Military historian Gareth Porter talks about the expansion of the “war on terror” into Pakistan, in what he says is another instance of a major disconnect between the Bush administration and the US intelligence community, and military operations directed by the Bush administration doing exactly what al Qaeda wants done, that in al Qaeda’s view Iran and the US are in reality “allied” to fight Islam and that al Qaeda is doing its utmost to drive a wedge between the two countries and foment a US attack on Iran.

Why is Bush helping them?

September 10, 2008 – 7 min 24 sec

Gareth Porter: US attacks tribal areas, al Qaeda celebrates 9/11 (Pt. 1)

From Steve Clemons at The Washington Note on Monday:

Now we’ve had a few days to see that in fact Sarah Palin has revved up a lot of Republicans.  She has also animated a lot on the left who fear her, and Barack Obama’s coffers are filling up fast with donations in response to the McCain/Palin ticket.

But among many progressive political junkies, of whom I consider myself one, a real depression has set in.

They see poll numbers showing a significant bounce for McCain — with one poll showing him 10 points ahead.  CNN has McCain ahead by two and the Washington Post has McCain and Obama in a dead heat.  But most other polls show McCain ahead at this point — and that is making a lot of pundits, writers, and activists hyperventilate.  

Guardian US editor Michael Tomasky wrote a note to me and a few others today encouraging folks to calm down.  I quote him with permission:

Let’s calm down a little. Let’s not live and die by the last poll or the last thing that Candy Crowley said. This will be decided by 1) debates 2) field and 3) ads, in that order.

Tomasky is wise.  There is a long way to go in the race.  I remember when John Kerry and Michael Dukakis were considerably ahead at this point in their races, and they were still defeated.  The same fate could befall McCain.

But this site seems to do a better job than any others I have seen of not getting seduced into the laziness of national polls.  It uses state polls to sort out what might happen in the electoral college.

FiveThirtyEight.com notes that there is new polling in five key swing states and after sorting it out, the analyst notes that McCain has made some modest inroads but that Obama still wins if the election was held tomorrow.  298 to 240 electoral votes.

A video essay in honor of Lasthorsemanship…

The Real News provides an investigative report and analysis of the mystery man behind John McCain’s extremist and ultra hawkish foreign policy views and plans to carry on and expand the attempts begun under George Bush to create a unipolar world dominated militarily by the U.S. as the sole single imperialist hyperpower at the expense of the rest of the world. We’ve already seen the backlash developing around the world to Bush’s attempts. McCain, with Scheunemann advising and pulling strings from behind the scenes, would create a world even more dangerous to the security of the United States.

If I were to coin a phrase here to summarize what a McCain presidency would look like, “All war all the time” seems the most apropos.

September 8, 2008 – 6 min 8 sec

McCain’s neocon foreign policy adviser has been a lobbyist for arms companies & Saakashvili’s Georgia

If the CERN Large Hadron Collider doesn’t end the world as we know it, we still have John Sidney McCain as the backup plan.

There is a big difference though. The LHC, if it’s experiments successfully bear out hypotheses, may provide physicists with a new understanding of the workings of the universe so fundamental that they will be able to fit the final few pieces of data into the final touches of a coherent Theory of Everything so complete that the fantasy of an invisible man in the sky ruling the universe will at long last be laid to rest, for anyone capable of critical thinking and reason at least, and the irrational dream world that people like McCain, Dobson, Bush, Palin, Kristol, Lieberman, Scheunemann and others inhabit may be one step closer to coming to an end.

On the other hand, if we are still here on November 08 an electoral win by McCain may simply set in motion the final few mindless political and military moves that will ultimately destroy America, civilization as we know it, and the environmental capability of the earth to support life.

Matt Welch, Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine, talking with Paul Jay of The Real News explains and provides a history of McCain and his ties to militant neocons.

September 7, 2008 – 8 min 25 sec

No moderate, no realist, McCain the neocon

Matt Welch is a journalist, blogger, pundit and a libertarian. Since 2008, he has been the editor-in-chief at the monthly libertarian journal, Reason. Recently (from 2006 to 2007), he was an editorial page editor for the Los Angeles Times. He has written a portrayal of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, from a libertarian perspective. In McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, Welch argues that a McCain presidency would advance a statist agenda.

Each presidential candidate may think that he is a bigger man than the other.

Well, it matters little what either of them may think, because there are powers greater than either of them and greater than any the President of the United States will ever command.

Unlimited powers that can vaporize whole planets, whole universes in fact, and the world just might end before either of them becomes president.

It turns out that there are much bigger and much smaller events taking place that affect us, all of us, no matter our gender, race, or political leanings, and make the presidential elections pale into insignificance.

When you look around you at all the objects, including yourself and other people, that make up the world, they appear to be of different sizes. What is it that determines what size an object is?

All objects you see are collections of molecules that are in turn collections of atoms that are in turn collections of hadrons; protons and neutrons, orbited by electrons. An atoms size is measured by the size of the orbits of the electrons.

If the mass of electrons were larger or smaller than is observed in nature, atoms would be larger or smaller, and consequently molecules and objects you see around you would be larger or smaller. So it is the mass of electrons that determines the size of everything you see, including the size of the man or woman that occupies the Oval Office.

John McCain may turn out to be a very small man after all. Possibly smaller a man than even George W. Bush.  

On August 8, 2008 Georgia under President Mikhail Saakashvili at the instigation of the Bush administration and PNAC neocons launched a major military offensive to retake the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Russia responded by sending tanks and troops into the area and rapidly broke Georgia’s offensive, forcing Georgian forces to retreat and abandon their aggresssion against the two provinces, and in the process announced to the world that the geopolitical balance of power had shifted and had been shifting for some time while Bush has had the US bogged down in quicksand in Iraq.

South Ossetia and Abkhazia have both moved to request UN and international recognition of their independence from Georgia, and South Ossetians have announced their intention to reunite with North Ossetia under the Russian Federation.

The McCain campaign, the Bush Administration, and US media have turned the situation and reality on it’s head with continual rhetoric condemning Russia for “aggression” and attempts to encircle Russia with a “missile defense shield”, when it was in reality Georgia supported by Washington and the neocons that had committed the aggression.

Obama has picked up on the McCain narrative and has also condemned Russia calling them the “aggressor”, and is now fighting the election on McCain’s terms trying to show that he is as “tough” or tougher than McCain on “national security”.

Andrei P. Tsygankov, Professor of Political Science and International Relations at San Francisco State University explains in this Real News video, and thinks that Obama will lose the election to McCain unless he rapidly differentiates himself from McCain over “national security” in the last few weeks of the campaign.

The other day Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern began a conversation with Paul Jay of The Real News about McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his VP running mate, and about what McCain knew about the selling of the invasion of Iraq based on demonstrably false information. Based on outright lies in other words, that straight talk express McCain happily supported and spread.

Today the conversation with Ritter and McGovern continues as they discuss the unquestioning free ride McCain is getting from US media in his presidential campaign. A campaign that, like the Iraq invasion, is based virtually entirely on lies. Lies disseminated and perpetuated by complicit media and “journalists” who are blatantly propagandizing and no longer even making any pretense at “journalism”, and thus allowing the RNC and McCain to being another campaign of lies now aimed at demonizing and attacking Iran and militarily confronting Russia.

September 3, 2008 – 17 min

Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern on McCain and the Iraq War

Pt. 2

Heh! Just kidding, folks!

There’s been quite a bit of speculation lately, fueled by Joe Biden’s own statements, that an Obama-Biden administration will pursue criminal investigations against George Bush and other members of the Bush administration.

The possibility that Barack Obama might seek to bring criminal charges against President Bush or members of his administration has been a recurring theme during the presidential campaign, especially since the Obama campaign has attempted to stress themes of bipartisanship. For that reason, Democrats have been quick to downplay any hints of possible criminal prosecutions.

Sen. Joe Biden aroused fresh speculations on Wednesday, when he suggested, “If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president — no one is above the law.”

Well, Joe being the straight talking regular Joe that he is after the quarter century or so of stand up comedy that has been his career in Washington, wanted to let the world know just how serious a guy he is and what, in his mind, change you can believe in really is.

How do we get from militarism to peace, not only in getting out of Iraq, but in avoiding possible future debacles such as an attack on Iran or military confrontation with other countries.

Parallel to the RNC in St. Paul a two day conference was held September 2nd and 3rd at Concordia University in St. Paul by a group called Peace Island.

Retired Colonel Mary Ann Wright was interviewed about her views on how to accomplish a US military withdrawal from Iraq and about her views on McCain’s threats to attack Iran and the catastrophe that would result from such an attack, as well as her thoughts on what it will take to move society from a militaristic footing to a peaceful one.

September 4, 2008 – 7 min 23 sec

Col. (Ret) Ann Wright on responsible US withdrawal from Iraq and the prospects for a peaceful future

Mary Ann Wright has been a career military woman, a State Department diplomat, and an influential spokesperson in the anti-war movement. She served 13 years in active duty, 16 years in the Army reserves, and another 16 years as a foreign diplomat in countries such as Nicaragua, Somalia, Uzbekistan, and Sierra Leone. She is coauthor with Susan Dixon of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience”, the stories of those in the Bush administration and other governments who have had the courage to speak out. “Dissent” was published January 2008 by Koa Books.

On August 14 we saw F W Engdahl explain in Nuclear War By Miscalculation, and The Russo-Georgian War and The Balance of Power how Russia went into Georgia to essentially deliver a message to America and the world that Russia was not prepared to submit to being encircled by the US and was taking steps to reassert its power on the global stage and limit neocon expansion.

In that same post we also read an in-depth intelligence background briefing from George Friedman, president of Stratfor, on the situation in Georgia and explaining the re-emergence of Russia as a major world power.

Friedman then on August 18, 2008 described for us “The Real World Order” that has been developing while Bush and the neocons were busy getting the US bogged down in quicksand in the Middle East.

Today Engdahl elaborates on the theme to expand our understanding of world events as he describes an “ironic” US foreign policy of trying to create an ‘iron curtain’ around Russia, and following the video George Friedman in “The Medvedev Doctrine and American Strategy” once again provides a very detailed geopolitical intelligence briefing of the current situation, it’s roots, and the multipolar world that is being forced upon an unwilling US foreign policy establishment and a political leadership in denial.

September 3, 2008 – 4 min 45 sec

F W Engdahl : US in decline as Russia asserts its rising power

US tries to create an ‘iron curtain’ around Russia

President Dimitri Medvedev criticized the European Union for having a biased approach in regards to the Georgian conflict. Medvedev however stated that the EU acted in a rational manner by not implementing sanctions against the Russian Federation. F William Engdahl believes the EU response mirrors its dependence on Russian oil and gas. Engdahl goes on to further state that the US provoked Russia to respond militarily and the US as the dominant power is beginning to stumble and “to look desperately for ways to hold on to that power.”

F William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.” Mr Engdhahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Mr. Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Asia, Inc, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine; Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland respectively. He is based in Germany.

A Spanish Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa’.

‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz’.

One of the students asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether ‘computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun.

Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.