Bush, Obama and the Gaza Blitz

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month ceasefire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the War of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli Air Force conducted over a hundred strikes — on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations and storage sites for rockets.

About Israel’s right and duty to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launch pad for rockets, it must expect retaliation. Nor can Hamas claim some right to dictate the limits of that retaliation.

Yet the wisdom of so savage a retribution for rockets that killed not one Israeli is open to question. And crass Israeli politics seems to be behind this premeditated and planned blitz.

With Likud’s hawkish “Bibi” Netanyahu ahead in the polls for the Feb. 10 election, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Labor’s candidate, had to show that he, too, could be ruthless with Hamas.

Kadima Party candidate and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has an even greater need than the highly decorated Barak to show toughness. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, departing in scandal, wants to exit in a blaze of glory, to blot out the memory of a botched war against Hezbollah that he launched in the summer of 2006.

However, while Israel’s politicians all seem to have a stake in these devastating strikes, Israel herself will pay the price.

Given the casualty toll, over 300 dead and 1,300 wounded as of this writing, Hamas will have to exact its pound of flesh. The Hamas wing that seeks renewed war with Israel will now shout into silence the wing working with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak on a new ceasefire.

The moderate Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who has been talking to Israel, testifying to her good faith, has been made to appear the puppet and fool. A new intifada spreading to the West Bank, with suicide attacks inside Israel, is now possible.

Moderate Arabs, who have recognized Israel or backed peace, will now be seen by the Arab street as appeasers impotent to stop the public suffering of the Palestinian people.

As for President Bush’s hopes of midwifing a peace that would create a Palestinian state, they are as dead as the Annapolis process he set in train. In advancing peace in the Middle East, Bush’s eight-year record is now a near-absolute failure.

For four years, Bush refused to talk to Yasir Arafat, though Bill Clinton had negotiated with him, as had four Israeli prime ministers, two of who shared a Nobel Prize with Arafat. In his second term, Bush, after insisting Hamas be included in free elections in Palestine, refused to recognize Hamas when it won those elections.

Arafat was a terrorist and Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared Bush, and we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Yet, Bush de-listed Libya as a state sponsor of terror and sent Condi Rice to chat up Col. Gadhafi, though Gadhafi still has on his hands the blood of scores of American school kids from the Lockerbie massacre of 1989 that Libya and Gadhafi engineered

For eight years, like the “dummy” in a hand of bridge, Bush has sat mute as his Israeli partner, Sharon or Olmert, played America’s cards as well as their own. The Bush response to Saturday’s carnage, as anticipated, was to blame Hamas for causing it and urge Israelis to be careful about civilian casualties as they go about their reprisals.

Whatever Israel decides, we support. For eight years that has been the most reliable guide to U.S. Middle East policy.

And Barack Obama? Forty-eight hours after the Israeli blitz began, he and his national security team remain silent.

Hopefully, Obama will bring with him a new Mideast policy, one made in the U.S.A., for the U.S.A. Hopefully, just as Israel has its private links to Syria through Turkey, to Hamas through Egypt and to Hezbollah, Obama will establish independent U.S. channels to all three, and adopt a separate U.S. policy toward all three, as Israel does.

While the United States must support Israel’s right to defend her towns and to strike bases from which Israelis are being attacked, Obama should denounce the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, by Israel’s cutting off their electricity in the dead of winter and denying them the food and medicine many need to survive.

For us to remain silent in the face of this comports neither with our interests or our values. Israel’s policy of withholding from the weak and innocent of Gaza, women and children, the necessities of life, to punish the guilty who rule at the point of a gun, is a policy that Obama should declare the United States will no longer support with tax dollars.

Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush's 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution ("VR"), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell's activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw [him] under the bus."


A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell's life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR's attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell's not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.


On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.


An associate of Mr. Connell's told VR that Mr. Connell was involved with the destruction of the White House emails and the setting up of the off-grid White House email system.


Mr. Connell handled all of John McCain's computer work in the recent presidential campaign. VR has received direct evidence that the McCain campaign kept abreast of the legal developments against Mr. Connell by reading the VR dedicated website, www.rovecybergate.com.


VR demands that the Ohio Attorney General and the United States Justice Department conduct a complete investigation into the activities of Mr. Connell and determine whether there was any foul play in his death. VR demands that federal law enforcement officials place the following people under protective custody pending this investigation. Heather Connell who


is the owner of GovTech Solutions, Randy Cole, the former President of GovTech Solutions, and Jeff Averbeck, the CEO of SmartTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Both GovTech and SmartTech have been implicated in the rigging of the 2000 and 2004 elections and the White House email scandal. Our prior request to have Mr. Connell protected went unheeded and now he is dead.

Comcast Cameras to Start Watching You?

If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes.


Kunkel said the system wouldn’t be based on facial recognition, so there wouldn’t be a picture of you on file (we hope). Instead, it would distinguish between different members of your household by recognizing body forms. He stressed that the system is still in the experimental phase, that there hasn’t been consumer testing, and that any rollout “must add value” to the viewing experience beyond serving ads.

Perhaps I’ve seen Enemy of the State too many times, or perhaps I’m just naive about the depths to which Comcast currently tracks my every move. I can’t trust Comcast with BitTorrent, so why should I trust them with my must-be-kept-secret, DVR-clogging addiction to Keeping Up with the Kardashians?

Kunkel also spoke on camera with me about fixing bad Comcast user experiences, the ongoing BitTorrent battle and VOD. But he mostly towed the corporate line on these issues (the monitoring your living room came up after my camera was put away).

Claims emerge of British terrorists in Mumbai

It is too early to tell whether British-born Pakistanis were among the Mumbai terrorists, Gordon Brown said today in response to claims that at least two Britons were involved.

The Foreign Office is investigating reports on the Indian channel NDTV quoting Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, as saying there were British nationals among the militants arrested.

In a televised address yesterday, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said the attacks had "external links", which was interpreted as a reference to Pakistan.

Brown said today that he would talk to Singh about the claims of British involvement. "I would not want to be drawn into early conclusions about this. There is so much information still to be discovered and made available. I have heard what prime minister Singh has said and I'll talk to him about it this morning," he told Sky News.

"But obviously when you have terrorists operating in one country they may be getting support from another country or coming from another country and it is very important that we strengthen the cooperation between India and Britain in dealing with these instances of terrorist attacks."

It is understood that in recent years dozens of British-born Pakistanis have travelled to Pakistan to train in terror camps.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, said that British authorities were working "intensively" on establishing the origins and identities of the terrorists. "We obviously will want to work very, very closely with the Indians on that, but it is too early to say whether or not any of them are British," he told Sky News.

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said UK authorities had "no knowledge" of any British links with the attacks.

"We will do anything we can to help Indian authorities through what is obviously a very difficult time," she said. "We will do what is necessary. At the moment the priority is to support the immediate needs. We will work with the Indians to see what we can learn from the events."

Indian commandos have recovered credit and identity cards belonging to the militants, which may shed more light on their nationalities.

Security services in Britain are studying images of the attackers in an effort to identify them. But a Foreign Office spokeswoman said the department was "not aware of anything giving any credence to those reports at the moment".

A team of Scotland Yard anti-terrorist detectives and negotiators are now on their way to Mumbai to assist the Indian authorities.

Deshmukh, said up to 25 gunmen were responsible for the series of bomb blasts and shootings that targeted tourists and foreign interests.

Bug-sized spies: US develops tiny flying robots

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — If only we could be a fly on the wall when our enemies are plotting to attack us. Better yet, what if that fly could record voices, transmit video and even fire tiny weapons?
That kind of James Bond-style fantasy is actually on the drawing board. U.S. military engineers are trying to design flying robots disguised as insects that could one day spy on enemies and conduct dangerous missions without risking lives.

"The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm," said Greg Parker, who helps lead the research project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. "If we know there's a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void."
In essence, the research seeks to miniaturize the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan for surveillance and reconnaissance.

The next generation of drones, called Micro Aerial Vehicles, or MAVs, could be as tiny as bumblebees and capable of flying undetected into buildings, where they could photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.
By identifying and assaulting adversaries more precisely, the robots would also help reduce or avoid civilian casualties, the military says.
Parker and his colleagues plan to start by developing a bird-sized robot as soon as 2015, followed by the insect-sized models by 2030.

The vehicles could be useful on battlefields where the biggest challenge is collecting reliable intelligence about enemies.

Panda bites guy who wanted a hug

BEIJING (AP) —

A college student in southern China was bitten by a panda after he broke into the bear's enclosure hoping to get a hug, state media and a park employee said Saturday.

The student was visiting Qixing Park with classmates on Friday when he jumped the 6.5-foot (2-meter) -high fence around the panda's habitat, said the park employee, who refused to give his name.
The park in Guilin, a popular tourist town in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, houses a small zoo and a panda exhibit. It was virtually deserted when the student scaled the fence surrounding the panda, named Yang Yang, the employee said.

He said the student was bitten in the arms and legs. Two foreign visitors who saw the attack ran to get help from workers at a nearby refreshment stand, who notified park officials, the employee said.
The student was pale as he was taken away by medics but appeared clear-headed, he said.

"Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn't expect he would attack," the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Hopes For The Future

Ron Paul's Texas straight talk--

With the election behind us, our country turns hopeful eyes to the future. I have a few hopes of my own.

I congratulate our first African-American president-elect. Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly would be proud to see this day. We are stronger for embracing diversity, and I am hopeful that we can continue working through the tensions and wrongs of the past and become a more just and colorblind society. I hope this new administration will help bring us together, and not further divide us. I have always found that freedom is the best way to break down barriers. A free society emphasizes the importance of individuals, and not because they are part of a certain group. That’s the only way equal justice can be achieved.

We will face more tough economic problems during this new administration. In fact, the worst is yet to come. A vast amount of problematic mortgages have not begun to reset their variable interest rates and go into default. We already have unprecedented deficits, spending is out of control, and more big industries are coming to government with their hands out. My hope is that this administration will handle this economic crisis better than the interventionists and big government spenders of the 1930’s, the bureaucrats that prolonged the Depression. I hope that new government programs and spiderwebs of red tape do not pop up to interfere with American productivity, and that we can quickly get our financial footing again. We have to understand that an economic correction needs to take place and the only way out of the coming recession is to go through it. Efforts to avoid it can only prolong it. I hope we can somehow find our way back to sound money and reject corporate cronyism.

Lawsuit Filed Against Bloomberg's Bid For 3rd Term

"In the United States, the right to vote is a fundamental right and votes have consequences," the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn said. "This bedrock democratic principle does not crumble in the face of a weakened economy, nor should it be violated for the direct benefit of specific individual elected officials."

A wide spectrum of New Yorkers from city councilmembers to lawyers to voters in both parties are working together to put a stop to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to stay in office for a third term.

The broadest legal attack yet on Bloomberg's bid for a third term came Monday when the coalition ganged together and sued the city, saying another term would be unconstitutional without letting the public vote on the issue for a third time.

Twice before, in 1993 and 1996, New Yorkers have decided they wanted term limits to keep New York City mayors from serving more than two four-year terms. The last mayor to do so was Ed Koch, who stepped down in 1989.

Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, has said he wants to seek a third term in next year's election so he can use his financial background to help the city navigate the fallout from the economic crisis.

Rahm Emanuel "Not going to clean the floors of the White House"

In an interview with Ma'ariv, Emanuel's father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said he was convinced that his son's appointment would be good for Israel. "Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel," he was quoted as saying. "Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House."

THE JERUSALEM POST
Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a key member of the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives, has accepted President-elect Barack Obama's call to serve him as chief of staff, party officials said on Thursday.

Obama barely had time to savor his victory before he began filling out his new administration and getting a sobering look at some of the daunting problems he will inherit when he takes office in just 10 weeks.

He got a quick start with the transition Wednesday, calling on Emanuel, a fellow Illinois politician, to serve as White House chief of staff.

Emanuel, who served in the Clinton White House, has Israeli family and spent significant amounts of time in Israel. He now serves as the fourth-highest member of the House of Representatives, is known as a skilled political operator who helped engineer the gains the Democrats made in Congress in 2006.

Obama's first pick: Israeli Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff

A day after his historic election to become the first black American president, Barack Obama stepped into the role of president-elect yesterday, inviting Rahm Emanuel to join his administration as White House chief of staff, Democratic officials said.

Emanuel, a former Bill Clinton adviser, is the son of a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel or IZL), a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948.

Obama intends to announce key cabinet and staff staff members in the next few days to ensure a swift transition to the White House in January, which would allow him to deal with the global economic crisis as quickly as possible.

If Emanuel accepts, he will return to the White House, where he served as a political and policy adviser to Clinton. Emanuel is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives as the Democratic Caucus chairman.

Emanuel knows Obama from his hometown Chicago and headed the special team that planned the midterm elections in 2006, in which the Democrats recaptured a Congressional majority.

Emanuel also served as inspiration for the fictional character Joshua "Josh" Lyman, the deputy White House chief of staff, played by Bradley Whitford on the television drama "The West Wing."

Obama is expected to appoint loyal advisers and aides to central cabinet and staff positions, as well as experienced officials from the Clinton administration and a few prominent Republicans to enhance his intention to bridge political gaps.

I still have the Fever

Phillies Fever that is!

World F'n Champions!

Chase Utley pretty much sums it up.

The 2008 World Series Champions!

Phillies are the best!

McCain campaign caught red-handed in Pittsburgh Hoax

This one goes all the way up to the top. Operative snatched by Pittsburgh Police.


John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

The KDKA reporter had called McCain's campaign office for details after seeing the story -- sans details -- teased on Drudge.

The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.

The claims to KDKA from the McCain campaign were included in an early story that ran late yesterday on KDKA's Web site. The paragraphs containing these assertions were quickly removed from the story after the Obama campaign privately complained that KDKA was letting the McCain campaign spin a racially-charged version of the story before the facts had been established, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

WV Voting Machines Switch Votes from Obama to McCain

I love American Democracy!

Early voting in the presidential election has already begun in many states, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters in at least two counties using touchscreen voting machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. Six voters reported having this problem in Jackson and Putnam Counties. In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. One voter, a retired nurse named Shelba Ketchum, said, "I hit Obama, and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.” Election officials blamed voters for not being more careful. Both counties use machines made by Election Systems & Software.

US mandate in Iraq enrages Moqtada Sadr

Moqtada Sadr's supporters are strongly opposed to the US presence in Iraq

Supporters of Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr have staged a mass demonstration in Baghdad in protest against plans to extend the US mandate in Iraq.

An estimated 50,000 protesters chanted slogans such as "Get out occupier!".

Iraqi and US negotiators drafted the deal after months of talks but it still needs approval from Iraq's government.

Under the agreement US troops would withdraw by 2011, and Iraq would have the right to prosecute Americans who commit crimes while off-duty.

The UN mandate for US-led coalition forces expires at the end of this year. About 144,000 of the 152,000 foreign troops deployed there are US military personnel.

Political battle

Chanting slogans and waving banners, tens of thousands of Shias, mainly young men, marched on the eastern suburb of Sadr City towards the centre of Baghdad.

The BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad says Moqtada Sadr's militant opposition to the US presence has strong grassroots support among many Shias - and this was a physical manifestation of that opposition.
He says leaders of the 30-strong Sadr bloc in the Iraqi parliament will have expressed that rejection at a meeting of Iraq's Political Council for National Security late on Friday.

NJ Violates Nuremberg Code With Forced Injections

NJ Assemblywoman compares state-mandated immunizations to Nazi experiments on humans.

About 500 activists rallied outside the State House on Thursday, many with children who they said developed autism and other disorders after state-mandated immunizations.

"The shots just have to stop," said Lisa Driscoll of Maplewood, who brought her 4-year-old son Matt. "He's allergic to everything in the shots."

For years, activists across the country have protested compulsory vaccines for such diseases as chicken pox, flu, rubella and polio.

Some suspect that mercury-derived preservatives in some formulas trigger autism and other neurological ailments. Others say they're not opposed to vaccines in general, but they want to choose when and if their children will receive them.


The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a program called Healthy People 2010, is aiming to immunize 95 percent of the country's kindergartners and first-graders against seven diseases.

In New Jersey — home to the country's highest rate of autism, with one in 94 children affected — the issue erupted late last year, when the state adopted a Public Health Council recommendation for additional vaccines. Starting last month, all infants and toddlers in public schools and day cares were required to get annual flu shots, and sixth-graders had to receive a meningitis vaccination and a booster for diphtheria/pertussis/tetanus, or DPT.

At the rally, Assemblywoman Charlotte Vandervalk, R-Westwood, told the crowd that forced immunizations violate the Nuremberg Code, the set of ethical standards created in the wake of Nazi experiments on humans.

"We have a right to informed consent," Vandervalk said. "This once was a closet fear that now has become a public outcry."

Vandervalk is the sponsor of a bill to allow parents a conscientious exemption from vaccinating their children. Parents would claim a "sincerely held or moral objection" on paperwork to be filed with local health departments.

An identical bill in the Senate is sponsored by Sen. Gerald Cardinale, R-Cresskill, with a half-dozen more North Jersey lawmakers as co-sponsors.

Nineteen states have such a provision, according to the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice. Right now, the only way New Jersey parents can avoid vaccinations — and stay within the law — is to claim a medical or religious waiver. Roughly 2,200 children have such exemptions.

At the rally, Christine Levin said she drove for two hours from Sparta with her six children, ages 12 years to 5 months. None of them is vaccinated, she said.

"With my first child, I took classes in natural childbirth and learned that at birth, children are given eye drops, a Vitamin K shot and a shot for hepatitis B," Levin said.

"Hepatitis B, for a newborn? That's something that drug addicts and prostitutes get, and the vaccine is only good for 10 years. So we're protecting 10-year-old prostitutes and drug users. I said no way. We'd rather take our chances getting an illness."

Many protesters said their main fear was that a vaccine, once injected, can't be removed.

"I want to have a choice," said Melanie Miller of Bernardsville, Somerset County, mother of 3-year-old Frances Miller. "I'm not going to put a vaccine in her body every year."

Mandatory Flu Shots Causes Outrage in NJ

As flu season approaches, many New Jersey parents are furious over a first-in-the-nation requirement that children get a flu shot in order to attend preschools and day-care centers. The decision should be the parents', not the state's, they contend.

Hundreds of parents and other activists rallied outside the New Jersey Statehouse on Thursday, decrying the policy and voicing support for a bill that would allow parents to opt out of mandatory vaccinations for their children.

"This is not an anti-vaccine rally - it's a freedom of choice rally," said one of the organizers, Louise Habakus. "This one-size-fits-all approach is really very anti-American."

New Jersey's policy was approved last December by the state's Public Health Council and is taking effect this fall. Children from 6 months to 5 years old who attend a child-care center or preschool have until Dec. 31 to receive the flu vaccine, along with a pneumococcal vaccine.
Opposition to the policy is vehement. Assemblywoman Charlotte Vandervalk, one of the speakers at the rally, said she now has 34 co-sponsors for a bill that would allow for conscientious objections to mandatory vaccinations.

"The right to informed consent is so basic," she said in an interview. "Parents have a right to decide for their own children what is injected in their bodies."

State policy now allows for medical and religious exemptions to mandatory vaccinations, but Vandervalk said requests for medical exemptions often have been turned down by local health authorities. She said 19 other states allow conscientious exemptions like those envisioned in her bill.

Among the speakers was Robin Stavola of Colts Neck, N.J., who said her daughter, Holly, died in 2000 at age 5 less than two weeks after receiving eight different vaccines, including a booster shot.

"I am not against vaccines, but I do believe there are too many," she told the crowd.

State health officials and the CDC insist the flu vaccine is safe and effective, but Vandervalk and the parent groups who support her bill contend there has been inadequate research into the vaccine's impact on small children. Critics note that flu vaccines contain trace amounts of thimerosol, a mercury-based preservative; the CDC says there's no convincing evidence these trace amounts cause harm.

More generally, many of the parents mobilizing against the state policy believe various types of vaccine are being overused, resulting in more cases of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other neurological problems in children.

"There's not been a response from the government that is credible in terms of doing the scientific research that will screen out vulnerable children," said Barbara Loe Fisher, a speaker at the rally. She is co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Va., an advocacy group skeptical of vaccination policies.

"The flu is not a deadly disease," said Barbara Majeski of Princeton, N.J., who does not want her two preschooler sons to get the vaccination.

"Mother Nature designed our bodies to be able to fight off infections through natural means - you need to be exposed and develop immunity," Majeski said. "We've just gotten a little too overprotective with our children."

The Phillies are World Series bound!

And Gizmo approves.

Z-Man in the house?

I expect some royalties from this video.

Markets VS. Martial Law

Like him or loathe him, last night CNN’s Glenn Beck became the only mainstream media source thus far to address on national TV the reality of the situation Americans are facing with the manufactured financial implosion - the direct threat of domestic martial law and a global financial dictatorship.

Beck’s guest, Peter Schiff, respected author of "Crash Proof" and president of the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, joined him in outlining that martial law, the use of armed troops on the streets to quell dissent, is a real possibility should the economic crisis not improve or worsen to the point where civil unrest is fomented.

One in three Atlanta Police Academy graduates have criminal records

Keovongsa Siharath was arrested in Henry County on charges he punched his stepfather.

Jeffrey Churchill was charged with assault in an altercation with a woman in a mall parking lot.

Calvin Thomas was taken into custody in DeKalb County on a concealed weapons charge.

All three are now officers with the Atlanta Police Department.

More than one-third of recent Atlanta Police Academy graduates have been arrested or cited for a crime, according to a review of their job applications. The arrests ranged from minor offenses such as shoplifting to violent charges including assault. More than one-third of the officers had been rejected by other law enforcement agencies, and more than half of the recruits admitted using marijuana.

“On its face, it’s troubling and disturbing,” said Vincent Fort, a state senator from Atlanta. “It would be very troubling that people might be hitting the streets to serve and protect and they have histories that have made them unqualified to serve on other departments.”

But Atlanta police say it’s not so simple. Officials have been trying without success for more than a decade to grow the department

to 2,000 officers, an effort hurt by this year’s budget crisis. With competition for recruits intense among law enforcement agencies, Atlanta has had to make concessions.

“We would like, in an ideal world, to see every applicant with a clean record, but obviously that’s not reality,” said Atlanta police Lt. Elder Dancy, who runs the department’s recruitment unit. “I don’t think you’ll find any departments who hire only applicants with squeaky-clean records.”

Army Orders Pain Ray Trucks

After years of testing, the Active Denial System -- the pain ray which drives off rioters with a microwave-like beam -- could finally have its day. The Army is buying five of the truck-mounted systems for $25 million. But the energy weapon may face new hurdles, before it's shipped off to the battlefield; a new report details how the supposedly non-lethal blaster could be turned into a flesh-frying killer.

The contract for the pain ray trucks is "expected to be awarded by year's end," Aviation Week notes. "A year after the contract is signed, the combination vehicle/weapons will start be fielded at the rate of one per month."

Maryland Mayor Details SWAT Raid in His Home

Cheye Calvo, the Mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, found himself on the receiving end of a botched no-knock police raid.
He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but police never apologized for killing his dogs and posing a threat to his family.
He spoke at the Cato Institute September 11, 2008.

Old-School TV sign-off

For your enjoyment, here is an old-school TV sign-off from channel 6 in Philadelphia. Remember when TV stations would sign-off with the National Anthem? Oh yeah, Go Phillies!!

John McCain - Dictator

John McCain speaking about the failed bailout package, admits he aspires to be a dictator.

Martial Law to be declared if bailout voted down

Rep. Brad Sherman told his fellow Congress members the government will declare martial law and the stock market will drop 3,000 points if the bill is not passed. “The panic-mongers were to the point of telling people the market would drop 3,000 points and there would be martial law,”

Police Lieutenant in Taser Case Commits Suicide

A New York City police lieutenant who gave the order to fire a Taser stun gun at a man who then fell to his death in Brooklyn committed suicide at Floyd Bennett Field early on Thursday, law enforcement officials said. The lieutenant, Michael W. Pigott, a 21-year veteran of the force, had been placed on modified assignment without his gun and badge after he gave the order to a sergeant to fire the Taser at a Bedford-Stuyvesant man, Iman Morales.
Mr. Morales, naked and with apparent signs of emotional disturbance, fell to his death from a building ledge after an officer shot him with the Taser, at the instruction of Lieutenant Pigott. Mr. Morales had been yelling at passers-by and swinging a long light bulb tube at officers before he fell.

Drunken Mets fan guilty of harassing Mr. Met

This is why the Mets and their fans are classless. Go Phillies!!

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK - A Mets fan accused of manhandling the team's baseball-headed, grinning humanoid mascot has pleaded guilty to harassment.

Authorities say that while harassing Mr. Met during a game in May, the drunken 32-year-old refused orders to leave Shea Stadium, took a swing at a security guard and spit in his face. They say he pushed kids out of his way, according to the New York Daily News.

Christien Hansen was charged with criminal trespass, disorderly conduct and harassment.

Queens Criminal Court Judge Robert Raciti sentenced Hansen to a conditional discharge, ordered him to pay $500 and released him.

Credit Crunch Banker Leaps to His Death in London

The City was in shock last night after the apparent suicide of a millionaire financier haunted by the pressures of dealing with the credit crunch.
Kirk Stephenson, who was married with an eight-year-old son, died in the path of a 100mph express train at Taplow railway station, Berkshire.
Mr Stephenson is believed to have taken his own life after succumbing to mounting personal pressures as the world’s financial markets went into meltdown.
The death of the respected 47-year-old City figure evokes memories of the 1929 Wall Street crash in America and comes as:
• Bradford & Bingley teeters on the brink of nationalisation after a dramatic share price slump.
• David Cameron faced embarrassment on the eve of the Tory conference after members of a secretive club of Conservative donors were linked to the ‘short-selling’ of Bradford & Bingley.
• Gordon Brown was wrongfooted by Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, who announced plans to set up an independent watchdog to police the Treasury and strip it of key powers if the Conservatives win the next Election.
New Zealand-born Mr Stephenson, who owned a £3.6million, five-storey house in Chelsea and a retreat in the West Country, was chief operating officer of Olivant Advisers.
Last year, the private equity firm tried to buy a 15 per cent stake worth almost £1billion in Northern Rock before the bank was nationalised, bidding against Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson.

2008 NL East Champions - Philadelphia Phillies

Action Alert!

A vote on Paulson and Bernanke bailout plan could literally come at any moment, and it is crucial that you immediately express your opinion to Congress.

The picture painted by the supporters of the bailout is dire. President Bush reinforced this notion in his address to the nation last night and again urged Congress to act immediately.

Remember what happened the last time the executive branch warned of horrible consequences and rushed legislation through Congress? We got the Patriot Act, which to this day threatens our civil liberties on an unprecedented scale.

We do know that our economy is in for a rough ride. These bad mortgage-related assets will have to be cleared out and the market will have to reset. The only question is how that will happen.

The easy way out is to continue the same practices that got us to this point. We can put $700 billion, for starters, in the hands of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a former CEO of Goldman Sachs) and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and let them spend the money on whatever they wish.

This option will only delay the economic downturn, which will only be worsened.

Or, we can take this opportunity to end the federal government's interference in the marketplace, truly embrace free market capitalism, and return to a sound monetary system.

The Federal Reserve's practices of easy credit and monetary inflation have crashed our economy, and now they're asking us to trust them to fix it.

When you call Congress to express your outrage at the bailout, tell them you want real solutions.

It is time for Congress to:

1.) End the Bailouts - Congress must revoke the Federal Reserve's authority to bail out failed businesses at your expense.

2.) Cut Taxes and Curb Regulation - If we really want to stimulate businesses and revive the market, we need to cut corporate and capital gains taxes, spurring investors to come back to the market and making it easier to attract new workers and clients. It is also time to end failed legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley, which has crippled capital markets, diminished our competitiveness, and greatly harmed small businesses.

3.) Reduce Spending - We must freeze all non-entitlement spending by the federal government at current levels and eliminate wasteful spending both domestically and in our trillion-dollar overseas budget. Our debt has to come down, and it won't until we start living within our means.

4.) Reform the Monetary System - If we are to have long-term economic progress, we must end the system of printing money out of thin air. The current laws limiting the circulation of gold and silver-backed currency must be overturned. We can no longer base our money on the empty promises of bureaucrats that it is sound.

The federal government is trying to scare us into accepting more tyranny. Don't stand for it.

Katie Couric interviews Sarah Palin - UGLY!!

NYPD Pigs kill another - with a taser

Police fired a Taser at a naked Brooklyn man armed with only a fluorescent light tube yesterday, sending him falling to his death from a second-floor ledge after he went on a 40-minute rant.

Iman Morales' mom begged cops not to hurt her son, telling them he's sick - then watched in horror as he plunged from the top of the roll-down gate on which he'd been perched.

An Emergency Services officer, acting on the orders of his boss, fired at the 35-year-old man at around 2 p.m., as he waved the 8-foot fluorescent light tube, police sources said.

"His body froze up and he fell face-first," said Sean Johnson, who witnessed the drama at 489 Tompkins Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Morales, who crashed 10 feet to the pavement, died a few hours later at Kings County Hospital.



Asked if police followed the proper protocol for using a Taser, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said, "That's being reviewed."

Amid his mostly unintelligible rant, Morales was heard yelling, "You're going to kill me. I'm going to take everyone with me."

He also screamed, "I'm going to die. You're all going to die with me."

Morales first emerged hanging out a third-floor window after a blowup with his mother at around 1 p.m., witnesses said.

Twenty minutes later, he climbed the fire escape to the fourth floor, where he tried to force his way into a neighbor's apartment.

"He tried to come into my window and I ran out," said 40-year-old Tonya Wright.

"He said, 'Let me in.' I told him, 'I'm not letting you in.' "

Morales then headed to the second floor and screamed to the crowd, which included his frantic mom.

"She was saying, 'No! No! Don't hurt him. He is sick,' " Wright said.

With police shouting for him to get down, Morales made his way to a ledge above a the gate.

"Walk down now! Move down!" the police can be heard shouting to him on video.

He then picked up the light tube and waved it in the air before jabbing cops who had climbed out of the windows above.

"When he was poking the cop, people were laughing," Johnson said.

He refused orders from the officers and continued his incoherent tirade.

Finally, one of the ESU cops on the street shot him with the Taser.

"He just fell face first," said witness Sean Brown. "People were screaming and yelling. It was wrong."

It was unclear what set off the episode, but, said Johnson, "once he started hitting the cop with that pole, that's when it turned serious."

Morales had one prior arrest, for a Manhattan petit larceny.

"This is very out of character," said the building's superintendent, Charlene Gayle, 31.

"Nice guy, clean cut, well kept, never irrational. Didn't have irrational behavior."

There goes your country

A message from Ron Paul

Dear Friends,

Whenever a Great Bipartisan Consensus is announced, and a compliant media assures everyone that the wondrous actions of our wise leaders are being taken for our own good, you can know with absolute certainty that disaster is about to strike.

The events of the past week are no exception.

The bailout package that is about to be rammed down Congress' throat is not just economically foolish. It is downright sinister. It makes a mockery of our Constitution, which our leaders should never again bother pretending is still in effect. It promises the American people a never-ending nightmare of ever-greater debt liabilities they will have to shoulder. Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! "This is welfare for the rich," he said. "This is socialism for the rich. It's bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters."

That describes the current bailout package to a T. And we're being told it's unavoidable.

The claim that the market caused all this is so staggeringly foolish that only politicians and the media could pretend to believe it. But that has become the conventional wisdom, with the desired result that those responsible for the credit bubble and its predictable consequences - predictable, that is, to those who understand sound, Austrian economics - are being let off the hook. The Federal Reserve System is actually positioning itself as the savior, rather than the culprit, in this mess!

• The Treasury Secretary is authorized to purchase up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets at any one time. That means $700 billion is only the very beginning of what will hit us.

• Financial institutions are "designated as financial agents of the Government." This is the New Deal to end all New Deals.

• Then there's this: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Translation: the Secretary can buy up whatever junk debt he wants to, burden the American people with it, and be subject to no one in the process.

There goes your country.

Even some so-called free-market economists are calling all this "sadly necessary." Sad, yes. Necessary? Don't make me laugh.

Our one-party system is complicit in yet another crime against the American people. The two major party candidates for president themselves initially indicated their strong support for bailouts of this kind - another example of the big choice we're supposedly presented with this November: yes or yes. Now, with a backlash brewing, they're not quite sure what their views are. A sad display, really.

Although the present bailout package is almost certainly not the end of the political atrocities we'll witness in connection with the crisis, time is short. Congress may vote as soon as tomorrow. With a Rasmussen poll finding support for the bailout at an anemic seven percent, some members of Congress are afraid to vote for it. Call them! Let them hear from you! Tell them you will never vote for anyone who supports this atrocity.

The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care?

When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media?

Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

The Party’s Over

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Crash of 2008, which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people’s wealth, is, like the Crash of 1929, likely to mark the end of one era and the onset of another.

The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America. The “Omnipower” and “Indispensable Nation” we heard about in all the hubris and braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history.

Seizing on the crisis, the left says we are witnessing the failure of market economics, a failure of conservatism.

This is nonsense. What we are witnessing is the collapse of Gordon Gecko (”Greed Is Good!”) capitalism. What we are witnessing is what happens to a prodigal nation that ignores history, and forgets and abandons the philosophy and principles that made it great.

A true conservative cherishes prudence and believes in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and a self-reliant republic. He believes in saving for retirement and a rainy day, in deferred gratification, in not buying on credit what you cannot afford, in living within your means.

Is that really what got Wall Street and us into this mess — that we followed too religiously the gospel of Robert Taft and Russell Kirk?

“Government must save us!” cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government — the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy?

For years, we Americans have spent more than we earned. We save nothing. Credit card debt, consumer debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt — all are at record levels. And with pensions and savings being wiped out, much of that debt will never be repaid.

Our standard of living is inevitably going to fall. For foreigners will not forever buy our bonds or lend us more money if they rightly fear that they will be paid back, if at all, in cheaper dollars.

We are going to have to learn to live again without our means.

The party’s over

Up through World War II, we followed the Hamiltonian idea that America must remain economically independent of the world in order to remain politically independent.

But this generation decided that was yesterday’s bromide and we must march bravely forward into a Global Economy, where we all depend on one another. American companies morphed into “global companies” and moved plants and factories to Mexico, Asia, China and India, and we began buying more cheaply from abroad what we used to make at home: shoes, clothes, bikes, cars, radios, TVs, planes, computers.

As the trade deficits began inexorably to rise to 6 percent of GDP, we began vast borrowing from abroad to continue buying from abroad.

At home, propelled by tax cuts, war in Iraq and an explosion in social spending, surpluses vanished and deficits reappeared and began to rise. The dollar began to sink, and gold began to soar.

Yet, still, the promises of the politicians come. Barack Obama will give us national health insurance and tax cuts for all but that 2 percent of the nation that already carries 50 percent of the federal income tax load.

John McCain is going to cut taxes, expand the military, move NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, confront Russia and force Iran to stop enriching uranium or “bomb, bomb, bomb,” with Joe Lieberman as wartime consigliere.

Who are we kidding?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end.

The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget. Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars.

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a Katrina-like failure of government, of our political class, and of democracy itself, casting a cloud over the viability and longevity of the system.

Notice who is managing the crisis. Not our elected leaders. Nancy Pelosi says she had nothing to do with it. Congress is paralyzed and heading home. President Bush is nowhere to be seen.

Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves.

An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. We are just spectators.

What the Greatest Generation handed down to us — the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved — the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away.

Ron Paul: Wake Up!!

Congressman Ron Paul discusses the current financial market turmoil, and what the end result will be for us - the tax payers.



Go Ron Go!!! Buy Gold Now!!

Unrest in Bolivia - U.S. ambassadors expelled

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — President Evo Morales on Saturday accused an opposition governor of using foreign thugs against government supporters in violence that has claimed at least 18 lives and prompted him to declare martial law in a breakaway province.

In a bid to defuse the bitter dispute over a new constitution and land reform that threatens to tear apart the poor Andean nation, Chile called for an emergency meeting of South American leaders on Monday.

"A larger tragedy has to be avoided," said Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a strong ally of Bolivia's leftist president, confirming he would attend the meeting.

Morales described as an ambush a gunbattle in the eastern province of Pando on Thursday that led him to impose martial law the next day. "These people were massacred," he told a news conference on Saturday.

Interior Minister Alfredo Rada said 16 people were killed in the clash — the majority of them peasants who back Morales — and authorities said another two people died Friday at Pando's main airfield as government troops took control, opening fire to disperse protesters.

Bolivia's first indigenous president said he would not hesitate to extend the state of siege if necessary to the other three pro-autonomy provinces in eastern Bolivia where separatists seized government offices and natural gas fields last week in the gravest crisis of his nearly 3-year-old presidency.

Government opponents are demanding Morales cancel a Dec. 7 referendum on a new constitution that would help him centralize power, run for a second consecutive term and transfer fallow terrain to landless peasants.

The emergency summit in Chile comes after both Morales and Chavez expelled the U.S. ambassadors in their countries to protest what they say is Washington's inciting of anti-government protesters in Bolivia.

U.S. officials call the accusations baseless.

Nonetheless, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said Saturday he would reject an invitation he had received to meet with U.S. President George W. Bush out of "solidarity" with Bolivia in its diplomatic spat with Washington. Ortega also backed Morales' claims against the U.S. He did not say why or when he had been invited to the White House.

At Saturday's news conference, Morales said "Brazilian and Peruvian assassins under the command of the governor of Pando" took part in what he said was an ambush of government supporters.

Pando Gov. Leopoldo Fernandez denied having anything to do with the violence, saying it was not an ambush but rather an armed clash between rival groups.

"The government has a great ability to distort things, and its arguments are always the same, accuse without reason," Fernandez told Radio Fides.

Peasant leader Antonio Moreno told The Associated Press in a phone interview that the violence began when he and several truckloads of companions came upon an opposition blockade on a jungle highway. He said there was some fighting, then suddenly a man exited a vehicle and fired on the farmers with a submachine gun.

"The campesinos fled to the mountain, while others jumped into the river," Moreno said.

National Health Minister Ramiro Tapia told Erbol radio that isolated shooting incidents involving opposition protesters Saturday were making it difficult for the military to enforce martial law in Pando's capital, Cobija, on the border with Brazil.

Interior Ministry officials told the AP that they expected more bodies to turn up from Thursday's violence, which occurred 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the provincial capital of Cobija.

The state of siege prohibits people from gathering or carrying weapons. It was declared hours after Morales and opposition governors from the four eastern provinces agreed to hold talks aimed at ending the crisis.

"We all agree that we have to look for a point of compromise," said Carlos Dabdoub, autonomy secretary in Santa Cruz — Bolivia's richest province and the center of anti-Morales opposition — on Friday.

But the following night, opposition governors announced that dialogue would be broken off if there are any more deaths in Cobija, and said in a statement that they would travel there Sunday to stand with Fernandez.

The protests temporarily disrupted natural gas exports to Brazil, Bolivia's No. 1 customer.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Saturday that he would attend the regional gathering in Chile if Bolivia requests it, and urged the Andean nation's government and opposition to determine goals for the summit.

"If we make a decision that neither side respects, then the meeting will be useless," Silva told reporters.

He also appealed for gas supplies to continue, saying, "We have a contract, and therefore this contract must be respected."

US military trained Georgian commandos

The US military provided combat training to 80 Georgian special forces commandos only months prior to Georgia’s army assault in South Ossetia in August.

The revelation, based on recruitment documents and interviews with US military trainers obtained by the Financial Times, could add fuel to accusations by Vlad­imir Putin, Russian prime minister, last month that the US had “orchestrated” the war in the Georgian enclave.

The training was provided by senior US soldiers and two military contractors. There is no evidence that the contractors or the Pentagon, which hired them, knew that the commandos they were training were likely be used in the assault on South Ossetia.

A US army spokesman said the goal of the programme was to train the commandos for duty in Afghanistan as part of Nato-led International Security Assist­ance Force. The programme, however, highlights the often unintended consequences of US “train and equip” programmes in foreign countries.

The contractors – MPRI and American Systems, both based in Virginia – recruited a 15-man team of former special forces soldiers to train the Georgians at the Vashlijvari special forces base on the outskirts of Tbilisi, part of a programme run by the US defence department.

MPRI was hired by the Pentagon in 1995 to train the Croatian military prior to their invasion of the ethnically-Serbian Krajina region, which led to the displacement of 200,000 refugees and was one of the worst incidents of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars. MPRI denies any wrongdoing.

US training of the Georgian army is a big flashpoint between Washington and Moscow. Mr Putin said on CNN on August 29: “It is not just that the American side could not restrain the Georgian leadership from this criminal act [of intervening in South Ossetia]. The American side in effect armed and trained the Georgian army.”

The first phase of the special forces training was held between January and April this year, concentrating on “basic special forces skills” said an American Systems employee interviewed by phone from the US army’s Fort Bragg.

The US military official familiar with the programme said the Pentagon hired the military contracting firms to help supplement its own trainers because of a lack of manpower.

The second 70-day phase was set to begin on August 11, a few days after war broke out in South Ossetia. The trainers arrived on August 3, four days before the conflict flared on August 7. “They would have only seen the inside of a hotel room,” quipped one former contractor. Neither MPRI nor American Systems would speak at length to the FT about the programme.

American Systems di­rected questions to the US army’s Security Assistance Training Management Organisation (Satmo) at Fort Bragg, part of the US Army’s Special Warfare Center School. Satmo sends trainers, mainly special forces but also contractors, to countries such as Yemen, Colombia and the Philippines. Satmo trainers generally work with forces involved in counter-insurgencies, counter-terrorism or civil wars. A Satmo spokesman declined to comment.

One US military official familiar with the programme said it emerged from a Georgian offer to the US in December 2006 to send commandos to Afghanistan to work alongside American special operations forces.

According to this person, the US told Georgia that the offer should be made through Nato, which welcomed the offer but informed Georgia that its forces would need additional training to meet the military alliance’s standards.

While the programme is not classified, there is a lack of transparency surrounding it, though US military officials said the lack of publicity was not part of an effort to keep the programme secret. Other US military training programmes in Georgia have their own websites and photo galleries.

A US European Command spokesman confirmed the existence of the programme only after reviewing an e-mail sent by MPRI recruiters that was obtained by the FT. According to the e-mail, which did not mention Nato operations, former US special operations forces would receive $2,000 ($1,150, €1,400) a week plus costs as trainers. “We can confirm the pro­gramme exists, but due to its nature and training ob­jectives we do not discuss specifics to ensure the integrity of the programme and force protection of the trainers and participants,” he said.

James Appathurai, Nato’s spokesman in Brussels, said: “Georgia has made an offer to provide forces to Isaf in the last two years. But until now these Georgian forces have not joined the Isaf mission.” An official at a senior Nato member state said it was understood that the forces had been trained by the US, but that the forces had not passed a certification process under which all potential members of the Isaf mission are vetted.

Additional reporting James Blitz in London

Conflict in the Caucasus

The conflict between Russia and Georgia began on the night of August 7, when Georgian forces, including commando units, tanks and artillery, assaulted the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

Russia says that at least 133 civilians died in the attack, as well as 59 of its own peacekeepers, according to figures released this week.

In response Russia launched a mass invasion and aerial bombardment of Georgia, in which 215 Georgians have died, including 146 soldiers and 69 civilians.

Israel of the Caucasus

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- NATO guarantees that an attack against one member country is an attack against all are no longer what they used to be. Had Georgia been inside NATO, a number of European countries would no longer be willing to consider it an attack against their own soil.
For Russia, the geopolitical stars were in perfect alignment. The United States was badly overstretched and had no plausible way to talk tough without coming across as empty rhetoric. American resources have been drained by the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the war on terror. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it, Washington must now choose between its "pet project" Georgia and a partnership with Moscow.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili evidently thought the United States would come to his side militarily if Russian troops pushed him back into Georgia after ordering an attack last Aug. 8 on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. And when his forces were mauled by Russia's counterattack, bitter disappointment turned to anger. Along with Abkhazia, Georgia lost two provinces.

Georgia also had a special relationship with Israel that was mostly under the radar. Georgian Defense Minister Davit Kezerashvili is a former Israeli who moved things along by facilitating Israeli arms sales with U.S. aid. "We are now in a fight against the great Russia," he was quoted as saying, "and our hope is to receive assistance from the White House because Georgia cannot survive on its own."

The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 12 reported, "Georgian Prime Minister Vladimir Gurgenidze made a special call to Israel Tuesday morning to receive a blessing from one of the Haredi community's most important rabbis and spiritual leaders, Rabbi Aaron Leib Steinman. 'I want him to pray for us and our state,'" he was quoted.

Israel began selling arms to Georgia seven years ago. U.S. grants facilitated these purchases. From Israel came former minister and former Tel Aviv Mayor Roni Milo, representing Elbit Systems, and his brother Shlomo, former director general of Military Industries. Israeli UAV spy drones, made by Elbit Maarahot Systems, conducted recon flights over southern Russia, as well as into nearby Iran.

In a secret agreement between Israel and Georgia, two military airfields in southern Georgia had been earmarked for the use of Israeli fighter-bombers in the event of pre-emptive attacks against Iranian nuclear installations. This would sharply reduce the distance Israeli fighter-bombers would have to fly to hit targets in Iran. And to reach Georgian airstrips, the Israeli air force would fly over Turkey.

The attack ordered by Saakashvili against South Ossetia the night of Aug. 7 provided the Russians the pretext for Moscow to order Special Forces to raid these Israeli facilities where some Israeli drones were reported captured.

At a Moscow news conference, Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, Russia's deputy chief of staff, said the extent of Israeli aid to Georgia included "eight types of military vehicles, explosives, landmines and special explosives for clearing minefields." Estimated numbers of Israeli trainers attached to the Georgian army range from 100 to 1,000. There were also 110 U.S. military personnel on training assignments in Georgia. Last July 2,000 U.S. troops were flown in for "Immediate Response 2008," a joint exercise with Georgian forces.

Details of Israel's involvement were largely ignored by Israeli media lest they be interpreted as another blow to Israel's legendary military prowess, which took a bad hit in the Lebanese war against Hezbollah two years ago. Georgia's top diplomat in Tel Aviv complained about Israel's "lackluster" response to his country's military predicament and called for "diplomatic pressure on Moscow." According to the Jerusalem Post, the Georgian was told "the address for that type of pressure is Washington."

Haaretz reported Georgian Minister Temur Yakobashvili -- who is Jewish, the newspaper said -- told Israeli army radio that "Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers" because he explained rather implausibly, "a small group of our soldiers were able to wipe out an entire Russian military division, thanks to Israeli training."

The Tel Aviv-Tbilisi military axis was agreed at the highest levels with the approval of the Bush administration. The official liaison between the two entities was Reserve Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch who commanded Israeli forces on the Lebanese border in July 2006. He resigned from the army after the Winograd Commission flayed Israel's conduct of its Second Lebanon War. Hirsch was also blamed for the seizure of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah.

Israeli personnel, working for "private" companies with close ties to the Israel Defense Forces, also trained Georgian soldiers in house-to-house fighting.

That Russia assessed these Israeli training missions as U.S.-approved is a given. The United States was also handicapped by a shortage of spy-in-the-sky satellite capability, already overextended by the Iraq and Afghan wars. Neither U.S. nor Georgian intelligence knew Russian forces were ready with an immediate and massive response to the Georgian attack Moscow knew was coming. Russian double agents ostensibly working for Georgia most probably egged on the military fantasies of the impetuous Saakashvili's "surprise attack" plans.

Saakashvili was convinced that by sending 2,000 of his soldiers to serve in Iraq (who were immediately flown home by the United States when Russia launched a massive counterattack into Georgia), he would be rewarded for his loyalty. He could not believe President Bush, a personal friend, would leave him in the lurch. Georgia, as Saakashvili saw his country's role, was the "Israel of the Caucasus."

The Tel Aviv-Tbilisi military axis appears to have been cemented at the highest levels, according to YNet, the Israeli electronic daily. But whether the IAF can still count on those air bases to launch bombing missions against Iran's nuke facilities is now in doubt.

Iran comes out ahead in the wake of the Georgian crisis. Neither Russia nor China is willing to respond to a Western request for more and tougher sanctions against the mullahs. Iran's European trading partners are also loath to squeeze Iran. The Russian-built, 1,000-megawatt Iranian reactor in Bushehr is scheduled to go online early next year.

A combination of Putin and oil has put Russia back on the geopolitical map of the world. Moscow's oil and gas revenue this year is projected at $201 billion -- a 13-fold increase since Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin eight years ago. Not shabby for a wannabe superpower on the comeback trail.

Distant Drums at Sarah's Party

by Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, September 05, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- The American Right has just died and gone to
heaven.

Last night's convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has
confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska
governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has
not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan.

A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to
John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues -- from Fred Thompson to
Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani -- to the rostrum to
lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on
Sister Sarah.

The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly
loathes -- the liberal media elite who savagely "Bork" every true
conservative who gets on the path to national power -- has been
reignited.

Positive polarization has been achieved. The Republican Party has
been united and invigorated. The enthusiasm gap with the Democratic
ticket has been closed. And the issues upon which the base loves to
fight -- the Culture War and Right to Life -- are back on the table.

Palin's beautifully crafted and delivered acceptance speech, after
Rudy's gleeful excoriations of the pretensions of Obama, will rank
as a night to remember in convention history.

Yet, as the familiar battle lines form up for the delicious
eight-week war that lies ahead, one hears a distant thunder. And
the seriousness of the hour we are in comes home.

U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and
al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just
across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into
the biggest hornet's nest on earth?

How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S.
incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been
reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak
new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed
President Musharraf, fall?

What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its
five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America's great ally in
South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as
hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with
the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a
winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what
cost?

While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early
return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki
regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle
accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over
who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.

Is the end of America's long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an
Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil
Saakashvili's army with weapons and training prior to his invasion
of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly
strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and
considering new military aid to Syria.

Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated
Iran's nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the
Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.

Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new
aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid
is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S.
warships.

In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking
of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has
demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine -- a sphere
from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be
excluded.

This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to
bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, "We
are all Georgians now!" -- but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly
willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Joseph
Stalin's birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who
launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost
within 24 hours?

In June of 1914, a powerful flotilla of the Royal Navy was anchored
in the German port of Kiel on a friendly visit where British naval
officers visited German warships on the invitation of Adm. Von
Tirpitz, and the Kaiser himself inspected the great new British
battleship George V, in the uniform of a British admiral.

The festive occasion was interrupted and ended by news of the
assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in
Sarajevo in the Balkans, where neither British nor Germans had
vital interests.

Six weeks later, the two nations had plunged into the bloodiest war
in history. Today, as Republicans celebrate the last hours of a
hugely successful convention, and Democrats seethe at the hiding
they took, are we as a nation drifting inexorably for new
confrontations and larger and wider wars?

Thousands rally at Ron Paul convention

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (CNN) -- While Republicans pow-wowed in St. Paul, supporters of Ron Paul threw their own party in neighboring Minneapolis. Freedom brings people together," Paul said before a sold-out crowd at Tuesday's Rally for the Republic.

Paul, who said he entered the presidential race reluctantly, told the roaring audience, "I lost my skepticism. I hope you lost your apathy."

As the congressman stepped on stage, red, white and blue confetti fell from the ceiling during a two-minute standing ovation.

Paul said he entered the presidential race not because of what he wanted to do but because of what he did not want to do.

"I did not want to run people's lives. I did not want to run the economy and I did not want to run the world. I didn't have the authority to do it, and I didn't have the Constitution behind me to do it," said Paul, who has served in the House of
Representatives for more than 30 years.

King Kong Ain’t Got SHIT On J.C. Romero

King Kong Ain't Got S--t On J.C.
by TheFightins

West will need to look again at pipeline routes

When Dick Cheney, the US vice president, visits the Caucasus next week he will bring a message of support for Georgia in its struggle with Russia for control of its separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

But, during talks in both Georgia and Azerbaijan, he will express Washington's deep concern about the vulnerability of strategic oil export routes across the Caucasus to the west in the wake of the conflict between Georgia and Russia.

The east-west pipeline corridor from Azerbaijan across Georgia to Turkey serves the US's twin goals in the Caspian: to loosen Russia's stranglehold over oil exports from the region and to further isolate Iran by discouraging oil exporters from selecting Iranian export routes.

No pipelines were damaged during the brief war, although, coincidentally, an explosion in Turkey the day before hostilities broke out halted oil transport through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to the Mediterranean, the main artery for Azerbaijan's exports to the west.

Kurdish separatists have claimed responsibility for the incident on the pipeline, which at the time was carrying 850,000 barrels a day of oil.

Georgia's main east-west railway line was disabled by an explosion on a bridge near the town of Gori last week, choking off oil deliveries to Georgian Black Sea ports.

Meanwhile, Russian forces occupied an oil port at Poti after bombing a nearby Georgian military base, preventing ships from docking.

Kazakhstan evacuated Batumi, a Georgian oil port it owns on the Black Sea.

BP, the operator of Azerbaijan's biggest oilfield, resumed exports through the BTC pipeline on Monday, but has not reopened a pipeline from Baku to Supsa on the Georgian Black Sea it closed last week.

BP has not confirmed Georgian claims that Russian warplanes attempted to blow up the pipeline to Supsa during the war.

Georgian Railways has repaired track damaged when a train carrying oil products hit a mine on Sunday near Gori, a Georgian town attacked by Russian aircraft and then occupied during the war.

But a railway bridge near Gori destroyed by an explosion last week is still down.

Russia has denied Georgian accusations that it was responsible for the attack on the bridge

Alexander Lomaia, the secretary of Georgia's national security council, welcomed the reopening of the BTC pipeline, saying "Russia had failed" in one of its main goals in the conflict - "to gain control of Caspian and central Asian oil export routes across the Caucasus".

But analysts said the dispute would prompt Caspian oil producers to shy away from Caucasus export routes in future.

Russia invited Azerbaijan to ship additional oil through a pipeline from Baku to the Russian Black Sea as soon as fighting in Georgia erupted.

Gazprom is pressing Azerbaijan to commit future gas production to Russian export routes rather than the planned Nabucco pipe-line across the Caucasus to Europe. Nabucco is at the core of the European Union's strategy to reduce its dependence on Russian gas.

Azerbaijan said this week it would temporarily export oil to Iran to help ease constraints in the Georgian oil transit system.

Russia, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan already supply oil to Iran in exchange for supplies of Iranian oil on the Gulf.

US sanctions against Iran prevent American oil companies from exporting Caspian oil to Iran without first obtaining a waiver from Washington.

But Michael Carter, the chief executive of Visor Capital, a Kazakh investment bank, said: "If Georgia is perceived to be a de facto Russian export route, the west may have to reassess its relations with Iran."

Mets fans at their best - crying

Howard/Pedro Jack
by TheFightins

And None Dare Call It Treason

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

He is the principal foreign policy adviser to John McCain and potential successor to Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security adviser to the president of the United States.

But Randy Scheunemann has another identity, another role.

He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man.

From January 2007 to March 2008, the McCain campaign paid Scheunemann $70,000 — pocket change compared to the $290,000 his Orion Strategies banked in those same 15 months from the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili.

What were Mikheil’s marching orders to Tbilisi’s man in Washington? Get Georgia a NATO war guarantee. Get America committed to fight Russia, if necessary, on behalf of Georgia.

Scheunemann came close to succeeding.

Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho and West Virginia would be killing Russians in the Caucasus, and dying to protect Scheunemann’s client, who launched this idiotic war the night of Aug. 7. That people like Scheunemann hire themselves out to put American lives on the line for their clients is a classic corruption of American democracy.

U.S. backing for his campaign to retrieve his lost provinces is what Saakashvili paid Scheunemann to produce. But why should Americans fight Russians to force 70,000 South Ossetians back into the custody of a regime they detest? Why not let the South Ossetians decide their own future in free elections?

Not only is the folly of the Bush interventionist policy on display in the Caucasus, so, too, is its manifest incoherence.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have sought for 45 years to stay out of a shooting war with Russia and we are not going to get into one now. President Bush assured us there will be no U.S. military response to the Russian move into Georgia.

That is a recognition of, and a bowing to, reality — namely, that Russia’s control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and occupation of a strip of Georgia cannot be a casus belli for the United States. We may deplore it, but it cannot justify war with Russia.

If that be true, and it transparently is, what are McCain, Barack Obama, Bush, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing committing the United States and Germany to bringing Georgia into NATO? For that would commit us to war for a cause we have already conceded, by our paralysis, does not justify a war.

Not only did Scheunemann’s two-man lobbying firm receive $730,000 since 2001 to get Georgia a NATO war guarantee, he was paid by Romania and Latvia to do the same. And he succeeded.

Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic annexed by Joseph Stalin in June 1940 during his pact with Adolf Hitler, was set free at the end of the Cold War. Yet hundreds of thousands of Russians had been moved into Latvia by Stalin, and as Riga served as a base of the Baltic Sea fleet, many Russian naval officers retired there.

The children and grandchildren of these Russians are Latvian citizens. They are a cause of constant tension with ethnic Letts and of strife with Moscow, which has assumed the role of protector of Russians left behind in the “near abroad” when the Soviet Union broke apart.

Thanks to the lobbying of Scheunemann and friends, Latvia has been brought into NATO and given a U.S. war guarantee. If Russia intervenes to halt some nasty ethnic violence in Riga, the United States is committed to come in and drive the Russians out.

This is the situation in which the interventionists have placed our country: committed to go to war for countries and causes that do not justify war, against a Russia that is re-emerging as a great power only to find NATO squatting on her doorstep.

Scheunemann’s resume as a War Party apparatchik is lengthy. He signed the PNAC (Project for the New American Century) letter to President Clinton urging war on Iraq, four years before 9-11. He signed the PNAC ultimatum to Bush, nine days after 9-11, threatening him with political reprisal if he did not go to war against Iraq. He was executive director of the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq,” a propaganda front for Ahmad Chalabi and his pack of liars who deceived us into war.

Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain’s camp.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Why would McCain seek foreign policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George Bush?

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … a free people ought to be constantly awake,” Washington warned in his Farewell Address. Our Founding Father was warning against the Randy Scheunemanns among us, agents hired by foreign powers to deceive Americans into fighting their wars. And none dare call it treason.