americans dominated.

Here was our view in the evening from our box seats:

It was confirmed today that Cindy Sheehan has delivered more than the required 10,000 signatures to ensure her place on the ballot this November in California’s 8^th District as an Independent challenger to incumbent Democrat Nancy Pelosi. This is just the sixth time in California history that this has happened.

Sheehan has garnered nationwide support for her candidacy as people have come to realize that a successful challenge to Pelosi is the best chance for drastic policy change in Washington. Under Pelosi’s ineffectual leadership, Congress’ approval rating has free fallen to a historical low of just 9%. Sheehan has been an outspoken critic of Pelosi, citing her failure to end the Iraq war and advance articles of impeachment against George W. Bush as reason for her challenge.

Most recently, she was removed from the ‘non-impeachment’ hearings for standing up and calling it exactly what it was: A toothless sham.

As I try to organize my thoughts on who might be the subject of this missive, I am debating whether to call this Part 1 for unfortunately obvious reasons. I make up titles and then try to create appropriate text.

Is the CIA and the Bush Administration appropriate for this title? Yes, if Ron Suskind is accurate in his new book The Way of the World, which accuses the

White House of ordering the CIA to forge a letter to tie together Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Fire them, impeach them, jail them, do anything possible to them short of torture…..Enough on that for now, this writer hopes for more information to come to light quickly to snuff these charges out or confirm them, in which case it will be brought front and center to not only US but to world politics.

Could I be talking about Freddie Mac CEO Richard F. Syron who ignored clear and accurate warnings in 2004 that Freddie Mac was buying loans that would not only harm Freddie Mac, but would also “harm the country”?

Yes and decision makers and risk managers at Fannie Mae, most Wall Street firms, most large Banks, rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor, and insurers like MBIA and AMBAC and especially Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve, someone I have historically admired. I must also mention that some, not all, individual loan salesmen, most often grouped into the mortgage broker category, who indeed were guilty of too many individual cases of inappropriate lending that harmed individuals. What must be understood is that mortgage brokers are actually the smallest part of this homeland security risk but get the most negative press.

They are an easier target for the MSM which likes to film individual victims of predatory and inappropriate lending but do not seem to understand or be able to explain the complexities of our important housing finance system requiring the services and judgment and capital of the firms I named above. In partial defense of the MSM, most of us know what a mortgage broker does but have no clue what part of the complex delivery system those other firms play.

So my point is, there are real culprits who have harmed national security because they are higher up in the chain of shame and whose combined actions effectively conspired to truly harm the economic security of the United States. Economic security is a necessary precursor to military and energy security.

This calamity began when our internationally admired housing industry lost it’s previous boring, sometimes overly cautious rules based rationality and resorted to an uncontrolled more computer and finance driven growth strategy that had it’s origins with Countrywide Mortgage in the early 1990s. By then the US started to leave behind its history of narrow market interest ranges and had endured about a dozen years of interest rate roller coasters rides with short term rates as high as 21% and mortgage rates as high as 18% and everywhere in between. During these boom and bust mortgage refinancing cycles in the industry, computers and clever finance strategies were created while legitimate housing demand fueled home price increases in many parts of the country.

During the late 1990s and into 2002 or so interest rates had been low for so long, and most homeowners had refinanced their mortgage, some many times, and rates remained historically low, and the industry was once again massively overstaffed. That is when the “advances,” begun in the last decade, kicked in to keep this beast fed, by in essence creating buyers/borrowers out of those who would have been better off remaining renters, and by allowing owners to buy and finance a bigger house than they could afford, and encouraging owners to take cash out of their artificially increased equity, due directly to the overbuying caused directly by the fog a mirror loan underwriting Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and most Wall Street firms and most large Banks facilitated and others facilitated. That game is more than over.

This today from the e-Daily Shirmeyer Rate Market Report, an interest rate strategy service for mortgage originators:

“The pendulum has swung 180 degrees on risk in the past year. For five years the greed of investors and Wall Street took risk and flushed it down the drain, and totally ruined the mortgage business. Now, in the massive reaction the pendulum has moved way too far to the right (pun intended), and investors and the agencies are trying to remove all risk with fee charges and credit scoring that is too tight. I still have a difficult time with what The Street foisted on the public and investors—but investors deserved what they got being too greedy and buying sub primes, Alt A’s, 80/20’s, etc, without having much of a clue as to what they were getting. Rating agencies also had no clue. Under it all there was the universal assumption that home values would continue to increase 15% to 20% a year ad infinitum. How dumb is that?”

Our ugly duck energy approach has a bag over its head as exhibited when Nancy (Queen Nancy) edicts to Politico that she “is trying to save the planet”. Repeat “trying to save the planet”.

How can she be so politically blinded to the consequences of our disregard for talking care and providing for our own energy needs rather than foisting it on others to meet our energy needs. Does she live in a cave with a bag over her head too? Please take time to read this article in it’s entirely, for we are on a path to destroy the earth by not drilling for oil and it is past time for the large percentage of thinking and concerned citizens to be heard loudly, firmly and respectfully.

Pelosi: Save the Planet, Let someone Else Drill

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, August 1, 2008; Page A17 Washington Post

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won’t even allow it to come to a vote. With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote. Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because, as she explained to Politico: “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.”

A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium’s effects on the planet? Consider: 25 years ago, nearly 60 percent of U.S. petroleum was produced domestically. Today it’s 25 percent. From its peak in 1970, U.S. production has declined a staggering 47 percent. The world consumes 86 million barrels a day, the United States, roughly 20 million. We need the stuff to run our cars and planes and economy. Where does it come from?

Places such as Nigeria, where chronic corruption, environmental neglect and the resulting unrest and instability lead to pipeline explosions, oil spills and illegal siphoning by the poverty-stricken population — which leads to more spills and explosions. Just this week, two Royal Dutch Shell pipelines had to be shut down because bombings by local militants were causing leaks into the ground.

Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oilrigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill.

The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling. Today, directional drilling — essentially drilling down, then sideways — allows access to oil that in 1970 would have required a surface footprint more than three times as large. Additionally, the United States has one of the most extensive and least corrupt regulatory systems on the planet.

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi’s no-drilling willfulness is negative. Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world — thereby increasing net planetary damage.

Democrats want no oil from the American OCS or ANWR. But of course they do want more oil. From OPEC. From where Americans don’t vote. From places Democratic legislators can’t see. On May 13 Sen. Chuck Schumer — deeply committed to saving just those pieces of the planet that might have huge reserves of American oil — demanded that the Saudis increase production by a million barrels a day. It doesn’t occur to him that by eschewing the slightest disturbance of the mating habits of the Arctic caribou, he is calling for the further exploitation of the pristine deserts of Arabia. In the name of the planet, mind you.

The other panacea, yesterday’s rage, is biofuels: We can’t drill our way out of the crisis, it seems, but we can greenly grow our way out. By now, however, it is blindingly obvious even to Democrats that biofuels are a devastating force for environmental degradation. It has led to the rape of “lungs of the world” rain forests in Indonesia and Brazil as huge tracts have been destroyed to make room for palm oil and sugar plantations.

Here in the United States, one out of every three ears of corn is stuffed into a gas tank (by way of ethanol), causing not just food shortages abroad and high prices at home but intensive increases in farming, with all of the attendant environmental problems (soil erosion, insecticide pollution, water consumption, etc.).

This to prevent drilling on an area in the Arctic one-sixth the size of Dulles Airport that leaves undisturbed a refuge one-third the size of Britain.

There are a dizzying number of economic and national security arguments for drilling at home: a $700 billion oil balance-of-payments deficit, a gas tax (equivalent) levied on the paychecks of American workers and poured into the treasuries of enemy and terror-supporting regimes, growing dependence on unstable states of the Persian Gulf and Caspian basin. Pelosi and the Democrats stand athwart, shouting: We don’t care. We come to save the planet!

They seem blissfully unaware that the argument for their drill-there-not-here policy collapses on its own environmental terms.

The Huffington Post writes about why the MSM is not reporting the Edwards “story.”

Simple, THEY DON’T HAVE TOO YET.

Because, you, the blogging community, are playing the part of the Minor League Media (MLM), aka the reporters of the ‘undernews,” will flesh out these stories, so to speak. You will do much of the dirty work cleaning up the dirty National Inquirer, and “find all the links that you are better at” paraphrasing Jonathan Alter, aka MSM man, pre renaissance.

Great article at the Huffington Post right HERE.

Two things seem obvious. One, there are certainly hypocrites at work here, even though I do not know who he, she, it or they may be, and two, an overpaid consultant could not have come close to creating the MSM Motto of “Not Till We Have Too.”.

According to Sarah Lai Stirland, blogging on wired.com the great Wiki is struggling with the issue too.

It’s like an exclusive mutual admiration society between John McCain and the mainstream media. This weeks’ stream-of-unconsciousness entry comes from a McCain interview on CNN last Friday where he stated that, if elected, Osama bin Forgotten may face Nuremberg-like justice. McCain doesn’t think he’ll have a hard time gaining worldwide support for that. I think he’s drinking some kind of government-issued Kool-Aid. The Bush administration has squandered so much good will since 9-11 that I find worldwide support for anything we do as a nation difficult to believe. Does anyone even talk about bin Laden anymore?

Of course, Wolf Blitzer failed to remind Senator McCain that the United States has to find bin Laden and arrest him first. That’s something we’ve been unable to do for seven years. At this point, I think you’d have to question whether our government even wants to find bin Laden. For the record, the bin Laden topic was the headline used to grab readers, but it actually occupied only a couple of paragraphs before the subject was changed to moving the location of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and McCain’s well-known position on winning (at all costs, of course) the Iraq war.

Mr. Blitzer failed to ask McCain the hard questions after the topic of bin Laden was raised. Are there really still ongoing efforts to find him? Has there been any progress in locating bin Laden? Is there any kind of strategy being employed? Does the military have any idea where he might be? What is your plan, Senator McCain, to find bin Laden? Here’s a thought: The present administration has no plan and neither does McCain. Failure to pursue this issue has again confirmed that the mainstream media is too wrapped up building McCain’s justice-crusading, straight-talk express image. Nobody wants to find bin Laden because there are too many questions surrounding and too many holes in the government’s official 9-11 story.

In another wartime sham, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan telling the people it was being done to bring bin Laden to justice. Nobody questioned George Bush on that one (yes, not even me). There was an overflow of support for Bush’s intention to apprehend bin Laden from all political persuasions both from within the United States and from around the globe. It was a golden opportunity. Yet, a mere six months after the terrorist attacks when he was asked if any progress was being made, George W. Bush flippantly stated to the media that he doesn’t spend much time thinking about bin Laden because he’s not that important. I think putting this in perspective is critical: Within six months of the 9-11 attacks, the most deadly terrorist event in our history and the only one that has ever happened here, Osama bin Laden went from being Public Enemy No. 1 (you will recall Bush vowing to get him dead or alive) to being “not that important.” That’s when I woke up from my shock-induced patriotic trance and started seeing the Bush administration for what it is.

Nearly eight years later, many (including myself) mistrust anyone who wants to continue Bush’s ill-advised policies and McCain has put himself squarely in that camp. It is apparent that there is a mainstream media blackout on reality. The conversation about bin Laden was absurd. Even more absurd is that a supposedly seasoned journalist like Wolf Blitzer would just let it slide by. It is difficult to take McCain seriously since he offered nothing more than a suggestion for prosecuting bin Laden and absolutely no plan for apprehending him. You can’t have one without the other.

I’ve recently been accused of speaking with venom about certain issues. I freely admit to that. This is, after all, America and every citizen is allowed that under the Constitution regardless of political affiliation. I have a ‘Question Authority’ bumper sticker on my car. I’ve tried to find the origin of the phrase, but can’t seem to pin it down. Some attribute it to Timothy Leary. Others credit Mother Jones. Regardless of who coined it, it’s underlying message of ‘think for yourself’ is good advice. It’s also what our forefathers intended. Not so long ago, questioning authority was the role of the media. However, with the advent of media ‘corporatization’ (for lack of a better word), the role of the media has switched to image building. So much for yet another critical cog in the wheel of checks and balances on our government (and those who aspire to run it).