Tom Hayden posted this to Talking Points Memo:

"Was Georgia a Neo-Con Conspiracy? A Lesson for Obama

By Tom Hayden - November 10, 2008, 12:33PM
New revelations about Georgia's August war with Russia should send a warning to president-elect Barack Obama about how a commander-in-chief can be manipulated into war.

It now appears that the same neo-conservatives who manipulated the US into the Iraq war on false evidence were directly involved in backing Georgia's ill-fated operation on August 7-8, which eyewitness military observers have described as indiscriminate attacks by Georgia on Russian and civilian positions. The observers reports, first made in August and then October to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, were disclosed in the New York Times three days after the presidential election. [NYT, Nov. 7]

The new evidence increases the likelihood that the August 7-8 clash between Georgia and Russia was an "October Surprise" that would highlight John McCain's greater foreign policy experience at the height of the presidential election.

The Georgia fighting occurred immediately before the Democratic convention in Denver. McCain, the leading public advocate for Georgia, immediately declared "we are all Georgians now" and promised "to blast Russia." Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, at first called for greater diplomacy, but quickly fell in line with a bipartisan consensus of national security advisers and the mainstream media. Obama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, openly applauded the White House for its rapid response, including support for NATO's inclusion of Georgia and the Ukraine and a one billion dollar emergency appropriation.

The newly-released evidence for the "October Surprise" now deserves deeper reflection by Obama and his advisers, and greater investigation by the mainstream media.

The trail of evidence stats with Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser and former director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which secured some $90 million in federal funds to lobby for the fabricated agenda of Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi leading to the Iraq invasion.

Scheunemann became a registered foreign agent for Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgian government when it came to power in 2004, making $800,000 in fees for his lobbying firm, Orion Strategies, until the relationship on May 15 was formally terminated under McCain's 2008 campaign rules.

In those years, McCain traveled to Georgia more than once, nominated his "close friend" Saakashvili for a Nobel Prize in 2005, engineered support for Georgia through the Republican Democracy Institute, and supported the US training of combat forces there. With Schuenemann as his adviser, Saakashvili had campaigned on a platform of taking back South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Schuenemann was also his lobbyist when Saakashvili sent troops to retake two other separatist enclaves, Ajaria in 2004, and upper Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia in 2006, both over Russian objections. Schuenemann and McCain visited Georgia again in 2006.

Scheunemann invented the neo-conservative battle cry of "rolling back rogue states", used by McCain in a 1999 speech, an echo of the Cold War strategy of rolling back the Soviet Union, and was a paid lobbyist for Latvia, Macedonia, Romania, and the so-called Caspian Alliance, a consortium including British Petroleum, Chevron and Conoco building a pipeline through Georgia to bypass the former Soviet Union.

Scheunemann attacked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2006 for "appeasement" of Russia over Georgia, suggesting the same tensions between the neo-conservatives, McCain, and Cheney's office versus the State Department that undermined rational assessments in the runup to Iraq. [Financial Times, Oct. 21, 2006]

Now that Georgia's August 7 operation appears to have been pre-planned and deliberate, is it possible to believe that Scheunemann was unaware of a scenario that closely matched the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident? Before this becomes yesterday's news, someone should ask what did he know and when did he know it? Did the US advisers to the Georgian military know and not report the facts? In the unlikely event that they were uninformed and uninvolved, the McCain team was quick to exploit the moment to attack Obama for inexperienced wobbling.

There followed a complete acquiescence by the Democrats, led by Obama's national security advisers, whose Cold War conditioning apparently trumped their own experience of being manipulated into the Iraq war. Or was a political decision made that Obama could not afford to appear weaker than McCain on Russia? A reignited Cold War would have been fused with the War on Terrorism in one dominant paradigm.

Now that they are in opposition, there is little doubt that the neo-conservatives will continue their strategy of confrontation on the Russian border. These are people who deliberately exaggerated the Soviet military threat in the Reagan years, developed the Project for the New American Century [where Scheunemann was a director], fabricated evidence about Saddam's arsenal, and seemingly have never stopped. They could destroy an Obama presidency by demanding expenditures for multiple wars which America cannot win and cannot afford, or alternatively accusing him of weakening America in the world.

The important cautionary lesson for Obama is that his initial instincts favoring diplomacy were correct while his national security advisers failed him. There is a parallel with the early days of the John Kennedy presidency, when the national security establishment presented a plan for invading Cuba to a young president eager to prove his national security mettle. If Kennedy rejected the Bay of Pigs invasion, he would have been accused of weakness and treason. When the invasion turned into a debacle - the Cubans had detailed information about the training and landing sites - Kennedy was quoted later as wishing he could tear the CIA into a thousand pieces. Indeed, if the national security advisers had prevailed against the secret diplomacy of the Kennedy brothers, there might have been nuclear war over Cuba. John Kennedy's deep questioning of the Cold War began with those disastrous experiences.

Vice president Joe Biden famously warned that Barack Obama would be tested over national security policy in the first months of his tenure. That the testing may come from within the national security establishment, not only from foreign sources, should give Obama pause as he contemplates the time ahead."

Since I am such a happy warrior, I didn't get a lot of grief, but some people jumped all over Letitrip and said some very nasty things. However - she was right and her detractors were wrong. Unfortunately, too many Democrats fell for the same old GOP manure.

For the last several hours, I have revelled in the great pride I feel as an American to have witnessed the election of Barack Obama. President Elect Obama was not chosen by a special interest group. He was chosen by the majority of citizens - a coming together of African, European, Hispanic, Asian and Native Americans; college professors and grade school teachers; lawyers and union members; young and old; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and atheists; Democrats, Republicans and Independents; from the North, West, South and East, from Maine to Hawaii, Florida to Washington. He was chosen overwhelmingly by American citizens living overseas.

What the Obama/Biden victory represents to me is not just a vindication of my own aspirations as a person who always believed that, ultimately, the politics of hope would prevail over the politics of division and personal destruction. This is a defining moment in world history. It is Day One of the New Tomorrow. It's the day that my generation passes the torch to the next. I haven't been this proud since the '60s (yes, I'm that old) when great Americans like Dr King and Bobby Kennedy captured my imagination and taught me how to be a true patriot. I stand united with the new generation of Americans, without whom this great victory of hope over hate might not be possible. And what can I possibly say to African-Americans? The joy, the pride you must be feeling today I can't even begin to imagine, but I revel in it. Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful day for America!

We're probably looking at a vote recount in Minnesota. Give all the support you can to our friend and fellow Party Builder, Al Franken.

Can we please have the old format back?? Pretty please??

Have a happy day and get some well-deserved rest, and then think about it.

Love to all!

He did it, you did it, we did it!!!!

Love to all!!

Dresses up for occasion.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/lat-rewind-palin-fashion5-2008sep05-pg,0,7117033.photogallery?index=2

Gwen Ifill - woowoo!!

Democrat in Hershey, PA was blogging for Bush last year.

We have ways of finding out lots of things about you! Will resist stating your work address!

The Anti-Troll Patrol

preserve records.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080921/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney_lawsuit

http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/T/J/2/remedial-republican.jpg

Now this is funny...!

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/86415/1?slideshow=0

Good for Israel - good for the world.

http://www.adn.com/palin/story/524038.html

(Who just happens to blog here!)

on your primary win - way to go, Al!!

of Hannibal, Missouri, who got famous writing books.

Most of you have probably never been to Hannibal. I have, by virtue of the fact I grew up in the "tri-state area" near the Missouri/Iowa/Illinois border.

But Samuel Clemens (nom de plume Mark Twain) did not dwell in the parochial attitudes of small-town Missouri at the turn of the century. He may be most famous for his works of semi-autobiographical fiction, but before he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" he ventured out of Hannibal to San Francisco, as a war and social correspondent. There, he wrote about racism and shocked San Francisco's hoi polloi by walking down the street arm-in-arm with his good friend, the African-American editor of the newly-established black journal, The Elevator. Not for effect, but as a show of egalitarianism and solidarity with a fellow journalist.

Clemens not only took on politicians and the established "yellow journalism" of publishers like Hearst. He challenged the sacred cows of the late 18th and early 19th century, from Charles Darwin to Rudyard Kipling.

In February 1901, Clemens published "To The Person Sitting In The Darkness", his most influential and popular anti-imperialist essay. The title was borrowed from the book of Matthew used by Christian missionaries when referring to the "uncivilized, heathen" populations of the lands European and American imperialists were conquering for their resources and cheap and slave labor.

Look what this small-town man was up against. Clemens quoted in his study, "Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialistic Writings on the Philippine-American War" the Republican Senator from Indiana, Albert J. Beveridge: "The Philippines are ours forever, and just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the (rest of the) world". Beveridge represented the established view in an America where William McKinley was re-elected after pronouncing that he was on a mission from God to civilize the "little brown monkeys" of the Philippines.

Sam Clemens is a beacon to us all. A man with simple beginnings and an acute intellect who stood up against bad policies and worse moral failings.

In Clemens' time, they called him a "traitor". Today, we call him a "Great American Hero".

All the readers comments have been disabled.

This is dynamite!

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/09/9620_sarah_palin_secret_email.html

Is there some kind of shortcut for writing a new blog post or do I have to go into my dashboard every time?

An older person would be grateful for your assistance whenever you get a moment.

And the new color scheme is...uhh...errr....interesting...!

Now, John McCain's record:

MCCAIN VOTED AGAINST RELIEF MEASURES FOR VICTIMS OF HURRICANE KATRINA

McCain Voted Against Appropriating $109 Billion In Supplemental Emergency Funding, Including $28 Billion for Hurricane Relief. McCain voted against passage of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations of 2006.
Passage of the emergency supplemental bill would appropriate roughly $109 billion in emergency supplemental funding for fiscal 2006. It would provide $72.4 billion in fiscal 2006 funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and
foreign aid, not counting an almost 3 percent across-the-board cut to defense funds in the bill. It would provide more than $28 billion for hurricane relief, approximately $2.3 billion for pandemic flu preparations and $1.9 billion for border security efforts. [2006 Senate Vote #112, 5/4/2006]

McCain Voted Against Granting Access To Medicaid For Hurricane Katrina Victims For Up To Five Months. McCain voted against an amendment to provide emergency health care and other relief for survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
The amendment would grant access to Medicaid to Hurricane Katrina victims for up to five months; it also provided full federal funding for Medicaid in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama for up to one year; provide $800
million to compensate providers caring for Katrina evacuees; it temporarily suspended the Medicare Part B late enrollment penalty; and permit states hit by or serving evacuees to access the TANF Contingency Fund. It would be offset with funds unspent by the FEMA. [2005 Senate Vote #285, 11/3/2005]

McCain Voted Twice Against Establishing A Commission To Study The Response To Hurricane Katrina. McCain voted against amendments establishing a Congressional commission to examine Federal, State, and local response to
devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in U.S. Gulf Region, especially in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and other areas impacted in the aftermath and makes immediate corrective measures to improve future responses. [2006
Senate Vote #6, 2/2/2006; 2005 Senate Vote #229, 9/14/2005]

McCain Opposed Granting Financial Relief To Those Affected By Hurricane Katrina. In 2005, McCain voted against allowing up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits to individuals affected by Hurricane Katrina. [2005 Senate Vote #234, 9/15/2005]   Read More »

Hurricane relief and reconstruction - Barack Obama record:

• Sept. 2, 2005: Obama holds press conference urging Illinoisans to contribute to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
• Sept. 5, 2005: Obama goes to Houston to visit evacuees with Presidents Clinton and Bush.
• Sept. 7, 2005: Obama introduces bill to create a national emergency family locator system
• Sept. 8, 2005: Obama introduces bill to create a National Emergency Volunteers Corps.
• Sept. 8, 2005: Obama co-sponsors the Katrina Emergency Relief Act of 2005 introduced by Senator Harry Reid
• Sept. 8, 2005: Obama co-sponsors the Hurricane Katrina Bankruptcy Relief and Community Protection Act of 2005 introduced by Senator Russ Feingold
•   Read More »