Russia's Putin Fears McCain Presidency

Vladimir Putin has decided to try and persuade American citizens who should be our next president. He has made it clear that he has no intention of pulling back from his plan to invade and occupy all former Soviet states - that is, he wants to rule the world with an iron fist as his predecessors tried to do in the past and failed.

His plan now for us is to have a president that believes the same way he does, or at least be willing to not become involved in his conquest to enslave all free states in the eastern block. Little wonder he wants McCain to lose and Obama to win.

Putin knows Barack Obama will not lift a finger to stop his plan to crush Freedom and Democracy that exists now, and further more, he knows Obama's mind set is the much the same as his. Obama wants to control America by instituting government regulation for everything we do and think. Putin and Obama are much alike in many ways. They both want to divide and conquer through fear and intimidation.

Obama will use misinformation, lies and character assignation through the main stream media, while Putin will use this same tactic along with mass murder. Will Obamn use violence to gain total power if deceit doesn't work? I really don't want to find out.

On the other hand, McCain is not afraid of Putin and Putin knows it.

Little wonder then why Putin wants Obama to win the coming election. Obama is his meal ticket to unopposed aggression. And while we're at it, think about the middle east, Iraq and Israel. South America's Hugo Chavez and other states about to go communist in the area.

Ralph Peters has a great article looking into the black heart of the next Stalin. You won't find this information in the main stream news media as they are willing participants with Obama.

Keep the faith - look at all alternatives, listen to what is being said from all sources and decide for your self what is the truth - not an easy task but the only way to win the battle!



PUTIN'S PICK FOR US PREZ
By RALPH Peters

RUSSIAN Prime Minister Vladimir Putin doesn't play defensive ball - he's all offense, all the time.

First, he invaded Georgia. Now he's invading our presidential election.

Thursday, Putin and his propaganda agents "explained" that the Georgia crisis - simmering for 20 years - was cooked up in the Bush White House. Russia's thug-in-chief would have us believe that US political hacks duped tiny Georgia into launching a war that would dismember it, /and/ that they did so in order to fabricate an image of a menacing Russia - thus frightening Americans into voting Republican. Well, I can tell you from inside sources that /every/ American involved in Georgia counseled its president to ignore Russia's bloody provocations.

Ultimately, though, President Mikheil Saakashvili had to respond to the deadly attacks on his own people. And Putin got /his/ war. But the truth doesn't matter - and Putin knows it. When it comes to sizing up opponents, he's the greatest intelligence operative of our time.

Putin /gets/ us. He knew he only had to toss out a "Wag the Dog" scenario and the Western media would bark - and the White House would have to respond on the defensive. He also realized that conspiracy junkies (and European pols) would snap up the story and keep it alive through November.

Putin's repeating his Georgia gambit: Tell a Big Lie blaming the victim for what the perp just did. It's shameless, and it works. Yesterday morning, NPR's Diane Rehm-usually an admirable host - led a "serious" discussion about Putin's charge. Putin's reinvented the show trial for the 21st century: You hold it in the media. Once the accusation's made, the accused is guilty. Putin's so good he might've outplayed Stalin.

Russia's latest strongman just committed the most flagrant intervention in a US presidential election by any foreign leader, purposely casting blame on the party he wants to lose in November. And the Western media didn't call him on it. Instead, they ran with the story. Yet Putin unwittingly made a rare mistake: He showed fear. Czar Vladimir clearly dreads a McCain presidency.

John McCain got to know Putin's type intimately when he was tortured in Hanoi. He /knows/ what Putin's all about - and Putin knows it. The Democratic Party's slate is just to Putin's taste, though: Two men who believe that a chat can solve any problem. Obama-Biden's the most-European presidential ticket in US history. It's the Kremlin's dream team.

This week, Putin voted absentee.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COMare trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc.

Why We Should All Vote Democrat

Just when you thought you had all the answers, along comes someone else that truly has the right answer.

Keep the faith!


I'm voting Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

I'm voting Democrat because freedom of speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it.

I'm voting Democrat because when we pull out of Iraq I trust that the bad guys will stop what they're doing because they now think we're good people.

I'm voting Democrat because I believe that people who can't tell us if it will rain on Friday CAN tell us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don't start driving a Prius.

I'm voting Democrat because I'm not concerned about the slaughter of millions of babies so long as we keep all death row inmates alive.

I'm voting Democrat because I believe that business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as THEY see fit.

I'm voting Democrat because I believe three or four pointy headed elitist liberals need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would NEVER get their agendas past the voters.

I'm voting Democrat because I believe that when the terrorists don't have to hide from us over there, when they come over here I don't want to have any guns in the house to fight them off with.

I'm voting Democrat because I love the fact that I can now marry whatever I want. I've decided to marry my pet horse.

I'm voting Democrat because I believe oil companies' profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn't.

Makes ya wonder why anyone would EVER vote Republican, now doesn't it?

Illiteracy In New Orleans Stalls Recovery

Little wonder there are so many illiterate people in New Orleans - this city has been controlled by Democrats for the last sixty years. With most of the money sent down there. which is in the billions over the years, was diverted to other projects other than the one the money was intended, like rebuilding the levees. And as one might expect, a large amount was diverted to private accounts as well. Remember, this has always been a sump hole for federal funds.

And who is the hero of the this area, "school bus Nagan". Ray Nagan of "chocolate city" fame has been given an award for " outstanding achievement". And the former governor 'Blanko' told President Bush she would do what she thought best and he should leave her to do her job. This was three days before Katrina hit - she did nothing!! Little wonder New Orleans is a night mare and always will be as long as the Democrats are in control.

The only hope for New Orleans is the new governor, a Republican. You had to notice how well the last hurricane evacuation went. Now it's up to the citizens of Louisiana to vote out all of the dead wood liberal Democrats that remain in the state and local government.

Also, let's not forget that 'stand up citizen' that is a champion of the down trodden, William Jefferson. He got reelected and is still in his federal job in Washington as a Representative of New Orleans. Remember he was caught on tape taking a $100,000 bribe but not to worry, he meant well. This is how the Democrats operate where ever they are in power.

Nancy Pelosi has done nothing to remove him from congress. The press has done nothing to bring pressure on her to do her job. Little wonder, they are both liberals Democrats. What do you think the situation would be like had William Jefferson been a Republican?

Keep the faith - the battle goes on!


Katrina Victims' Illiteracy Hampers Recovery
*Wednesday, August 27, 2008*

AP

NEW ORLEANS —Marsha Williams had always hesitated when mail arrived from the government. After Hurricane Katrina, she began to fear the letters. One warned that her apartment building could be shut down because of unrepaired storm damage. There were legal notices and forms. What did they all mean? At age 51, Williams was embarrassed she could not read much more than her own name and address. Three years after Katrina, residents of New Orleans are still buried in a blizzard of government paperwork. But for thousands of storm victims seeking federal aid, the challenge is made more difficult by a little-known obstacle:

More than 40 percent of the city's adults lack the literacy skills to comprehend basic government forms. And recovery programs have done little to ease the burden.

"I didn't get a lot of school when I was a child. I guess they didn't have enough to go around," said Williams, who is learning to read in a YMCA adult-education course. Rachel B. Nicolosi, program director for the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans, estimates that as many as 100,000 people from New Orleans may have had assistance delayed, or they never applied for help at all, because they could not read the documents.

"It's a paramount issue. The rules are almost indecipherable for everyone," said Davida Finger, a staff attorney for Loyola University's New Orleans College of Law, which has helped 1,000 people seek rebuilding aid, nearly all of whom had trouble understanding the forms.

Katrina destroyed 27 adult literacy programs when it came ashore in 2005. Only 13 programs survived, so Nicolosi and others have asked for government rebuilding agencies to write aid forms in a "plain language" format that is already used for some federal health and safety documents. But some government officials say too much plain language can leave out vital information.

"I concede the point that those who are functionally illiterate, they would have challenges with any form," said Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He said the agency has trained all of its 37 staff members in New Orleans to help "those with literacy disabilities.

"The National Adult Literacy Survey indicates that 25 percent of U.S. adults read at the lowest functional level, meaning, for example, that they can locate an expiration date on a driver's license but cannot fill out most motor-vehicle forms. In New Orleans, that figure is 44 percent, according to the survey, which is performed every decade and was last conducted in 2003.

The cornerstone of neighborhood rebuilding efforts is the $10.3 billion Road Home program, which asks participants to review dozens of documents and sign 18 final legal papers before aid is approved. One paragraph reads:

"Homeowner(s) agree(s) to the filing of certain covenants to run with the land on the property for which this Grant is awarded requiring generally as follows: flood insurance to be maintained if located in Special Flood Hazard Area and restraints on use, occupancy and alienation of the Property. The actual covenants are contained in the instrument to be executed by Homeowner(s) and recorded in the land records of the parish where the Property for which this Grant is awarded and located."

Christina Stephens, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Recovery Authority that oversees the Road Home program, said the papers are legal documents, which is "why they sound so serious." But she acknowledged that "it's equally important that people can understand what they are signing."Since the program was created in 2006, it has held at least 22 training sessions for staff members specifically designed to help illiterate applicants, Stephens said.Government officials "know who their audience is, and they should write for them," said Annetta Cheek, a spokeswoman for the Plain Language Action and Information Network, a group of federal employees who advocate for clearer language in government communications.

Cheek said the group asked three plain language "translators" to examine the 18 pages of Road Home documents. After several hours, the team was still uncertain of the program's requirements, even though two of the participants were lawyers.The papers were so confusing that Thomas Wright drove three hours from Mississippi to talk to Road Home outreach workers.

Wright, a retired auto mechanic, graduated from high school in the 1950s and later took shop classes to get his mechanics' license. But when it came to the Road Home forms, he had to enlist friends."I needed help from educated people," said Wright, who is black and remembers the segregation of the city school system."We got your second-hand books, with half the pages torn out," he said.Wright applied to Road Home a year ago, trying to rebuild a house in the Upper 9th Ward that was flooded with 8 feet of water. But his application remains stalled; program switchboards refer him back to the forms.

Wright was especially frustrated by one of the most important documents — the highly verbose form that asks applicants to choose among three options: stay and rebuild, sell their home to the state and relocate within Louisiana, or sell their home to the state and leave Louisiana."You got 1,500 words (on a form) that could be said in 500," Wright said.

Wright's generation is not the only one that's struggling. According to the Louisiana Department of Education, 42 percent of students who graduated from high school in New Orleans in 2004 had "unsatisfactory" English scores. And more than one in 10 students dropped out of high school.

Henry Lee Burton, 28, said he left school in the ninth grade to take a job and care for his diabetic mother, who died in the months after Katrina. Though he evacuated to Houston after the storm, he never applied for the FEMA relocation assistance. He said neither he, his mother, nor sister, read well enough to understand the requirements. Burton, who earns $24,000 a year as a Wal-Mart tire shop worker, said the only assistance he received was a $3,500 payout from his renter's insurance. Two years passed before he could gather up the courage to go to the office and tell his agent he did not fully understand letters from the insurance company.

Now he has a different plan: to learn to read well enough so he does not need help."It's something I've always wanted to do and something I need to do," he said. "You really can't depend on the government anyway. You have to do it yourself."

Sarah Palin : She IS The Real Thing! A Bio

What a good look into who this woman really is. From were I stand, she is the real thing and not some political hack that dances at the end of strings connected to people hiding in the shadows of corruption that is so prevalent in Washington and elsewhere.

This is a little long but well worth the time - I'm sure there are other sources but what better time to find out what our future will be like then right now. This woman can win the whole thing the next time around. I am pumped!

Keep the faith - we won the battle this time!

Family and personal background of Sarah Palin

Palin was born as Sarah Louise Heath in Sandpoint, Idaho, U.S.A., the daughter of Charles and Sally (Sheeran) Heath.[2] The family moved to Alaska when Sarah was an infant.[3] Charles Heath was a popular science teacher and coached track.[3] The Heaths were avid outdoors enthusiasts; Sarah and her father would sometimes wake at 3 a.m. to hunt moose before school, and the family would regularly run 5k and 10k races.[3]

Palin was the point guard and captain for the Wasilla High School Warriors when they won the Alaska small-school basketball championship in 1982; she earned the nickname 'Sarah Barracuda' because of her intense play.[3] [4] She played the championship game despite a stress fracture in her ankle, hitting a critical free throw in the last seconds.[3] Palin, who was also the head of the school Fellowship of Christian Athletes, would lead the team in prayer before games.[3]

In 1984, Palin was first runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant after winning the Miss Wasilla contest earlier that year, winning a scholarship to help pay her way through college.[3][5] In the Wasilla pageant, she played the flute and also won Miss Congeniality.
Details of Palin's personal life have contributed to her political image. She hunts, eats moose burgers, ice fishes, rides snowmobiles, and owns a float plane.[6][7] Palin holds a lifetime membership with the National Rifle Association. She admits that she used marijuana when it was legal in Alaska, but says that she did not like it.[8]

Palin holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Idaho where she also minored in politics. She briefly worked as a sports reporter for local Anchorage television stations while also working as a commercial fisherman with her husband, Todd, her high school sweetheart.[3] One summer when she was working on Todd's fishing boat, the boat collided with a tender while she was holding onto the railing; Palin broke several fingers.[3] Outside the fishing season, Todd works for BP at an oil field on the North Slope[9] and is a champion snowmobiler, winning the 2000-mile 'Iron Dog' race four times.[3]

The two eloped shortly after Palin graduated college; when they learned they needed witnesses for the civil ceremony, they recruited two residents from the old-age home down the street.[3] Todd is a Native Yup'ik Eskimo.[3] The Palin family lives in Wasilla, about 40 miles (64 km) north of Anchorage.[10]

On September 11, 2007, the Palins' son Track joined the Army. Eighteen years old at the time, he is the eldest of Palin's five children.[10] Track now serves in an infantry brigade and will be deployed to Iraq in September. She also has three daughters: Bristol, 17, Willow, 13, and Piper, 7.[11] On April 18, 2008, Palin gave birth to her second son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who has Down syndrome.[12] (Sarah returned to the office three days after giving birth.[13]) Palin refused to let the results of prenatal genetic testing change her decision to have the baby. 'I'm looking at him right now, and I see perfection,' Palin said. 'Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?'[13]

Pre-gubernatorial political experience Palin served two terms on the Wasilla, Alaska City Council from 1992 to 1996. In 1996, she challenged the incumbent mayor, criticizing wasteful spending and high taxes.[3] The ex-mayor and sheriff tried to organize a recall campaign, but failed.[3] Palin kept her campaign promises, reducing her own salary, as well as reducing property taxes 60%.[3] She ran for reelection against the former mayor in 1999, winning by an even larger margin.[3][14] Palin was also elected president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors.[11]

In 2002, Palin made an unsuccessful bid for Lieutenant Governor, coming in second to Loren Leman in a four-way race. After Frank Murkowski became governor (resigning his long-held U.S. Senate seat in mid-term), Palin interviewed to be his possible successor, but Murkowski appointed his daughter, then-Alaska State Representative Lisa Murkowski.[3]

Then-Governor Murkowski appointed Palin Ethics Commissioner of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission[15], where she served from 2003 to 2004 -- until resigning in protest over what she called the 'lack of ethics' of fellow Alaskan Republican leaders, who ignored her whistleblowing complaints of legal violations and conflicts of interest.[3] After she resigned, she exposed the state Republican party's chairman, Randy Ruedrich, one of her fellow Oil & Gas commissioners (who was accused of doing work for the party on public time, and supplying a lobbyist with a sensitive e-mail).[16] Palin filed formal complaints against both Ruedrich and former Alaska Attorney General Gregg Renkes, who both resigned; Ruedrich paid a record $12,000 fine.[3]

Governorship

Governor Palin with Alaska's At-large U.S. Representative Don YoungIn 2006, Palin, running on a clean-government campaign, executed an upset victory over then-Gov. Murkowski in the Republican gubernatorial primary.[3] Despite the lack of support from party leaders and being outspent by her Democratic opponent, she went on to win the general election in November 2006, defeating former Governor Tony Knowles.[3] Palin said in 2006 that education, public safety, and transportation would be three cornerstones of her administration.[8]

When elected, Palin became the youngest governor in Alaskan history (42 years old upon taking office), and the first woman to be Alaska's governor. Palin was also the first Alaskan governor born after Alaska achieved U.S. statehood. She was also the first Alaskan governor not to be inaugurated in Juneau, instead choosing to hold her inauguration ceremony in Fairbanks. She took office on December 4, 2006.

Highlights of Governor Palin's tenure include a successful push for an ethics bill, and also shelving pork-barrel projects supported by fellow Republicans. Palin successfully killed the Bridge to Nowhere project that had become a nationwide symbol of wasteful earmark spending.[13][17] 'Alaska needs to be self-sufficient, she says, instead of relying heavily on 'federal dollars,' as the state does today.'[6]

She has challenged the state's Republican leaders, helping to launch a campaign by Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell to unseat U.S. Congressman Don Young[18] and publicly challenging Senator Ted Stevens to come clean about the federal investigation into his financial dealings.[13] Palin supports holding occasional legislative sessions outside the state capital, and municipal revenue sharing to help local governments.[citation needed]

[edit] Energy policies

Palin's tenure is noted for her independence from big oil companies, while still promoting resource development.[6][13] Palin has also announced plans to create a new sub-cabinet group of advisors, to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions within Alaska. [19]
Shortly after taking office, Palin rescinded an appointment by Murkowski of his former chief of staff Jim Clark to the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority, one of thirty-five appointments made by Murkowski in the last hour of his administration that she reversed. [20][21] Clark later pled guilty to conspiring with a defunct oil-field-services company to channel money into Frank Murkowski's re-election campaign. [22]

In March 2007, Palin presented the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) as the new legal vehicle for building a natural gas pipeline from the state's North Slope.[23] Only one legislator, Representative Ralph Samuels, voted against the measure,[24] and in June Palin signed it into law.[25][26] On January 5, 2008, Palin announced that a Canadian company, Transcanada, was the sole AGIA-compliant applicant.[27][28]

In response to high oil and gas prices, and in response to the resulting state government budget surplus, Palin proposed giving Alaskans $100-a-month energy debit cards. She also proposed providing grants to electrical utilities so that they would reduce customers' rates.[29] She subsequently dropped the debit card proposal, and in its place she proposed to send Alaskans $1,200 directly and eliminate the gas tax.[30][31]

[edit] Social issues

Palin is strongly pro-life and belongs to Feminists for Life.[8] She opposes same-sex marriage, but she has stated that she has gay friends and is receptive to gay and lesbian concerns about discrimination.[8] While the previous administration did not implement same-sex benefits, Palin complied with a state Supreme Court order and signed them into law. [32]
She supported a democratic advisory vote from the public on whether there should be a constitutional amendment on the matter.[33] Alaska was one of the first U.S. states to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, in 1998, along with Hawaii.[34]

Palin's first veto was used to block legislation that would have barred the state from granting benefits to gay state employees and their partners. In effect, her veto granted State of Alaska benefits to same-sex couples. The veto occurred after Palin consulted with Alaska's attorney general on the constitutionality of the legislation.[35]

A Philosophy That Works

This is good in that we all can relate and benefit from being able to separate out the stuff that doesn't really impact our lives in any way. We then have a chance to embrace the important things and enjoy them without have to pack every minute with details -

Keep the faith -

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 Beers!

The Mayonnaise Jar and 2 Beers
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full.

They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles, poured them into the jar and he shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full.

They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.

The students responded with an unanimous "yes.!"

The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

"Now," said the professor as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your friends, your health and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full!"

The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car. The sand is everything else---the small stuff. "If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you."

"Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18! There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, "I'm glad youasked."
"The beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, ther is always room for a couple of beers with a friend!"

More News from Georgia - Russia Plans Occupation

If you ever thought that the invasion of Georgia was just a temporary thing to stop rebels from entering Russian territory, you were wrong. This is about occupation and control and the 'take back' of land masses that were lost when the Soviet Union fell.

Of course, the oil pipe line through Georgia has a lot to do with it as well - Putin knows he can control Europe by threatening to stop oil shipments from Georgia and from Russia. We, of course, can do nothing about that except step in and take back Georgia from the Russians. Feasible? Not very, but we should at least use the same tactics that the Russians use and threaten to land troops and have a face off right now.

By allowing the Russian bear to win here in Georgia, it only means we will have to fight an even wider conflict when the bear decides to take back the rest of Eastern Europe. NATO can not do anything without the United States leading the way and even then, many of the member states will not want to anger the Russian monster that lives so close to their particular home lands.

I believe the Europeans will fall back into the old standard of 'it is better to be enslaved then dead'. If your memory is anything at all, this is how the Europeans became enslaved so many times in history. It just who they are. They have their Union but down deep they are still separate states. Is America becoming the same way? I believe we are heading in that direction.

Barack Obama is definitely and isolationist and believes he can control world events through dialogue and by force of personality. Besides he wants to 'change' America into just another European state, in that he wants a 'new' from of government that controls all aspects of life in this country. What he really wants is to enslaves us himself to a socialist style big government with himself as an 'all-knowing' benevolent dictator. Going to war overseas would definitely put that plan in the dumper. I believe he sees the Russian movement into Georgia, and other Eastern European states in the future, as legitimate.

McCain, I believe, doesn't have the will to put the United States at risk just on principle alone. He says he will defend the country against terrorists and I believe he will. But I also believe he doesn't have the force of will that Bush had after 9/11 or the vision to make decisions now that will forestall even larger future disasters. Time will tell -

Keep the faith - gird you loins - the battle is heating up!


How the Georgian Conflict Really Started
By MELIK KAYLAN August 28, 2008

Tbilisi

'Anybody who thinks that Moscow didn't plan this invasion, that we in Georgia caused it gratuitously, is severely mistaken," President Mikheil Saakashvili told me during a late night chat in Georgia's presidential palace this weekend. "Our decision to engage was made in the last second as the Russian tanks were rolling -- we had no choice," Mr. Saakashvili explained. "We took the initiative just to buy some time. We knew we were not going to win against the Russian army, but we had to do something to defend ourselves."

I had just returned from Gori, which was still under the shadow of Russian occupation. I'd learned there on the ground how Russia has deployed a highly deliberate propaganda strategy in this war. Some Georgian friends sneaked me into town unnoticed past the Russian armored checkpoints via a little used tractor path.

We noted that, during the day, the tanks on Gori's streets withdrew from the streets to the hills. Apparently, the Russians thought this gave the impression, to any foreign eyewitnesses they chose to let through, of a town not so much occupied as stabilized and made peaceful. However, if you stayed overnight after observers left, as I did with various locals, you could hear and glimpse the tanks in the dark growling back into town and roaming around.

A serious curfew kicked in at sundown, and the streets turned instantly lethal, not least because the tanks allowed in marauding irregulars -- Cossacks, South Ossetians, Chechens and the like -- to do the looting in a town that the Russians had effectively emptied.

Now that the Russians have made a big show of moving out in force -- but only to a point some miles to the other side of Gori toward South Ossetia -- they've left behind a resonating threat in the population's memory, a feeling they could return at any moment.

The damage in Gori's civilian areas, like the Stalin-era neighborhood of Combinaty, give the lie to claims made by Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in these pages that Russian forces "acted efficiently and professionally" to achieve "clear and legitimate objectives." Either that, or they fully intended -- as a "legitimate" objective -- to flatten civilian streets in order to sow fear, drive out innocents and create massive refugee outflows.

Gori's refugees are now flooding back. Many have returned also to Poti, a port city near Abkhazia, and far more strategic than Gori because it serves as a trading lifeline for Georgia and potentially offers future access to NATO ships. The Russians are digging in around the town and in the port area itself, and refusing to budge as the world looks on.

"I got a call from the minister of defense that Russian tanks, some 200, were massing to enter Tskhinvali from North Ossetia," Mr. Saakashvili told me. "I ignored it at first, but reports kept coming in that they had begun to move forward. In fact, they had mobilized reserves several days ahead of time."This was precisely the kind of information that the Russians have suppressed and the world press continues to ignore, despite decades of familiarity with Kremlin disinformation methods.

"We subsequently found out from pilots we shot down," said Mr. Saakashvili, "that they'd been called up three days before from places like Moscow. We had intelligence coming in ahead of time but we just couldn't believe it. Also, in recent weeks, the separatists had intensified artillery barrages and were shooting our soldiers. I'd kept telling our guys to stay calm. Actually we had most of our troops down near Abkhazia where we expected the real trouble to start.

I can tell you that if we'd intended to attack, we'd have withdrawn our best-trained forces from Iraq up front."According to the Georgian president, the Russians had been planning an invasion of his country for weeks -- even months -- ahead of time: "Some months ago, I was warned by Western leaders in Dubrovnik to expect an attack this summer," he explained. "Mr. Putin had already threatened me in February, saying we would become a protectorate of Russia. When I met Mr. Medvedev in June, he was very friendly. I saw him again in July and he was a changed man, spooked, evasive. He tried to avoid me. He knew something by then.

I ask everyone to consider, what does it mean when hundreds of tanks can mobilize and occupy a country within two days? Just the fuelling takes that long. They were on their way. Would we provoke a war while all our Western friends are away on vacation? Be sensible."I put it to Mr. Saakashvili that there was also the question of why now?

Why did the Russians not act before or later? It was a matter, he said, of several factors coming together: the useful distractions of the Beijing Olympics and the U.S. elections, the fact that it took Mr. Putin this long to consolidate power, the danger that tanks would bog down in the winter.But two factors above all sealed Georgia's fate this summer, it seems.

In April, NATO postponed the decision to admit Georgia into the organization until its next summit in October. Mr. Saakashvili believes Moscow felt it had one last chance to pre-empt Georgia's joining NATO.

Finally, he says, the invasion had to be done before the situation in Iraq got any better and freed up U.S. forces to act elsewhere -- a matter not simply of U.S. weakness but of increasing U.S. strength. "If America thinks it is too weak to do anything about Georgia," said Mr. Saakashvili, "you should understand how the Russians see it, how much Moscow respects a strong United States -- or at least a U.S. that believes in its own strength."

*Mr. Kaylan is a New York-based writer who has reported often from Georgia.*/S/

Georgia Under Attack : Tfhe Facts Revealed

This a very long article but we need to know just what happen in Georgia and how Russia and their allies have attacked a free state.

This is a first person narrative that lays out the history of this region and how the communists have tried over and over again to foster conflict.

Keep the faith - knowledge is power to win the war.


The Truth About Russia in Georgia
August 26, 2008
I Am Georgia Stop Russia.

TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.Virtually everyone is wrong.

Georgia didn't start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia.

This happened /before/ Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war. Regional expert, German native, and former European Commission official Patrick Worms was recently hired by the Georgian government as a media advisor, and he explained to me exactly what happened when I met him in downtown Tbilisi. You should always be careful with the version of events told by someone on government payroll even when the government is friendly as democratic as Georgia's. I was lucky, though, that another regional expert, author and academic Thomas Goltz, was present during Worms' briefing to me and signed off on it as completely accurate aside from one tiny quibble.

Goltz has been writing about the Caucasus region for almost 20 years, and he isn't on Georgian government payroll. He earns his living from the University of Montana and from the sales of his books Azerbaijan Diary.

Goltz experienced these three Caucasus republics at their absolute worst, and he knows the players and the events better than just about anyone. Every journalist in Tbilisi seeks him out as the old hand who knows more than the rest of us put together, and he wanted to hear Patrick Worms' spiel to reporters in part to ensure its accuracy.“You,” Worms said to Goltz just before he started to flesh out the real story to me, “are going to be bored because I'm going to give some back story that you know better than I do.”“Go,” Goltz said. “Go.”

The back story began at least as early as the time of the Soviet Union. I turned on my digital voice recorder so I wouldn't miss anything that was said. Patrick Worms Map Tbilisi.jpg/Patrick Worms/“A key tool that the Soviet Union used to keep its empire together,” Worms said to me, “was pitting ethnic groups against one another. They did this extremely skillfully in the sense that they never generated ethnic wars within their own territory. But when the Soviet Union collapsed it became an essential Russian policy to weaken the states on its periphery by activating the ethnic fuses they planted.

“They tried that in a number of countries. They tried it in the Baltic states, but the fuses were defused. Nothing much happened. They tried it in Ukraine. It has not happened yet, but it's getting hotter. They tried it in Moldova. There it worked, and now we have Transnitria. They tried it in Armenia and Azerbaijan and it went beyond their wildest dreams and we ended up with a massive, massive war. And they tried it in two territories in Georgia, which I'll talk about in a minute. They didn't try it in Central Asia because basically all the presidents of the newly independent countries were the former heads of the communist parties and they said /we're still following your line, Kremlin, we haven't changed very much.

He's right about the massive war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, though few outside the region know much about it. Armenians and Azeris very thoroughly transferred Azeris and Armenians “back” to their respective mother countries after the Soviet Union collapsed through pogroms, massacres, and ethnic-cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled savage communal warfare in terror. The Armenian military still occupies the ethnic-Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region in southwestern Azerbaijan. It's another so-called “frozen conflict” in the Caucasus region waiting to thaw. Moscow takes the Armenian side and could blow up Nagorno-Karabakh, and subsequently all of Azerbaijan, at any time. After hearing the strident Azeri point of view on the conflict for a week before I arrived in Georgia, I'd say that particular ethnic-nationalist fuse is about one millimeter in length.

“Now the story starts really in 1992 when this fuse was lit in Georgia,” Worms said. “Now, there's two territories. There's Abkhazia which has clearly defined administrative borders, and there's South Ossetia that doesn't. Before the troubles started, Abkhazia was an extremely ethnically mixed area: about 60 percent Georgian, 20 percent Abkhaz, and 20 percent assorted others – Greeks, Estonians, Armenians, Jews, what have you. In Ossetia it was a completely integrated and completely mixed Ossetian-Georgian population. The Ossetians and the Georgians have never been apart in the sense that they were living in their own little villages and doing their own little things. There has been inter-marriage and a sense of common understanding going back to distant history. The Georgians will tell you about King Tamar – that's a woman, but they called her a king – and she was married to an Ossetian. So the fuse was lit and two wars start, one in Abkhazia and one in South Ossetia.”

South Ossetia is inside Georgia, while North Ossetia is inside Russia.“The fuse was not just lit in Moscow,” he said. “It was also lit in Tbilisi. There was a guy in charge here, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a little bit like [Serbian Nationalist war criminal in Bosnia Radovan] Karadzic. He was a poet. He was an intellectual. But he was one of these guys who veered off into ethnic exclusivism. He made stupid declarations like /Georgia is only for the Georgians/. If you're running a multi-ethnic country, that is really not a clever thing to say. The central control of the state was extremely weak. The Russians were trying to make things worse. There was a civil war between Georgians and Tbilisi. But they key thing is that here there were militias, Georgian militias, and some of them pretty nasty.”Thomas Goltz Briefing Tbilisi.jpg/Thomas Goltz/

Thomas Goltz then interjected his only critique of Patrick Worms' explanation of events that led to this war. “It started in 1991,” he said, “but it went into 1992 and 1993, as well.” Then he turned to me. “This guy, [Zviad] Gamsakhurdia, was driven from power from across the street. They bombed this place.” He meant the Marriott Hotel. We stood in the lobby where Worms had set up his media relations operation. “There's a horrible picture in my Georgia book of this facade.”“Of this building?” I said.Marriot Tbilisi.jpg/Marriot Hotel (right), Tbilisi, Georgia/

“Yeah,” Goltz said. “That was December 1991. He fled in December 1991.”“Where did he go?” I said.“To Chechnya,” Goltz said. “Of course. He led the government in exile until he came back in 1993 then died obscurely in the mountains, of suicide some people say, others say cancer. Then he was buried in Grozny.” He turned then again to Patrick Worms. “1991,” he said. “Not 1992.”“1991,” Worms said. “Okay.”So aside from that quibble, everything else Worms said to me was vouched for as accurate by the man who literally wrote the book on this conflict from the point of view of both academic and witness.“So in 1991,” Worms said, “things here explode. And basically it gets pretty nasty. Thomas can tell you what happened. Read his book http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGeorgia-Diary-Chronicle-Political-Post-soviet%2Fdp%2F0765617102%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1219615180%26sr%3D8-1&tag=michajtottesm-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1%20,

it's worth it. And by the time the dust settles, there are between 20,000 and 30,000 dead. Many atrocities committed by both sides, but mostly – at least that's what the Georgians say – by the Abkhaz. And the end result is everybody gets kicked out. Everybody who is not Abkhaz or Russian gets kicked out. That's about 400,000 people. 250,000 of those still live as Internally Displaced Persons within Georgia. As for the rest: the Greeks have gone back to Greece, the Armenians to Armenia, some Abkhaz to Turkey, etc.Abkhazia Map.jpg/Abkhazia (upper left)/“When it's over,” he said, “you've got two bits of Abkhazia which are not ethnic Abkhazia. You've got Gali district which is filled with ethnic Georgians. And you've got the Kodori Gorge which is filled with another bunch of Georgians. So there the end result was a classic case of ethnic-cleansing, but the world didn't pay much attention because it was happening at the same time as the Yugoslav wars.

Ossetia was different. Ossetia also had a war that started about the same time, and it was also pretty nasty, but it never quite succeeded in generating a consolidated bit of territory that Ossetians could keep their own. When the dust settled there, you ended up with a patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages. Before the war, Ossetians and Georgians lived together in the same villages. After the war they lived in separate villages. But there were still contacts. People were talking, people were trading. It wasn't quite as nasty as it was in Abkhazia.South Ossetia Map.JPG“Now fast forward to the Rose Revolution,” he said.The Rose Revolution was a popular bloodless revolution that brought Georgia's current president Mikheil Saakashvili to power and replaced the old man of Georgian politics Eduard Shevardnadze who basically ran the country Soviet-style.“The first thing that Misha [Mikheil Saakashvili] did was try to poke his finger in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's eyes as many times as possible,” Worms said, “most notably by wanting to join NATO.

The West, in my view, mishandled this situation. America gave the wrong signals. So did Europe.”“Can you elaborate on that a bit?” I said.“I will,” he said. “But basically the encouragement was given despite stronger and stronger Russian signals that a Georgian accession to NATO would not be tolerated. Fast forward to 2008, to this year, to the meeting of NATO heads of state that took place in Bucharest, Romania, where Georgia was promised eventual membership of the organization but was refused what it really wanted, which was the so-called Membership Action Plan.

The Membership Action Plan is the bureaucratic tool NATO uses to prepare countries for membership. And this despite the fact that military experts will tell you that the Georgian Army, which had been reformed root and branch with American support, was now in better shape and more able to meet NATO aspirations than the armies of Albania and Macedonia which got offered membership at the same meeting.Night Shot Tbilisi 3.jpg/Tbilisi, Georgia/“Just a little bit of back story again, in July of 2007 Russia withdrew from the Conventional Forces Treaty in Europe.

This is a Soviet era treaty that dictates where NATO and the Warsaw Pact can keep their conventional armor around their territories. Russia started moving a lot of materiel south. After Bucharest, provocations started. Russian provocations started, and they were mostly in Abkhazia.“One provocation was to use the Russian media to launch shrill accusations that the Georgian army was in Kodori preparing for an invasion of Abkhazia. Now if you go up there – I took a bunch of journalists up there a few times – when you get to the actual checkpoint you have a wall of crumbling rock, a wooden bridge, another wall of crumbling rock, a raging torrent, and a steep mountainside filled with woods. It's not possible to invade out or invade in unless you've got air support. Which is why the Abkhaz were never able to kick these Georgians out. They just kept that bit of territory.”He paused and looked over at Thomas Goltz as though he was bracing for a critique.“I'm just doing what I've done already,” he said, “but this time I'm getting advice from an expert on how I'm doing.”Thomas Goltz silently nodded.Walls and Church Tbilisi.jpg/Tbilisi, Georgia/

“Kodori provocations,” Worms continued, “and other provocations. First the Russians had a peacekeeping base under a 1994 agreement that allowed them to keep the peace in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They added paratroopers, crack paratroopers, with modern weaponry there. That doesn't sound a lot like peacekeeping. A further provocation: they start shooting unmanned Georgian aircraft drones out the sky. One of them was caught on camera by the drone as it was about to be destroyed. The United Nations confirmed that it was a Russian plane that did this. It probably took off from an airbase that the Russians were supposed to have vacated a few years ago, but they never let the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] in to check.

“The next provocation: On April 16 Putin signs a presidential decree recognizing the documents of Abkhazians and South Ossetians in Russia and vice versa. This effectively integrates these two territories into Russia's legal space. The Georgians were furious. So you have all these provocations mounting and mounting and mounting. Meanwhile, as of July, various air corps start moving from the rest of Russia to get closer to the Caucasus. These are obscure details, but they are available.Stop Russia Tbilisi.jpg/A poster on a wall in Tbilisi, Georgia/“Starting in mid July the Russians launched the biggest military exercise in the North Caucasus that they've held since the Chechnya war.

That exercise never stopped. It just turned into a war. They had all their elite troops there, all their armor there, all their stuff there. Everyone still foolishly thought the action was going to be in Abkhazia or in Chechnya, which is still not as peaceful as they'd like it to be.“The Georgians had their crack troops in Iraq. So what was left at their central base in Gori? Not very much. Just Soviet era equipment and not their best troops. They didn't place troops on the border with Abkhazia because they didn't want to provoke the Abkhaz. They were expecting an attempt on Kodori, but the gorge is in such a way that unless they're going to use massive air support – which the Abkhaz don't have – it's impossible to take that place. Otherwise they would have done it already.

“So fast forward to early August. You have a town, Tskhinvali, which is Ossetian, and a bunch of Georgian villages surrounding it in a crescent shape. There are peacekeepers there. Both Russian peacekeepers and Georgian peacekeepers under a 1994 accord. The Ossetians were dug in in the town, and the Georgians were in the forests and the fields between the town and the villages. The Ossetians start provoking and provoking and provoking by shelling Georgian positions and Georgian villages around there. And it's a classic tit for tat thing. You shell, I shell back. The Georgians offered repeated ceasefires, which the Ossetians broke.Friendliness Poster Tbilisi.jpg/A poster on a wall in Tbilisi, Georgia/“On August 3, the head of the local administration says he's evacuating his civilians.

You also need to know one thing: you may be wondering what these areas live off, especially in Ossetia, there's no industry there. Georgia is poor, but Ossetia is poorer. It's basically a smuggler's paradise. There was a sting operation that netted three kilograms of highly enriched uranium. There are fake hundred dollar bills to the tune of at least 50 million dollars that have been printed. [South Ossetian “President” Eduard] Kokoity himself is a former wrestler and a former bodyguard who was promoted to the presidency by powerful Ossetian families as their puppet. What does that mean in practice? It means that if you are a young man, you have no choice. You can either live in absolute misery, or you can take the government's dime and join the militia. It happened in both territories.

“On top of that, for the last four years the Russians have been dishing out passports to anyone who asks in those areas. All you have to do is present your Ossetian or Abkhaz papers and a photo and you get a Russian passport on the spot. If you live in Moscow and try to get a Russian passport, you have the normal procedure to follow, and it takes years. So suddenly you have a lot of Ossetian militiamen and Abkhaz militiamen with Russian passports in effect paid by Russian subsidies.Night Shot Tbilisi 1.jpg/Tbilisi, Georgia/

“So back to the 3rd of August. Kokoity announces women and children should leave. As it later turned out, he made all the civilians leave who were not fighting or did not have fighting capabilities. On the same day, irregulars – Ingush, Chechen, Ossetians, and Cossacks – start coming in and spreading out into the countryside but don't do anything. They just sit and wait. On the 6th of August the shelling intensifies from Ossetian positions. And for the first time since the war finished in 1992, they are using 120mm guns.”“Can I stop you for a second?” I said. I was still under the impression that the war began on August 7 and that Georgian President Saakashvili started it when he sent troops into South Ossetia's capital Tskhinvali. What was all this about the Ossetian violence on August 6 and before?He raised his hand as if to say /stop/.

“That was the formal start of the war,” he said. “Because of the peace agreement they had, nobody was allowed to have guns bigger than 80mm. Okay, so that's the formal start of the war. It wasn't the attack on Tskhinvali. Now stop me.”“Okay,” I said. “All the reports I've read say Saakashvili started the war.”“I'm not yet on the 7th,” he said. “I'm on the 6th.”“Okay,” I said. He had given this explanation to reporters before, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.“Saakashvili is accused of starting this war on the 7th,” he said.“Right,” I said. “But that sounds like complete bs to me if what you say is true.”Thomas Goltz nodded.

*I later met wounded Georgian soldiers in a Tbilisi hospital who confirmed what Patrick Worms had told me about what happened when the war actually started. I felt apprehensive about meeting wounded soldiers. Would they really want to talk to someone in the media or would they rather spend their time healing in peace? My translator spoke to some of the doctors in the hospital who directed us to Georgian soldiers and a civilian who were wounded in South Ossetia and felt okay enough to speak to a foreign reporter.Kaha Bragadze.jpg/Kaha Bragadze/“Every day and every hour the Russian side lied,” Georgian soldier Kaha Bragadze said. “It must be stopped. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. My troops were in our village, Avnevi.

On the 6th of August they blew up our troops' four-wheel-drives, our pickups. They blew them up. Also in this village – it was August 5th or 6th, I can't remember – they started bombing us with shells. Two soldiers died that day, our peacekeepers. The Ossetians had a good position on the hill. They could see all our positions and our villages, and they started bombing. They went to the top of the hill, bombed us, then went down. We couldn't see who was shooting at us.”Kaha Bragadze Leg.jpg/Kaha Bragadze's leg wounded by shrapnel from a Russian air strike/“Which day was this?” I said. “The 5th or the 6th?”“I don't remember,” he said. “But it started that day from that place when two Georgians were killed.”“Were they just bombing you the peacekeepers,” I said, “or also civilians and villages?”

“Before they started bombing us they took all the civilians out of their villages,” he said. “Then they started damaging our villages – houses, a gas pipe, roads, yards. They killed our animals. They evacuated their villages, then bombed our villages.”Another Georgian soldier, Giorgi Khosiashvili, concurredGiorgi Khosiashvili.jpg/Giorgi Khosiashvili/“I was a peace keeper as well,” he said, “but in another village. I was fired upon on August 6th. On the 5th of August they started shooting. They blew up our peacekeeping trucks. They put a bomb on the road and when they were driving they were blown up. They also mined the roads used by civilians. On the 6th of August they started bombing Avnevi. And at this time they took the civilians out of Tskhinvali and sent them to North Ossetia [inside Russia].”“I saw this on TV,” said Alex, my translator.

“They took the civilians, kids, women, and put them on the bus and sent them to North Ossetia.”A civilian man, Koba Mindiashvili, shared the hospital room with the Georgian soldiers. He, too, was in South Ossetia where he lived outside Tskhinvali.Koba Mindiashvili.jpg/Koba Mindiashvili/“When they started bombing my village,” he said, “I was running away and the soldiers wounded me. They robbed me and shot me in the leg with a Kalashnikov. I don't know if it was Russians or Ossetians. They took my car, took my gold chain, and shot me.”“They didn't care if it was a house or a military camp,” Giorgi Khosiashvili said. “They bombed everything.”

“You actually saw this for yourself?” I said.“Yes,” he said. “I saw it. It was the Russian military airplanes. If they knew it was a Georgian village, they bombed all the houses. Many civilians were killed from this bombing.”“It was Russians or Ossetians who did this?” I said.“It was Russians,” he said. “The Ossetians don't have any jets.”*Back at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Tbilisi, Patrick Worms continued fleshing out the rest of the story. “Let me tell you what happened on the 7th,” he said. “On the 6th, while this is going on, the integration minister who was until a few months ago an NGO guy and who believes in soft power things, tried to go there and meet the separatist leadership. The meeting doesn't happen for farcical reasons.

The shelling intensifies during the night and there is, again, tit for tat, but this time with weapons coming from the South Ossetian side which are not allowed under the agreement. By that time, the Georgians were seriously worried. All their armor that was near Abkhazia starts moving, but they are tanks, they don't have tank transporters, so they move slowly. They don't make it back in time. On the 7th, this continues. That afternoon, the president announces a unilateral ceasefire, a different one from the previous ones. It means /I stop firing first, and if you fire, I still won't fire back/. That holds until the next part of the story.Peace Vigil Tbilisi.jpg/Peace vigil, Tbilisi, Georgia/

“On the evening of the 7th, the Ossetians launch an all-out barrage focused on Georgian /villages/, not on Georgian positions. Remember, these Georgian villages inside South Ossetia – the Georgians have mostly evacuated those villages, and three of them are completely pulverized. That evening, the 7th, the president gets information that a large Russian column is on the move. Later that evening, somebody sees those vehicles emerging from the Roki tunnel [into Georgia from Russia]. Then a little bit later, somebody else sees them. That's three confirmations. It was time to act.“What they had in the area was peacekeeping stuff, not stuff for fighting a war. They had to stop that column, and they had to stop it for two reasons. It's a pretty steep valley.

If they could stop the Russians there, they would be stuck in the tunnel and they couldn't send the rest of their army through. So they did two things. The first thing they did, and it happened at roughly the same time, they tried to get through [South Ossetian capital] Tskhinvali, and that's when everybody says Saakashvili started the war. It wasn't about taking Ossetia back, it was about fighting their way through that town to get onto that road to slow the Russian advance. The second thing they did, they dropped a team of paratroopers to destroy a bridge. They got wiped out, but first they managed to destroy the bridge and about 15 Russian vehicles.

“The Georgians will tell you that they estimate that these two actions together slowed the Russian advance by 24 to 48 hours. That is what the world considered to be Misha's game. And you know why the world considers that? Because here in South Ossetia was the head of the peacekeeping troops. He hasn't been in Iraq, he's a peace keeper What have they been told for the last four years? They lived in a failed state, then there was the Rose Revolution – it wasn't perfect but, damn, now there's electricity, there's jobs, roads have been fixed – and what the Georgians have had drummed into them is that Georgia is now a constitutional state, a state of law and order. And everybody here knows that Ossetia is a gangster's smuggler's paradise. The whole world knows it, but here they know it particularly well. The peacekeepers had a military objective, and the first rule of warfare when you're talking to the media is not to reveal to your enemy what you're going to do.

So they weren't going to blather into a microphone and say /well, actually, I'm trying to go through Tskhinvali in order to stop the Russians/. So what did he say instead? /I'm here to restore constitutional order in South Ossetia/. And that's it. With that, Georgia lost the propaganda war and the world believes Saakashvili started it. And the rest of the story...you know.”Night Shot Tbilisi 2.jpg/Tbilisi, Georgia/

“Let me make a couple of comments,” Goltz said.“That,” Worms said, “to the best of my knowledge, is all true.”“Let's just start at the ass end,” Goltz said to me. “This is your first time to the lands of the former Soviet Union?”“Yes,” I said.“/The restoration of constitutional order/,” he said, “may sound just like a rhetorical flourish with no echo in the American mindset. What it means in the post-Soviet mindset is what Boris Yeltsin was doing in Chechnya.

This was the stupidest phrase this guy possibly could have used. That's why people want to lynch him.”Goltz was referring to the head of the Georgian peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia. He turned then to Patrick Worms. “Your presentation was deliciously comprehensive. Perhaps it was...we'll ask our new friend Michael...too much information out of the gate to absorb.”“I absorbed it,” I said.“Okay,” Goltz said.“Am I making any mistakes?” Worms said to Goltz. “Am I forgetting anything?”“Well,” Goltz said, “there are some details that I would chip in. Who are the Ossetians and where do they live? This is the question that has been lost in all of the static from this story.

This autonomy [South Ossetia] is an autonomous /district/, as opposed to an autonomous /republic/, with about 60,000 people max. So, where are the rest of the Ossetians? Guess where they live? Tbilisi. Here. There. Everywhere. There are more Ossetians – take a look around this lobby. You will find Ossetians here. Of those Ossetians who are theoretically citizens of the Republic of Georgia, 60,000 live there and around 40,000 live here.”Cross Outside Tbilisi.jpg/A roadside cross outside Tbilisi, Georgia/“What do they think about all this?” I said.“They're scared as /shit/,” Goltz said.“Are they on the side of those who live in South Ossetia?” I said.“/No/,” he said. “One of them is Georgia's Minister of Defense.

Georgia is a multi-ethnic republic. And the whole point of the Ossetian ethnic question is this: South Ossetia is part of Georgia.”“Are reporters receptive to what you're saying?” I said to Worms.“Everyone is receptive,” he said. “Everyone, regardless of nationality, even those who love Georgia, genuinely thought Saakashvili started it.”“That's what I thought,” I said. “That's what everyone has been writing.”Putin Hopscotch Tbilisi.jpg/Vladimir Putin's face used for hopscotch, Tbilisi, Georgia/“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely. We've been trying to tell the world about this for months.

If you go back and look at the archives you'll see plenty of calls from the Georgian government saying they're really worried. Even some Russian commentators agree that this is exactly what happened. Don't forget, they sent in a lot of irregulars, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians, Ingush – basically thugs. Not normal Chechens or Ingush – thugs. Thugs out for a holiday. Many Western camera crews were robbed at gunpoint ten meters from Russian tanks while Russian commanders just stood there smoking their cigarettes while the irregulars...that happened to a Turkish TV crew. They're lucky to still be alive. Some of the Georgians were picked up by the irregulars. If they happened to be female, they got raped. If they happened to be male, they got shot immediately, sometimes tortured.

Injured people we have in hospitals who managed to get out have had arms chopped off, eyes gouged out, and their tongues ripped out.”Putin Sidewalk Georgia Flag Tbilisi.jpg/Vladimir Putin/Russian rules of engagement, so to speak, go down harder than communism. And the Soviet era habits of disinformation are alive and well.

“You also have to remember the propaganda campaign that came out,” he said. “Human Rights Watch is accusing the Russian authorities of being indirectly responsible for the massive ethnic cleansing of Georgians that happened in South Ossetia. The Ossetians are claiming that the Georgians killed 2,000 people in Tskhinvali, but when Human Rights Watch got in there a few days ago and talked to the hospital director, he had received 44 bodies. There was nobody left in that town.

Plus it's the oldest law of warfare: have your guns in populated areas, and when the enemy responds, show the world your dead women and children.“Right,” I said. “That goes on a lot where I usually work, in the Middle East.”“Yes,” he said. “That's /exactly/ what the Russians were doing.”*Post-script:* If these dispatches are worth something to you, please consider a contribution and help make truly independent writing economically viable.

The Truth Be known : Polls Show Conservatism is The Majority

This article is a little long but a 'well stone' of information on polls and how they are crafted to meet an agenda - It appears that most polls are designed to show conservatives in the minority but in reality it is just the opposite. What's more important is the numbers have always shown that conservatives have always been the majority. Then this begs the question, why do so many Republicans run from their basic conservative beliefs?

Conservatives must regain control of their self confidence and actually live what they believe. It seems when a good conservative goes to Washington they always scum to the pressure to be like everyone else, that is, to be like those in power at the time - and by power I mean getting your face on the television or on the front page of the New York Times.

As a conservative member of congress, and having your picture on the front page of the NYT's can only mean two things, you have become a liberal Marxist socialist or you died tragically in an illicit gun battle while fleeing the scene of a liquor store hold up. Actually you died in your sleep at home but the NYT thought it was a good opportunity to crush another conservative with managed news. It really doesn't matter that it isn't the truth, the NYT believes this is how it should be and that it fits the agenda of the paper.

Even more depressing is the fact that there is a huge number of people that believe anything they read in a major publication. 'It must be true or they wouldn't put it in the paper'. How many time have I heard that line.

Keep the faith fellow believers, the battle goes on for intestinal fortitude.



The Biggest Missing Story in Politics
August 25, 2008*
By Bruce Walker*

The Battleground Poll, the most respected and thorough of all public opinion polls, released its latest results on August 20^th . Although many people read this poll for the data on voter preference in upcoming elections, for voter opinions about the two major political parties, for what things matter most to voters, I always zip past this data in the first fifteen pages of poll results and go straight to Question D3, which very quietly and totally ignored the biggest missing story in American politics and which is the only story, in the long run, that really matters.

I have been tracking Question D3 for a long time, 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 may change their opinions dramatically about Iraq or President Bush or drilling for oil, but not their answer to Question D3. 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.

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"

In August 2008, Americans answered that question this way: (1) 20% of Americans considered themselves to be very conservative; (2) 40% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat conservative; (3) 2% of Americans considered themselves to be moderate; (4) 27% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat liberal; (5) 9% of Americans considered themselves to be very liberal; and (6) 3% of Americans did not know or refused to answer.

Sixty percent (60%) 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 2008.)

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. Are these remarkable results skewed? This has always been the argument, but it is a hopelessly flawed argument.

The poll results are incredibly consistent over time.

These results are the same when President Bush has poll numbers at rock bottom and when Republicans were facing electoral disaster, like in October 2006 when 61% of Americans called themselves conservatives. The very consistency of these percentages is powerful evidence of their inherent validity.If people did not know what conservative, liberal, and moderate meant, then the poll results to that question would bounce around over time and people would flock to define themselves as "moderate" or they would say "don't know."

When given four different options to the conservative label, respondents overwhelmingly chose to define themselves, instead, as conservatives. Do people feel pressured into calling themselves conservatives? Think: Hollywood regularly excoriates the image of conservatives; the mainstream media demonizes conservatives; schools teach that conservatives are narrow minded bigots; academia tries to hound independent conservative newspapers and organizations off campus.

It requires much more courage to define yourself as a conservative than any other label, particularly when the banal "moderate" answer is so easily grasped.

No: These answers to Question D3 are real, profound, and great. Why, then, do other polls show Americans so different from conservatives? The short answer is that other polls are scrupulously constructed to hide the tsunami of conservative opinion in America. On abortion, for example, polls will report that Americans define themselves at least as much as "pro-choice" as they do "pro-life," but that is just not true.

The "pro-choice" advocates nationally oppose bans on partial birth abortion, oppose parental notification, and oppose counseling on abortion. Led by men like Obama, the "pro-choice" position is, quite simply, that a woman always has a right to choose an abortion.

Polls do not show support for that at all. Polls over the last few months give the following levels of support to making abortion always legal: "always legal - 19%" (Quinnipiac Poll, July 2008); "legal in all cases - 19%" (Pew Poll, June 2008); "legal in all cases - 18%" (ABC / Washington Post Poll, June 2008).

While it is true that the percentage of Americans who want abortion illegal in all situations is almost exactly the same as those who want abortion legal in all cases, the overwhelming percentage of Americans want just what pro-life advocates want: abortion generally available in cases of rape, incest, or life-threatening health problems for the mother; abortion for minors regulated just like abortion for any major medical procedure for minors is regulated; and abortion on account of personal inconvenience more strictly regulated.

All of these polls showing Americans equally divided were crafted by people and by groups intent upon presenting a false impression of how Americans felt about abortion.Polls on other issues are just as bad.

The CNN poll of June 2008 on gun control is a good example. CNN asks people to interpret the Constitution, by reciting the text of the Second Amendment. Then asks whether this text in the Bill of Rights was intended to provide for "a well regulated militia" or to preserve "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." In other words, the question implies that the Second Amendment cannot preserve two rights, both of which are explicitly recited within the text of that amendment: A well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is specifically guaranteed as well.

Like everything that the Left does, from entertainment to higher education, the structure, the format, and the revealed results of information is conformed to present an image in which conservatives and their values are as invisible as blacks in the Antebellum South. Even Leftists themselves believe this false picture.

Consider, in 1988, how many liberal Democrats did not believe that Reagan had won an overwhelming landslide because they, personally, knew of no one who voted for him. Consider how blindsided the Left was by the overwhelming popularity of an unapologetic conservative like Rush Limbaugh. Consider that Republicans walk about in a blue funk wondering where the next Reagan is, utterly forgetting that not only Leftists, but "moderate" Republicans in 1980 were labeling Reagan as far, far too conservative. The Gipper, in fact, was comfortably in the middle of a huge American majority.

The extremists are that 9% of Americans who call themselves "very liberal." Conservatives are like those proverbial sailors becalmed off the coast of Brazil, dying of thirst, and wondering how they would survive until tomorrow. When another ship passed asked the listless sailing ship if its crew needed help, the urgent call was for fresh water, to which the passing ship replied "Lift down your buckets into the sea. You are in the mouth of the Amazon." Fresh water was everywhere around the dehydrated men; they just did not know it.

Conservatives are not just a majority of Americans, but an utterly overwhelming majority of all Americans. As soon as they grasp this huge fact, government and politics in America will be transformed.

*Bruce Walker is the author of */*/Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie/ */*, and the recently published book, */*/The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity/ */*.*/*Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/08/the_biggest_missing_story_in_p.html* at August 25, 2008 - 09:22:48 PM EDT

Lawyers as Politicians Bodes Poorly for America

The foundation of society is based on limited government. What the Democrats have in mind is more government to control all aspects of our lives.

What is the worst part of this equation, and I mentioned this before, when we lose our most precious possession, freedom, so many Americans will not know they have lost anything as they demand others to take control of their problems. They will blame their loss on everyone and anyone that will make themselves feel justified.

Apparently these citizens have become lost in their own little world that they were able to build because of all the freedoms that America has to offer. These people have no history to fall back on, only a 'lotto mentality' to sustain them.

I don't know who wrote this but they certainly have it right about lawyers and Democrats.

keep the faith.

This is very interesting! I never thought about it this way. Perhaps this is why so many physicians are conservatives or Republicans. Thoughtful point of view...

The Democrat Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer, and so is his wife, Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.

Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and, Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastics manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon. Who was the last Republican President who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting President, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.

The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as enemies of America . And so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party, grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers.

Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case, the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side. Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming.

Some Americans become 'adverse parties' of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers. Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked.

When the most important decision for our next President is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great.

When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing. We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform, or real hope in America Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789.

Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.

Second Amemdent Rights Refresher

This is just a reminder of how lucky we are to be living in this country and what our obligations are to her survival. The well used and accurate statement, 'freedom is not free' defines what we must do ensure America remains free. Never say the battle for the second Amendanet is won as there is always those enemies of America who survived that will come back and try again and again to steal our freedom.

We have the knowledge of what our forefathers did to lay the foundations of liberty. Now it is up to us to do our part to sustain those efforts by building bridges of courage and will for the next generation to look back on as they take up the responsibility of doing their duty as soldiers of freedom. For us to do anything less is a national security breech.

Keep the faith - fight the good fight - we will win!


FIREARMS REFRESHER COURSE

1. An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject.

2. A gun in the hand is better than a cop on the phone.

2.1 When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

3. Gun Lock: The original point and 'click' interface.

4. Gun control is not about guns; it's about control.

5. If guns are outlawed, can we use swords?

6. If guns cause crime, then pencils cause misspelled words.

7. Free Men Do not ask permission to bear arms.

8. If you don't know your rights you don't have any.

9. Those who trade liberty for security have neither.

10. The United States Constitution (c) 1791. All Rights reserved.

11. What part of "shall not be infringed" do you not understand?

12. The Second Amendment is in place in case they ignore the others.

13. 80,000,000 legal firearms owners killed no one yesterday.

14. Guns only have two enemies: rust and liberals.

15. Know guns, know peace and safety. No guns, no peace nor safety.

16. You don't shoot to kill; you shoot to stay alive.

17. 911 - government sponsored Dial-a-Prayer.

18. Assault is a behavior, not a device.

19. Criminals love gun control -- it makes their jobs safer.

20. If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.

21. Only a government that is afraid of its citizens tries to control them.

22. You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.

23. Enforce the "Gun Control Laws" we have; don't make more.

24. When you remove the people's right to bear arms, you create slaves.

25. The American Revolution would never have happened with gun control.

26. ".. A government of the people, by the people, for the people..."