Monday, 25 August 2008
KNOW YOUR ENEMY - The Shanghai Cooperation Organization
Topic: WORLD WAR III
This is the seal of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It is a 'mutual security organization' which includes Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Iran is an observer and expected to gain full status soon.
The map above shows SCO's current geographic reach in dark green and states with observer status in the organization in light green. Anyone noticing an eerie resemblance to the mapboard in RISK is not being paranoid - this may well be a campaign map for World War III. We'd be fools to ignore the possibility.
Those of us old enough remember that the old Warsaw Pact was a 'mutual security organization,' too. THAT 'mutual security organization' invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, murdered thousands of people for not being sufficiently Communist, held regular rehearsals to invade Western Europe, aimed thousands of nuclear missiles at the US, UK, Canada and Europe, and posed a threat to European and American security which has not abated yet - as recent events in Georgia show.
The Stalinist mentality which caused the Russians to mass hundreds of thousands of troops on the West German-East German border for thirty years despite any remote possibility that outnumbered NATO forces posed any threat to their Warsaw Pact alliance at all is alive and well.
The new Stalin, Vladimir Putin, has lost no time reviving Russia's old xenophobic distrust of the same West that spent freely to help Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin says that democracy and the West are responsible for the chaos following the dissolution of European Communism. That's one way of looking at it, I guess.
Another way would be to rid ourselves of the illusions so many of us, including me, harbored that there was any dealing with the nomenklatura, the "fortunate sons" of the Russian Empire. Communism wasn't the problem - Russia can't abide a world it doesn't run. That's the problem, and apparently it always WAS the problem. They are the Free World's malignant, manipulative mother-in-law. And as long as the financial security of the handful of men who wield true power in Russia is imperiled by the possibility that the seed of democracy will spread from the West to their own country and send them to jail, or simply packing from their plush lives, they will continue to stir up trouble and kill as many people as they think they have to.
There is no co-existing with them. Much of the money we paid them through the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program supposedly to reduce their stocks of weapons of mass destruction have actually gone to rebuild the Russian nuclear arsenal so that we cannot target it nearly as effectively as we were able to before it was largely moved to "Topaz" mobile missile launchers, and to make new varieties of nerve gas which our current antidotes won't be effective against.
Not to mention the Russians' ongoing work with diseases such as monkeypox and recombinant versions of Legionella designed to cause incurable, severe sclerosing damage to the human nervous system - research specifically prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention. Oops, I mentioned it, which may make me one of the few journalists to do so recently.
(I was one of the first bloggers to mention the scarcity of typewriters which could type superscripts in 1972-73 when a Democratic Party operative gave forged Texas Air National Guard memos to CBS and Dan Rather uttered them as factual in an attempt to smear the President's name during the 2004 election, so I don't think that I should be too modest with that description.)
We shouldn't fool ourselves about the good intentions of the people running this alliance, and we should be strongly aware that the concentration of political power in those countries means that the good intentions of most of their citizens means absolutely nothing. Most of their citizens cannot order invasions of other countries or call them back - their leaders have that power and guard it jealously. It's as though the members of the US Senate and House of Representatives were appointed by the President and none of them had to stand for re-election by the people.
World War III has never been closer.
Only a fool wouldn't prepare for it.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 3:17 PM MDT
Updated: Wednesday, 24 November 2010 7:19 PM MST
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Criticizing Bush on Iraq - Hindsight is sometimes 20/200.
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Commentary magazine recently printed a column, "Why Iraq Was Inevitable," by George Mason University historian Arthur Herman dealing with the current fad of condemning George Bush for getting us into the war with Iraq. As they point out, it's hard to remember that he had plenty of company in wanting to neutralize Iraq's potential as a home base for terror and a nexus for attacks on neighboring countries:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/why-iraq-was-inevitable-11456
"In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.
Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.
_____________
It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate:
Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. . . . Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.
These were the words of President Clinton on the night of December 16, 1998 as he announced a four-day bombing campaign over Iraq. Only six weeks earlier, Clinton had signed the Iraq Liberation Act authorizing Saddam’s overthrow—an initiative supported unanimously in the Senate and by a margin of 360 to 38 in the House. “Iraqis deserve and desire freedom,” Clinton had declared. On the evening the bombs began to drop, Vice President Al Gore told CNN’s Larry King:
You allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons. How many people is he going to kill with such weapons? . . . We are not going to allow him to succeed. [emphasis added]
What these and other such statements remind us is that, by the time George Bush entered the White House in January 2001, the United States was already at war with Iraq, and in fact had been at war for a decade, ever since the first Gulf war in the early 1990’s. (This was literally the case, the end of hostilities in 1991 being merely a cease-fire and not a formal surrender followed by a peace treaty.) Not only that, but the diplomatic and military framework Bush inherited for neutralizing the Middle East’s most fearsome dictator had been approved by the United Nations. It consisted of (a) regular UN inspections to track and dispose of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) remaining in Saddam’s arsenal since the first Gulf war; (b) UN-monitored sanctions to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to make more WMD’s; and (c) the creation of so-called “no-fly zones” over large sections of southern and northern Iraq to deter Saddam from sending the remnants of his air force against resisting Kurds and Shiite Muslims.
The problem, as Bill Clinton discovered at the start of his second term, was that this “containment regime” was collapsing. By this point Saddam was not just the brutal dictator who had killed as many as two million of his own people and used chemical weapons in battle against Iran (and in 1988 against Iraqis themselves). Nor was he just the regional aggressor who had to be driven out of Kuwait in 1991 by an international coalition of armed forces in Operation Desert Storm. As Clinton recognized, Saddam’s WMD programs, in combination with his ties to international terrorists, posed a direct challenge to the United States.
In a February 17, 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Clinton focused on what in his State of the Union address a few weeks earlier he had called an “unholy axis” of rogue states and predatory powers threatening the world’s security. “There is no more clear example of this threat,” he asserted, “than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” and he added that the danger would grow many times worse if Saddam were able to realize his thoroughly documented ambition, going back decades and at one point close to accomplishment, of acquiring an arsenal of nuclear as well as chemical and biological weapons. The United States, Clinton said, “simply cannot allow this to happen.”
So if William Jefferson Clinton had lived up to the lofty rhetoric in his speeches, we would have been in Iraq before the end of his administration - perhaps if Clinton's compulsive womanizing had left any intellectual energy in the Capitol for anything but impeachment hearings and abortive air raids such as Operation Desert Fox which did nothing to discover what was really on the ground in Iraq.
If George W. Bush hadn't sent the Armed Forces in to invade Iraq, hadn't pressured Saddam to hide (perhaps export) his weapons of mass destruction, such as the sarin nerve agent used on American troops after the war by insurgents, or the 450 tons of yellowcake uranium which was not in Iraq for glazing pottery, the impetus for the next President might have been a series of attacks on the American homeland with weapons from the Iraqi arsenal solicitously provided by the Iraqi hosts of Al-Qaeda and Ansar Al-Islam, both present in Iraq before the invasion.
But there's an election to steal, so the Democrats and their allies in the press are going to forget that the leaders of the Democratic Party were for the war up to, and after, the point at which it happened.
The reason we don't respond to this hypocrisy as such is that it's not remarkable coming from the Democratic Party.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 12:03 PM MDT
Updated: Sunday, 24 August 2008 12:12 PM MDT
Thursday, 14 August 2008
POLL: Does Web Ad Hypnotize Voters Into Thinking Obama Antichrist?
Mood:
mischievious
Topic: The Audacity of Obama
The press has been repeating a memo mailed to them by the Eleison Group, an ad agency which specializes in getting religious people to vote for the Democratic party and "progressive" causes, that the McCain campaign has created a powerful Web ad/video, "the One," which supposedly uses imagery from the "Left Behind" books to make people believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
No, really. The Antichrist. The Father of Lies.
Anyway, I watched the video many times, because it's pretty funny, and no urge to scour the Mark of the Beast from my skin overcame me, nor had I a feeling that Barack Obama was heading my way with four guys on horses behind him.
So I decided to take a poll to see whether anyone else felt that way after seeing this particular Web ad.
Please watch "the One," then take the poll.
(NOTE: neither I nor my ISP are responsible for any confusion between the Democratic front-runner in the Presidential race and the Antichrist which may result.)
_________________________________________________
This idiotic controversy has been brought to you by
the Eleison Group
- armtwisting religious people into voting for socialism since 2007.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 10:46 PM MDT
Updated: Saturday, 16 August 2008 4:21 PM MDT
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Tell your utility to build a fusion reactor
Topic: Take THAT, you...
We could be as little as five years away from clean, cheap fusion power.
Fusion, if you need a refresher, is one of two nuclear reactions that can give us energy.
Nuclear fission, the reaction we now use in nuclear power plants, splits the center (or "nucleus") of a heavy atom like uranium, thorium or plutonium into smaller atoms to release energy in the form of heat and radiation. We also use fission in nuclear weapons.
Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which light atoms like hydrogen, lithium, boron or helium are fused together into larger atoms, which also releases energy and radiation. Nuclear fusion is used along with fission in some nuclear weapons (usually the ones called "hydrogen bombs").
Nuclear fusion is harder to make happen outside of a hydrogen bomb. So far, fusion reactors are great, huge things that consume more power than they make. By contrast, the very first nuclear reactor (under the west stands at Amos Alonzo Stagg Field in The University of Chicago in 1942) made more energy than it consumed (essentially none) from the beginning.
But there are different ways to make this reaction happen that haven't really been explored with the money and energy that have gone into the big-iron thermonuclear reactors built so far, and the monstrous ITER reactor under construction in France (with American help in funding and design). Possibly the most promising one - one which its developers say could be producing power in as little as three to five years - is the Bussard Polywell fusion reactor.
Dr. Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist from the fun old days who designed a nuclear-powered cruise missile for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, also the father of the concept of the "interstellar ramscoop," was one of the major exponents of the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) concept.
Not many years ago, Dr. Bussard presented a talk at Google entitled "Should Google go Nuclear?" (amid rumors that Sergei Brin and some of the other investors in Google were thinking about funding him):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
For those who, like me, like written presentations of technical data better, there's a written transcript:
http://askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/Should%20Google%20Go%20Nuclear.pdf
and a Web page on the progress made by Dr. Bussard's group:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/01/bussards-inertial-electrostatic.html
ICF doesn't have to emit or use neutrons - the boron-11 (80% of natural boron is boron-11) + proton (ionized hydrogen) inertial confinement reaction emits no neutrons and it emits charged particles that can be captured in the magnetically-active inertial confinement grid to produce electrical current directly.
Boron-11 + proton --> Helium-4 + Helium-4 + energy
Producing electrical current in the reactor is something no other reactor design, fusion or fission, does. It's brilliant - it has far fewer systems and parts than other reactor designs. Instead of a huge concrete reactor dome next to a large concrete building holding the generators and water pumps and auxiliary diesel generators, a Bussard Polywell fusion power reactor would sit in a single building, about a story or two tall. The transformers would be the same, because electrical power is electrical power.
What's better is that the power wasted when a nuclear reactor or an oil or coal furnace heats water into steam to spin electrical generators, then pumps the water from the cooled steam back into the reactor is not wasted in this design. Much, much more of the energy made by the Bussard Polywell design goes out of the reactor as electricity.
Finally, and best of all - no meltdowns. When a Polywell fusion reactor breaks, it just stops. No explosions, no radioactivity, no muss, and no fuss.
Calculations indicate that a full-scale Polywell IEC reactor could produce as much as 128 gigawatts of power. Normal fission reactors and oil and coal power plants top out at 1 - 2 gigawatts. And Polywell fusion reactors are much, much cheaper to build per unit of energy generated than current nuclear reactors.
The projected cost to build the first power-generating Polywell IEC reactor is about $200 million, with a generating capacity of a gigawatt. The reactor would be 4 meters (about 4.3 yards or 13 feet) across and weigh 14 tons. You could install one inside a medium-sized freighter.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/01/bussards-inertial-electrostatic.html
By comparison, it costs between $2,000 million ($2 billion) and $3,800 million ($3.8 billion) dollars to build modern fission power plants for a generating capacity of 1.05 and 1.15 gigawatts.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/17/18348080.php
So electricity made by Polywell fission plants could cost up to nineteen times less than electricity generated by existing nuclear plants. And if the boron-11 + proton reaction can be made to work in large Polywell reactors, this would be CLEAN nuclear power, with no neutrons and very little, perhaps no radioactive waste.
Say that three-fourths of your utility bill is related to power generation costs and fuel, and your power is all made by nuclear power plants (both very conservative assumptions favoring present-day utilities). If you pay 12 cents/kilowatt-hour for power, 9 cents of that may be traceable to power plant operations and fuel.
Replace the current power plant with a Polywell fusion power plant, and this part of your electricity rate drops to 0.47 cent. Your overall power rate becomes 3.47 cents instead of 12 cents. You get to spend 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour you use on other things, assuming your power use remains the same. Your power bill drops by 71 percent.
If you, for the sake of argument, use 2,000 kilowatt-hours of power a month, your power bill is 240 dollars a month if you pay 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. Drop that rate to 4.8 cents and your bill drops to $69.40.
Interestingly, power output in Polywell reactors varies exponentially with physical size.
Double that hypothetical 4-meter Polywell reactor in size and you get a reactor theoretically capable of generating 128 gigawatts! (exclamation point mine)
I don't know how much that 8-meter Polywell reactor would cost to build, but even if it cost a billion dollars, the part of your electricity bill traceable to power plant construction and operation would be reduced up to 128 times.
Using that analysis of mine again, this part of your present 12 cents per kilowatt-hour electrical power rate falls to 0.07 cents. Your rate could drop to 3.07 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Say again that you use two thousand kilowatt-hours a month. At 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, now you pay $240 a month for power. At 3.07 cents per kilowatt-hour, that bill is now $61.40 most of it payroll, debt service, maintenance of the power distribution grid, etc. The power generation cost (assuming a 128 gigawatt power plant) for 2000 kilowatt-hours would be $1.40.
Since nuclear power right now is twice as cheap as coal power and many times as cheap as oil, even cheaper than natural gas, the cost advantage of fusion power over fossil power is even greater.
We're really talking about knocking the props out from under Russia and OPEC. If we get this concept to work and sell these plants around the world, Vladimir Putin is going to have to drink generic brand vodka. Works for me.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 7:01 PM MDT
Updated: Wednesday, 24 November 2010 7:29 PM MST
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
IN 52 SECS WHY BARACK OBAMA WON'T WIN THE GENERAL ELECTION
Topic: The Audacity of Obama
Just in case we need reminding why disarmament and "peace-oriented" defense policy don't work, the Russians decided to remind us two days ago.
But some people won't learn until it's too late.
One of them is Barack Obama.
Hear him explain why in his own words:
This is your country on dope on January 20th 2009 if Obama wins.
Any questions?
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 8:55 PM MDT
Updated: Tuesday, 12 August 2008 10:34 PM MDT
Monday, 11 August 2008
Putin = Hitler
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Vladimir Putin has been playing terrorist for years, now. Maybe not a big surprise for someone who used to work for the KGB, but cheesy behavior for a head of state all the same.
Now he's going whole Adolf Hitler hog - terrorizing entire countries. The Cold War just came back.
I've heard talking heads say that we need Russian help with Iran, but it seems to me that we've been played by those two countries on the nuclear issue, as well as on Iran's involvement with Iraqi terrorists, the two areas the talking heads say we need Russia's help with. If what we see now is "help," we can do without it.
Europe needs Russian natural gas. Maybe they also need to drill in the Baltic and other areas which have deposits of natural gas, as well as exploring alternative fuels (something we're badly overdue to do here in the United States, too). Certainly they need to think about Putin's next step. Putin and his generals have their walking shoes on, and they've behaved more aggressively than the occupants of the Kremlin have since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
And we need allies that don't screw us over when we're not watching.
A President who doesn't go play women's volleyball at the Olympics when an ally of ours is being invaded by Russia would be nice, too. That tiny rattling you may have heard during the Olympic Games yesterday was George W. Bush's balls rolling down his pants leg and down the stadium bleachers in Beijing.
Not that Obama was much better - oh, he'd file a complaint at the United Nations - the same United Nations whose Security Council Russia has a veto over, and the same United Nations whose Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, slobbered all over Putin's shoes when he promised to start paying full UN dues for the first time in the past several decades.
McCain talked a good game, and he had a good suggestion (he actually made it prior to the invasion) - kick Russia out of the G8. They don't belong there, anyway - based on national economic health, India and Brazil both have better claims.
When the ravages of crony capitalism catch up with the Russian energy and mining industries, we may see babushkas in the streets asking for handouts again.
The Russian stock market took a dive earlier, when with his trademark finesse, Putin made the same noises about the head of a major metals conglomerate that he did about Khodorovsky before taking the oil company Yukos away from him. It rebounded slightly after the new President of Russia, Medvedev, made vague critical noises about his boss; then took another hit when war broke out. Medvedev told everyone the war's almost over today, which you can take several ways, none of them very cheerful. The Russian stock market's up a little again.
But when Russia gets the bad news about economic sanctions (about the only handle we have on the bastards), their stock market is going to look like ours after September 11th, 2001. Try running a company with a vodka buzz on without overseas orders, guys.
For those of you who cut History of Western Civilization, part 2 when they were discussing the Sudetenland Crisis, Adolf Hitler did the same thing Putin's trying in Czechoslovakia.
In 1938, some German-speaking people lived in a part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. According to Hitler, the Czechs decided to pick on Germans living in their country after Germany had built up the world's largest military force. Go figure. Next thing you know, the German Army is bounding through Czechoslovakia and the Sudeten Germans aren't nearly as important as taking over Czechoslovakia.
Sound familiar, anyone? Putin is the new Hitler.
And, because we didn't reactivate the military draft when it became clear we were in a century-long war with fanatical Muslim terrorists, who might someday get nuclear weapons (and with the progress we're making right now with Iraq and North Korea, that sounds more and more like a "certain to" than a "might"), we have very few strategic options apart from very harsh language. Or, if John McCain is elected, very, very harsh language, interspersed with cluster bombs.
They call it a War Against Terror because we're supposed to mobilize industry, build the armed forces up, start up the draft, and get ready to kick ass. What happened?
Putin had the nerve to say that he was upset because we brought the Georgian soldiers serving beside our own soldiers in Iraq back home to fight, so we weren't being very good partners.
Just wait until McCain gets into the White House, asshole.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 7:25 PM MDT
Updated: Monday, 11 August 2008 9:30 PM MDT
Saturday, 9 August 2008
Democrat Ad Agency Eleison Group Lies About the "The One Ad"
Topic: The Audacity of Obama
A close reading of the Eleison Group's analysis of McCain's "The One" versus the ad itself shows that the Eleison Group brought all of the bad faith and deception of which they complain to their analysis. They lied, and they lied and they lied.
For those of you who don't know, the Eleison Group is a political ad agency whose Web site www.eleisongroup.com advertises its services as getting strongly religious people to accept the Democratic Party's agenda. (Getting Catholics and Evangelicals to vote for Obama should be tough - his votes against requiring abortion clinics not to kill babies who survive abortion procedures in the Illinois State Senate are a matter of public record.)
According to co-founder Eric Sapp, "Eleison Group is going to be a group that works with Democrats and progressive non-profits to engage the faith community, help people communicate their values in an authentic way, and push forward on the notion that the best way to engage faith in the public square is from a place of religious humility instead of one of religious arrogance."
In other words, this heavily publicized "analysis" is the Eleison Group doing what they say they'll do - getting evangelical Christian voters to vote for people they ordinarily wouldn't. (And "pushing forward on the notion that the best way to engage faith in the public square" is for evangelicals to humbly vote the way that Eleison Group and the Democrats tell them to.)
And the "mainstream media" ran Eleison Group's partisan political press release as straight news because they thought they could get evangelical Christians to vote for Barack Obama.
Does anyone really think that there are so many readers of the "Left Behind" books in the pool of uncommitted voters that the McCain campaign would spend the money required to make very obscure, esoteric references to them in major media markets? No.
LaHaye & Company probably have more people reading their books right now to find stuff McCain's people are supposed to have put in that ad than they've had in the last two months before the synthetic furor over this ad.
To someone who hasn't quaffed deeply of the Obama Kool-Aid, the context and the message of the ad are obvious - Obama has cast himself as the Messiah. Obama's doing, and Obama's fault - not McCain's.
Obama's campaign constantly makes use of religious overtones to put his audiences in a receptive frame of mind. His imagery - especially the "Audacity of Hope" trope - borrows heavily from the religious background of the civil rights struggle. Whether he comes out and says he's the answer to the uncommitted voter's prayers or not, that message is there. Obama comes across as very impressed with himself in the clips we see in the "One" ad.
Obama made the decision to play around with overtures to religious, or at least numinous imagery. McCain's ad is just calling BS on him for it, and doing it in a way that highlights the absurdity of the Obama message.
Obama's partisans are intensely uncomfortable with this ad because it shows a home truth about their man - that he has hoodwinked millions of people by a conscious, crafted appeal to their religious sense. Until the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was caught channeling Adolf Hitler, he and his office were also used to wrap Obama in the altar linens.
Obama told people that Wright inspired the book "The Audacity of Hope."
This ad has raised so many hackles with the Obama camp because it shows the truth about their man:
The Audacity of Hype
If you haven't seen the ad, don't take the word of one of Obama's ad agencies or my word, see it for yourself - it's hilarious.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 10:34 PM MDT
Updated: Sunday, 10 August 2008 12:53 AM MDT
Friday, 8 August 2008
War Between Russia and Georgia
Mood:
incredulous
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
I am stunned. A shooting war has broken out between Russia and Georgia and until just now, CNN has been talking about some sex scandal involving John "Senator Gone" Edwards.
I managed to get Email to my contact list before CNN as much as mentioned the Russian-Georgian War.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7549594.stm
Trouble between Russia and Georgia has been brewing for some time - minor skirmishes on their border and in the South Ossetia region of Georgia which wants to break away and become part of Russia. There's been a lot of major harassment - dead animals thrown in rivers running through both countries, Internet warfare against the Georgian government, minor armed actions.
Since Georgian troops are serving in Iraq alongside our own, they have urgently requested that we airlift their troops back home to help in the defense of their homeland. The US also has troops in Georgia training their army; we have civilians working in the oil industry there as well.
The precipitating event seems to have been breach of a ceasefire between South Ossetian separatists and Georgian government forces - the separatists attacked the Georgian government, provoking a harsh response from the Georgian internal security forces. Russia has used the death or injury of Russians serving as peacekeepers in the South Ossetia region as an excuse to invade Georgia.
So far, only delays in the admisssion of Georgia to NATO have kept this from being the first shot in another European, possibly a World War.
It's as I've been saying - Russia has been arming for an aggressive foreign policy which will almost inevitably lead to war.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 3:49 PM MDT
Updated: Sunday, 10 August 2008 12:51 AM MDT
Sunday, 3 August 2008
James A. Johnson Slimed, Resigns from Obama VP Search Team
Topic: The Audacity of Obama
While playing with Muckety.com (which specializes in interactive Java-based maps of personal and corporate relationships among the nation's powerful) I discovered a bit of news that got past me while I was having surgery and recuperating from it in late June and early July:
James A. Johnson, head of the Vice-Presidential Search Team for Barack Hussein Obama's 2008 Presidential Campaign, resigned from that post in June 2008.
http://news.muckety.com/2008/06/11/johnson-resigns-from-obamas-vp-search-team/3361
According to the muckety.com article,
"Obama appointed Johnson last week to a three-member team to vet possible running mates. But the longtime Washington insider became a lightning rod for criticism after the Journal reported last weekend that he had been the recipient of at least five real-estate loans totaling $7 million from financially beleaguered Countrywide Financial, as a friend of chief executive Angelo R. Mozilo.
At least two of the mortgages were at rates below market averages, though the Journal wrote that is difficult to predict a market rate without access to nonpublic information about a borrower’s credit history.
Johnson, who vetted vice-presidential nominees for John Kerry in 2004 and Walter Mondale in 1984, was the chief executive of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. The government-sponsored shareholder-owned company is the biggest buyer of Countrywide’s mortgages.
Johnson’s ties to Mozilo became a campaign issue after Republicans pointed out that Obama had been critical of the mortgage lender in campaign speeches.
During his years at Fannie Mae, Johnson reportedly worked closely with Mozilo - naming him chairman of Fannie Mae’s national advisory council in 1996. An American Banker article in 1999 said the two men had a “close friendship.’”
Criticism mounted after the New York Times reported today that Johnson was involved in several controversial executive compensation decisions, serving on the boards of five companies that granted lavish pay packages to their executives - and, in some cases playing a key role in approving them.
One of the better-known cases involved UnitedHealth Group, a Minnesota company, where Johnson was a board member and later headed the compensation committee, according to Times reporter Leslie Wayne. The company came under fire after chief executive William McGuire was granted more than $1.4 billion in stock options - some $618 million of which was returned as a result of settlements with federal regulators and shareholders.
McGuire resigned, but kept $800 million from the package.
That and cases like it led Obama to introduce legislation last year that would give shareholders an advisory role in executive compensation packages. The measure, called “Say on Pay,” passed the House and is still pending in the Senate.
Johnson was also criticized by oversight groups for the number of corporate boards on which he served while holding a full-time position at Fannie Mae. Besides United Health, he was a director of Goldman Sachs, KB Homes, the Gannett Corporation, Temple Inland and Target.
Johnson said in his statement today that he had done nothing wrong, saying “blatantly false statements and misrepresentations” were written about him.
“Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept,” Obama said in an e-mailed statement.
Obama said he is “confident” his vice presidential search process will produce “a number of highly qualified candidates” in coming weeks.
The remaining members of the vetting team are Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late President John F. Kennedy Jr., and former deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder."
The New York Times article which Muckety.com cited above led with a summary that seemed to dismiss the problem with Johnson as being a partisan smear, but the following paragraphs tell a different story.
I'll let you decide whether this is just politics as usual, or whether or not Obama is the shag toy of the big national banks:
"Republicans and their presumed presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, have criticized Mr. Johnson, the former chairman of Fannie Mae, accusing him of getting favorable rates on three home mortgages totaling $1.7 million as a friend of the chief executive of the Countrywide Financial Corporation, the troubled mortgage lender that has became a symbol of the excesses that led to the crisis in subprime mortgage."
That was the second paragraph from the top, and given what comes next, I wonder whether or not typical journalistic practice - the "inverted pyramid" style of reporting in which the facts are trotted out first, then the speculation and editorializing (if any) are presented - would have called for this paragraph to be placed dead last in the article.
Here's what came afterward:
"Mr. Johnson was also involved in some of the more controversial executive compensation decisions in recent years, serving on the board of five companies that granted lavish pay packages to their executives — and often playing a key role in approving them.
One of the more well-known cases involves UnitedHealth Group, a Minnesota company, where Mr. Johnson was a board member and later head of the compensation committee.
The company came under fire after the chief executive was granted more than $1.4 billion in stock options — some $618 million of which was returned as a result of settlements with federal regulators and shareholders.
The executive, William McGuire, resigned, but he kept $800 million from the package.
Because of cases like UnitedHealth Group, Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, introduced legislation in the Senate last year to restrict runaway compensation.
The measure, informally called “Say on Pay,” would give shareholders an advisory role in setting executive pay packages. It passed the House and is pending in the Senate.
In introducing the measure, Mr. Obama said it was intended to “force corporate boards to think twice before signing over millions of dollars to C.E.O.’s.”
He added that “the rate at which executive pay has grown, as compared to stagnating wages among American workers, is rightfully frustrating shareholders and employees alike, especially given the lackluster performance of many of the companies paying these high salaries.”
Now, shouldn't all of that have come first?
This is the news - that Obama has been very cozy with the same investment bankers and executive board members who got us in the foreclosure crisis in the first place, and who have been giving each other multi-million dollar "golden parachutes" even when they screw up, while ordinary employees don't get raises for years and years, and sometimes have to take pay cuts. These are the people who run his campaign, who tell him what to do and what to say.
And if you have to have political commentary, instead of blaming John McCain for Obama's cluelessness (or even Obama's collusion with the big banks), this is what the lead paragraph should have been:
“Jim Johnson is an unusual choice for Obama to have heading up his vice-presidential selection committee,” said Charles M. Elson, head of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware.
“Johnson found himself in the middle of the controversy that spurred the introduction of the Say on Pay bill,” Mr. Elson said. Given that Mr. Obama is leading the effort to rein in such excesses, “that makes it more strange,” he added.
Say on Pay is directed at the kind of decisions that led to enormous compensation packages at UnitedHealth Care and at four other companies where Mr. Johnson headed the compensation committees. One of them was Goldman Sachs, where Mr. Johnson defended a pay package granted to Henry Paulson, now the treasury secretary, that allowed Mr. Paulson to keep an extra $26 million in stock options.
At some of the companies where Mr. Johnson sat on the board, controversy erupted after packages were approved that included the backdating of options — or the practice of granting options to corporate executives on dates when the company’s share price was low, to guarantee the maximum profit when the options were exercised.
UnitedHealth Care reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholders over the issue in December.
In return for his work on the UnitedHealth Care board, Mr. Johnson received more than 3.1 million stock options, with an underlying value of about $175 million. He also received a director’s fee of $400,000 a year.
Oversight groups have also raised questions about the number of boards on which Mr. Johnson served while holding a full-time position at Fannie Mae. Besides UnitedHealth and Goldman Sachs, he served on the boards and compensation committees of KB Homes, the Gannett Corporation and Temple Inland. He was also a board member at Target.
“He was on the boards of five companies at the time we had flagged him in our reports,” said Paul Hodgson, senior research analyst at the Corporate Library, a company that analyzes corporate governance issues. “Two of those were involved in the backdating of stock options, and the levels of executive compensation at four of them were considered excessive.”
In other words, Obama went out and got himself one of the biggest corporate robbers in history as chairman of his vice-presidential selection team. He says one thing on the floor of the Senate and before the microphones and cameras, but does the exact opposite when no one's paying close attention. The people who are paying for Obama's Presidential run are, mostly, the people who are profiting from the bind that so many American citizens are in these days.
If Obama and his team are as bright as they and their friends in the press tell us they are, how did this get past them? If they care so much about the common man, couldn't they be bothered to pick up a newspaper or search the Internet for information about their new, rich friends?
Or am I missing the point here? Will the Obama campaign will take ANYONE'S money? Dirty or clean?
-
And what does the Obama campaign have to say about all this?
"The Obama campaign did not directly respond to questions about Mr. Johnson, nor did it provide additional information about the terms of the mortgages that he received from Countrywide.
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama responded by saying, “I am not vetting my V.P. search committee for their mortgages.”
Because if you did, BO, you'd discover a fetid rat's nest of sweetheart loans, golden parachutes, and other ways of picking the pockets of corporate shareholders (a group which includes any citizen with an investment account, and any member of a mutual fund or IRA).
These people are the real bank robbers of the 21st century - the real home invaders, and the real world-class thieves. They suck money out of private corporations in return for very, very little - business decisions which more often than not turn out very badly for the corporations involved - and walk away with MILLIONS in company shares and cash.
And Obama doesn't check up on their finances before he lets them run his campaign. Could it be because his job is to cover up for them?
He's done it before, with the "Class Action Reform Act," a rapacious piece of legislation against which almost every other Democratic senator voted - but not Obama. He anchored that bill in the Senate, made sure it passed through the Senate.
So now, thanks in part to Senator Obama, corporate thieves and crooks must be sued through the already overburdened Federal court system, not at state or local levels.
And he'll do it again.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 1:37 PM MDT
Updated: Sunday, 3 August 2008 1:49 PM MDT
How the Teamsters Shot Themselves in the Foot by Supporting Obama
Topic: The Audacity of Obama
The Teamsters Union officially announced their support for Barack Obama on February 20th, 2008.
http://www.teamster.org/08news/nr_080220_6.asp
According to the big boss Teamster, James Hoffa, Jr.,
“Senator Obama will stand with the Teamsters when it comes to fighting for working families,” Hoffa said. “This endorsement begins a partnership to change America. Together we will reinvent the political process and give a voice to those who have been ignored by the Bush administration for the past eight years.” Hoffa emphasized Obama’s commitment to rebuilding and strengthening the national transportation infrastructure, a key priority of the Teamsters Union.
“Senator Obama will fight to rebuild our transportation infrastructure,” Hoffa said. “He will work with us to address critical issues from our ports to our highways, rails and airports. We need a president who is focused on rebuilding America and Barack Obama will be that president.”
That was then. This is now.
According to the Denver Post, August 3, 2008 Sunday edition, page 10K:
"Union objects to Frontier deal"
The Teamsters union is trying to block bankrupt Frontier Airlines' new $75 million financing agreement with private equity firm Perseus LLC, objecting to labor-cost cuts required by the deal.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents 435 Frontier workers, including its mechanics, filed a motion Friday in bankruptcy court asking a judge to reject the agreement.
The Teamsters said Frontier is illegally trying to throw out existing labor contracts."
Why does this involve the Obama campaign?
The Web site muckety.com is a wonderful tool for digging out information on who's connected with whom:
http://www.muckety.com/2008-Barack-Obama-VP-search-team/5030085.muckety
for example, shows the membership of Barack Obama campaign's Vice-presidential search team:
James A. Johnson, Eric A. Holder, and Caroline Kennedy.
As we can see from THIS muckety.com map,
http://www.muckety.com/Perseus-LLC/5001487.muckety
Mr. Johnson has many fingers in many pies, but his butt is firmly in the Vice-Chairman's swivel recliner at Perseus LLC.
However, James A. Johnson is no longer affiliated with the vice-presidential search team for Barack Obama's campaign, owing to a Wall Street Journal article that uncovered the possibility that Johnson got sweetheart loans (in other words, loans on much better terms than ordinary mortals can get) from Countrywide Financial Services.
http://news.muckety.com/2008/06/11/johnson-resigns-from-obamas-vp-search-team/3361You'd think that if Obama were all that concerned with making things better for Teamsters, he wouldn't take help or money from Perseus LLC after they just tried to invalidate Teamster contracts with Frontier Airlines - wouldn't you?
The result of support for Obama for the Teamsters at Frontier Airlines is that a huge investment bank which has Obama in their pocket has told Frontier that these particular Teamsters... well, that they lose.
The Teamsters at Frontier Airlines lose money if the labor cost cuts in Perseus' financing agreement with Frontier survive court challenges, and they lose that wonderful influence that Obama promised the Teamsters before they decided to come down from the fence on his side instead of Hillary Clinton's.
BS walks, money talks. Look at the results so far before you cast that vote in November, people.
Posted by V.P. Frickey
at 12:23 PM MDT
Updated: Sunday, 3 August 2008 2:00 PM MDT
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