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POPSMoscow’s Plan is to Redraw the Map of Europe: Mikheil Saakashvili
Since Russia’s invasion, its forces have been “cleansing” Georgian villages in both regions – including outside the conflict zone – using arson, rape and execution. Human rights groups have documented these actions. It hopes the west will forget ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia drove out more than three-quarters of the local population – ethnic Georgians, Greeks, Jews and others – leaving the minority Abkhaz in control. Last week Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president, put us on alert: “Russia does not really know where it begins and where it ends.” He noted that the Moscow regime is “a lot more sophisticated” than the Soviets under Leonid Brezhnev. He should know – he was on the front line the last time Russia invaded a European country. Backing Georgia with Europe’s political and financial institutions is a powerful response. The most potent western response to Russia is to stay united and firm by providing immediate material and political support.
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POPSPutin wants human rights survey in europe - Socrates agrees Europe ssupports Human Rights organizations in russia. Now has come the time to give it back by founding a russian human rights survey in europe. Observing the rights of marginal groups, as immigrants, ethic minorities and media will be it's task. Thank you, President Putin.
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POPSObama's Senate service, Part 2 Especially focused on foreign policy and veterans' affairs; becomes chair of Foreign Relations' Committee's subcommittee for European Affairs.
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POPSKaradzic brings Humor in The Court Twelve and a half years ago, when the corpses in these mass graves were still fresh, the arrest of Radovan Karadzic might have made a difference. True, the world knew even then that the so-called president of the breakaway Serb region of Bosnia and Herzegovina was more the foreman than the architect of the worst massacres in Europe since World War II: the siege of Sarajevo, which killed at least 10,000 people, and the slaughter at Srebrenica, which killed more than 7,000 men, some of whose bodies had filled the site at Glogova. It was former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in jail in 2006, who had hatched and orchestrated the overall plan for the ethnic cleansing and violent division of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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POPSHope and Change—for McCain [Victor Davis Hanson] He played well off the serial Obama gaffes like the tire-pressure sermon, while solidifying the base on abortion, drilling, and now his VP pick. He looks the relaxed candidate with the magnanimous reference to Obama's nomination in contrast to the herky-jerky ankle-biting from the Obama handlers over the Palin appointment. Now the pairing of the septuagenarian warhorse, alongside the youthful mom of five from Alaska contrasts well with two doom and gloom, DC natty liberal senators. The 72-year old McCain is still running behind the Messiah, and who knows whether the sudden 3.3 GDP good news on the economy, the stability in Iraq, and cooling off of gas price spikes will hold or play a role. But given the Democratic dynamics this year, the overt bias of the media, and the rock-star quality of Obama, being this close as September nears is a tribute to McCain's toughness and the savvy of his staff.
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POPSThe Price of Putin when Russia defaulted, and the amount of cash leaving the country in the second week of August was the highest on record. Russia's central bank, which reported the $16.5 billion decline last week, still reckons to have $581 billion in reserves, money being stored away when the oil runs out and the gas flow starts to falter. This may come somewhat sooner than many think. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin spoke after the Cabinet approved the draft federal budget for the next three years, which assumes that Russia's main oil blend, Urals, will sell for at least $95 a barrel. (Russian government's own budget estimates, oil is expected to drop to $90 in 2010 and $88 in 2011.) At current rates of extraction combined with rising national consumption, Russia's known oil reserves will start to run out in the 2020s, and a lack of investment in maintenance and development means the two main gas fields expected to maintain Russia's export income are falling ominously behind schedule.
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POPSGeorgia is the graveyard of America's unipolar world Cont... There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer." And that has the neocons scare witless!
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POPSWomen Power- Educated Women and Babies It has been proven for a long time that women who are educated and in control of their lives will not have as many children as their un-educated counterparts. Give women control of their economics and the effect is startling.
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POPS'Ethnic cleansing continues' All the while Europe and the rest of the World stand by and do nothing...except condemn and talk. Inaction only emboldens Putin. Where will he move next? I wonder what John Bolton would do?
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POPSCorporate Welfare End the corporate welfare, close up the loopholes, subsidies, and the offshore enabling, and it might be feasible to lower corporate taxes to between 15 and 25 percent, on the record. Not that most don't pay this percent now...
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POPSEastern Europe Can Defend Itself The small number of interceptors are designed to shoot down an equally small number of Iranian missiles -- not the overwhelming numbers that Russia deploys. Poland and other states should be under no illusion they can count on the U.S. in a crisis. In the past we left Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the lurch. More recently we haven't done much to help Georgia. We have already seen how the tiny Georgian armed forces -- with fewer than 30,000 men -- were routed by the Russian invaders. According to the CIA's World Factbook, Georgia has over 900,000 men between the ages of 16 and 49. It could easily create a larger military force than it has, but that would require spending more on defense. By the CIA's estimate, its defense budget was just 0.59% of GDP in 2005. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, one country in Eastern Europe spends more than 2% of GDP on defense. Bulgaria at 2.2%. Romania is in second place at 1.9%, followed by Poland at 1.8%.
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POPSI Want My Country Back "I love America, and I can't stand quietly by while the land of peace and liberty is being destroyed. I love the America of the Constitution and limited government - not the America of the Patriot Act and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security. I love the America that Washington and Jefferson said should be far removed from all the age-old quarrels of Europe and Asia, while trading benevolently with people all over the world - not the America that has troops in a hundred countries while our own government prohibits us from peaceful trading with dozens of countries."
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POPSFilm Reveals CIA's 'Most Secret Place on Earth'
This film's analysis sets it apart from other books and documentaries on the subject, most of which justify the conflict, lauding the CIA operatives and their Air America pilots as heroes. The reality, as Alfred McCoy says towards the end of the film, was very different. "We destroyed a whole civilisation, we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost." The covert nature of the conflict meant that U.S. forces were able to ignore virtually all the rules of engagement operating in Vietnam. Every building was a potential target and the civilian toll was huge. The situation grew worse in 1970 when U.S. President Nixon authorised massive B-52 bombing strikes on Laos, which remained classified information until many years later. American planes dropped an average of one planeload of bombs on targets in Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, making it the most heavily bombed country on earth
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POPSEU Leaders To Discuss Georgia As Russia Flouts West French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner warned that Russia could face a deterioration of relations with Europe, Moscow's largest trading partner, including ties involving energy, Russia's main export. Most of the troops left Friday, but Moscow retained its peacekeepers in Kremlin-defined security zones around South Ossetia and Abkhazia. "They are trying to keep instruments to suffocate Georgia and create further trouble at any moment," said Giga Bokeria, Georgia's deputy foreign minister. In Ukraine, meanwhile, pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko said the conflict in Georgia showed his country needed to accelerate its bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, speaking at a military parade in honor of Ukraine's independence. Russia opposes the idea of Ukraine joining NATO, which the Kremlin views as an anti-Russian bloc.
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POPSSarkozy Calls Crisis EU Summit on Georgia, Russia German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to supportive of this view. In a telephone conversation with the French President, she suggested that the EU convene a regional conference to address Georgia's reconstruction and wider stability issues in the region. But the conference would not include Russia, according to Merkel, who will explain her views in an article to be published in Der Spiegel on Monday. Earlier, while on a visit to Tbilisi on 17 August, the German Chancellor had lent her support to Georgia's NATO membership, moving away from a previously more cautious stance about the countries' affiliation to the North Atlantic military alliance. US officials have warned that the conflict in Georgia could affect Russia's membership of international organisations such as the Group of Eight industrialised nations and could undermine its bid to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
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POPSThomas Paine and American Values "Aspirations of Thomas Paine and his fellow liberal-progressives toward economic equality as the necessary condition for earthly social perfection gave us the bloody French Revolution. More than 70,000 French citizens – from children to the elderly – were murdered on the guillotine, by hanging, and by firing squads, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood." Those same liberal-progressive ideals espoused by Thomas Paine gave us the 20th century, the most savagely sanguinary and oppressive period in human history, all in the name of perfecting humanity." These realities combined with the motivations from Rousseau laid the foundations for nationalism and socialism that came to fruition in the early 20th century Europe.
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POPSThe End of The Fairy Tale by Ralph Peters Putin went to war and the American president went to a basketball game--reinforcing the Kremlin's conviction that it could do as it pleased and get away with it. (Bush's gravest flaw is that he's a dreadful judge of character, stubbornly trusting undeserving men, from Iraqi schemer Ahmed Chalabi , through the incompetent Alberto Gonzales , to Vladimir Putin , who played Bush for a fool.) French president Nicolas Sarkozy, well-intentioned and inadequate The Putin regime was perfectly willing to let Monsieur le President return to Paris with a signed piece of paper. The Russians have drawn the lesson from Western efforts to negotiate with Iran and other rogue states that Europe can be narcotized with empty agreements and nebulous promises and that Europe has become a continent of bureaucrats who much prefer paperwork to reality. And there are no penalties when the agreements prove worthless.
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POPSWhere are the marches for peace? "Ah, who am I kidding? It is one thing to march against the country that liberated half of Europe and kept it that way for the following 50 years. It is quite another to march against a nation that enslaved half of Europe and kept it under a bloody slavery for 50 years. I can see the morally bankrupt relativist lefty loonies massing to the streets to protest the overthrow of a regional warmonger who managed to kill at least half a million of his own citizens in a few decades. It takes no courage to stand up against that, only vast amounts of ignorance and self adoration."
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POPSHuge Train Blast as Russia Faces New Pressure to Leave Georgia But it added that international monitors would not replace Russian troops as a statement from the French presidency asserted. "During the telephone conversation between the Russian and French presidents, there was no discussion about replacing Russian peacekeeping troops by an OSCE mission in the buffer zone," said a Kremlin spokesman. The West sees the presence of OSCE monitors as critical to ensuring the success of the ceasefire. The speedy military victory over Georgia, which is pressing for membership of NATO, stunned Western powers and plunged relations between Russia and the West to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. The latest focus of international tension was the Black Sea, where NATO naval exercises are taking place. A US destroyer arrived on Sunday in Georgia with what the Pentagon says are humanitarian aid supplies.
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