Georgia On My Mind

Georgia on my mind…..

SOCHI, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev convened security chiefs on Tuesday to consider a plea from parliament to recognize two separatist regions of Georgia as independent, a move Washington says would be unacceptable.

The meeting came amid signs Moscow was preparing for a showdown with the West over its action in Georgia.

Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, compared the position to the eve of World War One, saying a new freeze in relations was inevitable.
"The current atmosphere reminds me of the situation in Europe in 1914 ... when because of one terrorist leading world powers clashed," Rogozin told the RBK Daily business newspaper.

"I hope (Georgian President) Mikheil Saakashvili will not go down in history as a new Gavrilo Princip," Rogozin said, referring to the man who in August 1914 killed Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, triggering the world war.

U.S. President George W. Bush said he was deeply concerned by the parliamentary votes. MORE

The BBC reports that the ceasefire agreement brokered by France had called on Russia and Georgia to pull back their forces to positions held on 6 August, before the outbreak of hostilities.

Russia, though, says it has the right to maintain a troop presence inside Georgia. It has created a buffer zone - what it calls an "area of responsibility" - around South Ossetia, which cuts into undisputed Georgian territory.

There are reports, too, of Russian soldiers digging in around the commercial port of Poti in western Georgia.

The United States and European leaders have criticized Moscow's limited pullout.

The Russians are playing "Chicken", and unfortunately for the people of Georgia, it looks like the Russians will win this round. Neither Europe nor the US has the capability to strong-arm The Russians into leaving Georgia. The Europeans need the gas, and the US needs Russia's cooperation on Iran (which it really won't get no matter what else happens).

Same ‘ol, Same ‘ol Party….The Democrats that is…

Racism at the Democratic Convention

Larrey Anderson at the American Thinker has a great post from the Democrat National Convention.

In typical reverse speech, the Democrats are the Party of Racism. How about just calling people Voters?

The guys at www.badattitudes.com provide some insight into Rep. Pelosi.

Is there a level of dishonesty that would embarrass Nancy Pelosi? It appears not.

Asked whether she classified herself as a "Washington insider" at a briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Pelosi answered, "Oh, absolutely not. No."

Who could possibly imagine that a mere 22 years in Congress made the daughter of a "prominent Maryland political family" part of the system? Just because she's spent her time as Speaker of the House making sure Bush and Cheney get everything they want?

Pressed for an explanation, Pelosi said that being an insider is about a person's "state of mind," not their tenure in politics.

"Inside, outside — you have to know the territory so you can work it, but you never become a part of it", she said.

This kind of dishonesty with herself helps us understand why she's been so dishonest with us.

Cindy Sheehan for Congress! Honesty, for a change.

The New York Times reveals that Sen. Obama and Sen. Biden are really about change, unfortunately for us, it's not small change. Oh yeah, all that talk about special interests and no more lobbyists? Forget it.

During the years that Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. was helping the credit card industry win passage of a law making it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy protection, his son had a consulting agreement that lasted five years with one of the largest companies pushing for the changes, aides to Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign acknowledged Sunday.

Mr. Biden's son, Hunter, received consulting fees from the MBNA Corporation from 2001 to 2005 for work on online banking issues. Aides to Mr. Obama, who chose Mr. Biden as his vice-presidential running mate on Saturday, would not say how much the younger Mr. Biden, who works as both a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, had received, though a company official had once described him as having a $100,000 a year retainer.

That old cliché that we talked about the other day, "Birds of a feather flock together"? Well, the Washington Post has revealed a clutch of magpies that would just love to settle in to the White House….

A son and a brother of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) are accused in two lawsuits of defrauding a former business partner and an investor of millions of dollars in a hedge fund deal that went sour, court records show.

The Democratic vice presidential candidate's son Hunter, 38, and brother James, 59, assert instead that their former partner defrauded them by misrepresenting his experience in the hedge fund industry and recommending that they hire a lawyer with felony convictions.

The legal actions have been playing out in New York State Supreme Court since 2007, and they focus on Hunter and James Biden's involvement in Paradigm Companies LLC, a hedge fund group. Hunter Biden, a Washington lobbyist, briefly served as president of the firm.

A lawsuit filed by their former partner Anthony Lotito Jr. asserts in court papers that the deal was crafted to get Hunter Biden out of lobbying because his father was concerned about the impact it would have on his bid for the White House. Biden was running for the Democratic nomination at the time the suit was filed.

Bruce Walker at the American Thinker points out the biggest missing story in politics……the results of the Battle Ground Poll

The Battleground Poll is different. It is bipartisan. A Republican polling organization, the Terrance Group, and a Democrat polling organization, Lake Research Partners, collaborate in picking the questions, selecting the sample population, conducting the surveys, and analyzing the results. The Battleground Poll website, along with the raw data, is "Republican Strategic Analysis" and "Democratic Strategic Analysis." There are few polls that are bipartisan. No other polling organization asks the same questions year after year, none that reveal the internals of their poll results so completely, and none ask anything like Question D3 in every survey.

since June 2002, in thirteen straight Battleground Poll results. Americans respond to this question more consistently than to any other question in those thirteen Battleground Poll surveys. People many change their opinions dramatically about Iraq or President Bush or drilling for oil, but not their answer to Question D3.

What is Question D3 and what were the results to Question D3 in the August 20, 2008 Battleground Poll? It is this:

"When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be...

Very conservative

Somewhat conservative

MODERATE

Somewhat liberal

Very liberal

UNSURE/REFUSED"

Sixty percent of Americans considered themselves conservative. Does this mean that most Americans do not know what "conservative" means? No: The question specifically provides an out to people who are not sure about their ideology; it provides an out to people who want to be considered "moderate." Americans reject those choices. They overwhelmingly define themselves as "conservative."

This is a huge political story - except that it is not "new" at all. Look at the thirteen Battleground Poll results over the last six years, and how do Americans answer that very question? Here are the percentages of Americans in those polls who call themselves "conservative" since June 2002: 59% (June 2002 poll), 59% (September 2003 poll), 61% (April 2004 poll), 59% (June 2004 poll), 60% (September 2004 poll), 61% (October 2005 poll), 59% (March 2006), 61% (October 2006), 59% (January 2007),63% (July 2007), 58%(December 2007), 63% (May 2008), and now 60% (August 08.)

The percentage of Americans who define themselves as "somewhat liberal" or "very liberal" has always been puny. In thirteen straight polls, this percentage has never been higher than 38% (June 2004) and it has usually been much lower. The gap between self-defined conservatives and self-defined liberals has been as high as thirty percentage points and as low as twenty-one percentage points. What does that translate into in electoral politics? If conservative presidential candidates simply got all the conservative votes - if virtually all moderate voters, uncommitted voters, and liberal voters went for the liberal candidate - then the conservative candidates would win a landslide bigger than Ronald Reagan in 1988. Have you ever wondered why liberals like Obama never call themselves liberals? Maybe their advisers have read the Battleground Poll internals.

The Man Behind The Mask

A number of reporters are starting to question the real story of Sen. Obama's background and meteoric rise to run for the Presidency. Aside from the recent book Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi (which I read last week), Michael Barone of US News published two articles that begin to shed some additional light on Obama's questionable history.

There is a difference between the two parties, however. The Democrats can usually depend on the mainstream media to accept their narratives uncritically, while the Republicans can expect them to punch holes in their story lines. In 1988, the media didn't note that Dukakis was less an earthy ethnic than a reformer in the Massachusetts Puritan tradition, but they were eager to point to the senior Bush's aristocratic eastern background.

The narrative of this year's Democratic National Convention can be forecast with some assurance. It will emphasize Barack Obama's roots in Kansas more than Kenya or even Hawaii; it will portray him as a leader from a new generation eager to cast off the partisanship of the past decade; it will hail him as a symbol that America has risen above past prejudices and can once again stand proud in the world. His acceptance speech in Invesco Field will invite comparison with the other two Democratic nominees who spoke in stadiums, Franklin Roosevelt in Philadelphia's Franklin Field in 1936 and John Kennedy in the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1960.

Pretty thin. An interesting question is whether mainstream media have any appetite for undermining this undeniably attractive narrative. Of "the whole Obama narrative," one reporter told the New Republic's Gabriel Sherman, "like all stories, it's not entirely true." Obama's record of reaching across party lines is, as his own answer to Rick Warren's recent Saddleback Civil Forum question showed, pretty thin. His paper trail is surprisingly thin, too: He has left no papers from his Illinois Senate days; he hasn't listed his law firm clients or provided more than one page of medical records; the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which he chaired and in which the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers was heavily involved, were suddenly closed to National Review's Stanley Kurtz by the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois. Mainstream media, with the conspicuous exception of ABC News's George Stephanopoulos, have shown little curiosity about Obama's connection with Ayers. It will also be interesting to see if there is much coverage of Obama's 2003 vote in Illinois against protecting infants born alive in attempted abortions, now that his campaign has conceded that the bill was virtually identical to one that passed the U.S. Senate 98 to 0 in 2001.

Michael Barone also picks up the thread of the William Ayers connection with Sen. Obama…….

In my U.S. News column this week, I make a brief reference to the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers and his connections to Barack Obama. They were closer than Obama implied when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers in the April 16 debate—the last debate Obama allowed during the primary season. To get an idea of how close they were, check out Tom Maguire's Just One Minute blog, and Steve Diamond's Global Labor and Politics. The Obama-Ayers relationship is also mentioned in David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate ..............

Which leads us back to Barack Obama, who is now a U.S. senator and will shortly become the Democratic nominee for an office that even Chicago regards as more important than mayor. And the question presents itself: How did this outsider from Hawaii and Columbia and Harvard become somebody somebody sent? His wife, Michelle Robinson Obama, had some connections: Her father was (I believe) a Democratic precinct committeeman, she baby-sat for Jesse Jackson's children, and she worked as a staffer for the current Mayor Daley. Obama made connections on the all-black South Side by joining the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church. But was Obama's critical connection to le tout Chicago William Ayers? That's the conclusion you are led to by Steve Diamond's blog. And by the fact that the National Review's Stanley Kurtz was suddenly denied access to the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge by the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. (Kurtz had already been given an index to the records.) Presumably the CAC records would show a closer collaboration between Ayers and Obama than was suggested by Obama's response to Stephanopoulos that Ayers was just a guy "in the neighborhood.” For Obama, the outsider who gained the trust of the insiders, the position is different. He was willing to use Ayers and ally with him despite his terrorist past and lack of repentance. An unrepentant terrorist, who bragged of bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, was a fit associate. Ayers evidently helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and politics—how much, we can't be sure unless the Richard J. Daley Library opens the CAC archive. But most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a man with Ayers's past or of Ayers's beliefs. It's something voters might reasonably want to take into account.

Clarice Feldman from Pajamas Media.com had an interesting report on Sen. Obama's relationship to William Ayers:

The last thing Obama should want made public are his dubious associates. The public has had some exposure to his long time spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, many have heard of the convicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, and some have just a bit of knowledge about William Ayers. As McCain said ……: "[I]f Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let's start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama's political career was reportedly launched . Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and banks. In recent years Mr. Ayers has stated, 'I don't regret setting bombs. … I feel we didn't do enough.'"

So, the story was that Ayers was an old professor in Mr. Obama's neighborhood who just happened to host a fundraiser for him in 1995 which launched his political career.

Some mush was thrown in along the way about having served with him on a charity board, but Obama did not correctly describe the charity or the dates or the extent of their association on it.

The truth is that the two men worked closely together for years, beginning several months before that 1995 fundraiser. The fund Obama chaired and which was supposed to improve public education in Chicago never met its stated purpose of improving public school pupils' performance and, in fact, probably hindered it, despite having blown through $110 million in the process. And as chairman of this group Obama funneled this money to politically useful types including Fidelistas and Maoists who like Ayers (now vice-president elect of the American Education Research Association) are working to make our public schools indoctrination centers for the left .

Once the public learns more of the CAC, will the voters decide that the manner in which Obama exercised his sole opportunity at executive authority was so good that he deserves the keys to the Oval Office?

All legitimate and required questions for one who is seeking to lead this nation…….

Democrats care more

Charity begins at home….except for Democrats

Joe Biden's Earned income: $298,200.

Honoraria, all donated to charity: $1,025.

That's 1/3 of one percent of his income. Senator and Mrs Obama have also been remarkably uncharitable in their giving, even to their favorite charity, Rev. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ.

Democrats do, however, want to your income to give to recipients around the world they deem worthy of your money.

The press seems to have no problem with this, or the fact that Obama's half brother is living on $1 a month, because Democrats care more