Monday, July 13, 2009

Good 'ole Russian Humor. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev fires stategic missile near NATO.

I can't wait to see the details of the Non-Proliferation Agreement. Any chance it will be soon?


This entire 'Georgia thing' with NATO is hideous. Completely hideous. One Kaboom and its all over anyway.


Russian submarine successfully test-launches strategic missile (click title to entry - thank you)

22:0113/07/2009

SOCHI, July 13 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday that Russia had successfully test-launched a strategic missile from a submarine.
"The target was hit and the pieces of the missile landed in the designated area," the president said at a meeting with Navy personnel in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi.
The president said the test occurred on Monday, but did not specify the type of missile or the name of the submarine.
Last month Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky, the Russian Navy commander, said Russia would carry out the next test of a Bulava sea-launched ballistic missile in late July, one of a total of four or five launches this year.
Despite five failures in 10 trials, the last unsuccessful trial being in December 2008, Russia's Defense Ministry is planning to complete Bulava tests and put the ICBM into service by the end of 2009.
The Russian military says the Bulava, along with Topol-M ballistic missiles, will become the backbone of Russia's nuclear triad.
The triad comprises land-based ballistic missile systems, nuclear-powered submarines armed with sea-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers carrying nuclear bombs and nuclear-capable cruise missiles.

The people of Pakistan return to 'hold their ground' against occupiers and human rights abusers.


A displaced woman returning home to the Swat valley. Photograph: Reuters (click title to entry - thank you)

Some aide workers are concerned the people are returning too early. I believe the Pakistani military is overseeing their return. I also believe some disturbance by the Taliban is expected, but, then that would be the case no matter when the people returned. One has to remember the people wanted their liberation from the oppressors. It is time to 'secure' the region by returning citizens to their homes and regular activities. The sooner the people experience 'freedom' and 'rights' the more they will seek to secure their communities.

There is the argument, that, keeping people in refugee camps much longer would be a 'sentence' all by itself. If the Pakistani government can succeed in preparing the region for the promise of a better life, there is every reason to believe they will have the loyalty of the people in continuing to secure their liberation rather than recidivism and timidity.

It was cruel and difficult with the Taliban. The people of Pakistan now have a chance to rid themselves and their regions of such oppressive regimes. They will succeed. They had the will to bring their military into the region, they will support them especially now.

...But some aid workers say the process has been poorly conceived and people are vulnerable to further attack.
"The Pakistani government is sending people home far too early," said Kristèle Younès, of Refugees International. "Displaced people should be the ones to determine whether it is safe for them to return, and we fear the government is not providing them with clear and accurate information."
"There are some suspicions that [the return] is not as free as you would like," said Dorothy Blane of Concern. "They should not be forced back just so the government can say that normal life has returned, because if they have to come out again it will be a disaster."
The return process got off to a slow and chaotic start. Residents trying to travel to Swat in private cars were turned back at the town of Sher Gur, on the edge of the conflict-affected area....

Okay, so let's see if I get this right. As Vice President, I preceive the President as a threat and plan his assassination with taxpayers time...

...and money, but, since I never carried it out, the point of breaking the law is mute. Is that what the media is trying to say now?

So, anything, Dickey wanted to toy with as official business, was okay? Really?

It is called abuse of power. And who is to say Dickey would decide an American citizen was an al Qaeda leader and send out the goon squad? Huh? Answer me that. Because we have already had innocent people sent on Renditions. Answer? No one?


Cheney's SS (Schutzstaffel) in training.

Cheney “Assassination Unit” Still Active Under Obama, Including Domestically (click here)
Joint Special Operations Command comprises Delta Force personnel that have killed U.S. citizens and acted in support of Obama’s expanded war in Pakistan
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Revelations that a political assassination unit which reported solely to Dick Cheney was in operation during the Bush administration are absent the fact that the unit in question, the Joint Special Operations Command, has been active for decades, has been deployed domestically in the U.S., has killed U.S. citizens, and is an integral part of Barack Obama’s expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan....


See, Richard Cheney didn't care about the law, he cared about power. He abused the power of his office regularly for the sake of 'expanding' the authority of the Vice Presidency.

The US and International Policy regarding assassination of foreign leaders is very clear. It is a crime. Whether or not terrorist network leaders are 'foreign leaders' isn't really debatable. They are not leaders of sovereign nations, however, the arguments hold up when 'breaching' the fact that ASSASSINATION alone carried out by a sovereign power weakens the International laws that make it a crime. (click here)

...One Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said CIA Director Leon Panetta (click title to entry - thank you) told them that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the program be kept secret and that CIA directors agreed, placing Cheney squarely at the center of the controversy.
"He was told the vice president had ordered that the program not be briefed to the Congress," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "I think that is a problem, obviously."...


Richard Cheney and George Bush CHRONICALLY lied about their activities in the White House including wireless wire taps and the PRIVATE companies that were forced into servitude during their years in the White House. Richard Cheney breached his authority within the Vice Presidency all the time, including the outing of a CIA agent for a personal AND political vendetta after her spouse wrote an editorial in the Op-Ed section of The New York Times.

Hey, there ya go. Maybe Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson were al Qaeda leaders and we just didn't know it ! What do you think, huh?

Then again, I always thought Judith Miller was al Aqeda. After all she hung Libby out to dry !

The Holy Men of Iran need to address the needs of the people, first, before any political directive by a Desperate President.

I sincerely wish they would come together over the passions of their people. The Iranians want peace. The enemy that existed in Iraq is gone. There is clearly a 'Shi'ite Province' in Southern Iraq with The Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

There is far less danger to the Shi'ites with the withdrawal of American forces and a 'friendly' Iraq as a neighbor. There is no way a radical Ahmadinejad can claim his nation has direct threats from any nation. At every turn, there are 'resolving' issues that once concerned the Iranian people of their national security.

I am concerned a new religious divide in Iran could lead to greater turmoil and tensions.


Majid Ghaemi Heidari is welcomed at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. He and four other Iranians were freed after 30 months in U.S. custody in Iraq.
By Borzou Da
After a long absence, pro-Mousavi cleric Rafsanjani to lead prayers (click title to entry - thank you)
July 13, 2009
Reporting from Beirut -- A powerful cleric who has been a driving force behind the opposition movement challenging the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will lead Friday prayers this week after a two-month absence that was considered a sign of conflict within the Iranian establishment.
The semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency reported Sunday that Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani will deliver the nation's weekly keynote religious sermon. Rafsanjani, who chairs powerful boards that oversee the office of the supreme leader and adjudicate disputes between government bodies, is the highest-profile backer of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who lost to Ahmadinejad in an election marred by allegations of vote-rigging....
Published: July 12, 2009, 23:03
Tehran: Iran threatened the United States yesterday with possible legal action for detaining five of its officials for up to 30 months in Iraq.
The five Iranians were given a hero's welcome home after their release last week, waving and smiling as they stepped from their plane at Tehran's Mehrabad airport to be met by their families.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was also there to greet them, denounced their detention as "inhumane".
The capture of the Iran-ians, some of whom US forces accused of arming Shiite Muslim militias at the height of Iraq's sectarian war, stoked tension between Tehran and Washington.
The two powers are also at odds over Iran's nuclear programme....

Dedication without question. Who can we trust?


...Dr. Regina Benjamin is known along Alabama's impoverished Gulf Coast (click here) as a country doctor who makes house calls and doesn't turn away patients who can't pay, even as she's had to find the money to rebuild a clinic repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and once even fire....


...Benjamin was the first black woman to head a state medical society (click title to entry - thank you), received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights and just last fall received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." But she made headlines in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with her determination to rebuild her rural health clinic Bayou La Batre, Ala., which serves 4,400 patients who would be hard-pressed to find care elsewhere.

It 'pays' to pay attention. Nice job ! A North Carolina Couple saved lives.


A serial killer who terrorised a US town has been shot dead by police.
Patrick Burris, 41, was gunned down in a shootout after he fired at officers sent to investigate his car.
Bullets in his gun were found to match those that killed five people over an eight-day shooting spree.

N.C. couple gets $30,000 S.C. serial killer reward (click title to entry - thank you)
Associated Press
Published: Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 7:17 p.m. Last Modified: Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 7:17 p.m.
GAFFNEY, S.C. (AP) – Officials have decided a Dallas, N.C., couple will get a $30,000 award for calling in the tip that led to a man who authorities say was a serial killer who shot to death five people in South Carolina....

June 2009 - US Unemployment Rate - 9.7% - There are 13 States, The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico with higher rates.

The statistics below reflect a "Stimulus Package," not a Republican Legislative Jobs Bill or Bush Tax Cut. It isn't 'a feel good feeling' with 'immediate gradification.' Sort of like a pat on the head. The Stimulus was all of two full months in the making when these statistics were reported, this is no measure of its effectiveness.

A good friend told me that on this past Thursday, in Wilmington, North Carolina, there was a call for the unemployed to report to the Unemployment Office to place applications with International Paper. There were many people that responded with lines out the door. That fact about the 'uptick' in the economy was never reported in the newspapers either.

May 2009 - Illinois - 9.9 % - Ranks 5th in GSP (Gross State Product)



May 2009 - Florida - 10.0% - Ranks 4th in GSP



May 2009 - Tennesee - 10.3% - Ranks 19th in GSP



May 2009 - Indiana - 10.4% - Ranks 18th in GSP



May 2009 - Ohio - 10.4% - Ranks 8th in GSP



May 2009 - Kentucky - 10.5% - Ranks 27th in GSP



May 2009 - District of Columbia - 10.7% - Ranks 34.5 place in GSP



May 2009 - Nevada - 11% - Ranks 31st in GSP



May 2009 - North Carolina - 11.1% - Ranks 9th in GSP



May 2009 - California - 11.2% - Ranks 1st in GSP



May 2009 - South Carolina - 11.6% - Ranks 28th in GSP



May 2009 - Oregon - 12.1% - Ranks 26th in GSP



May 2009 - Rhode Island - 12.1% - Ranks 44th in GSP



May 2009 - Michigan - 13.9% - Ranks 12th in GSP



May 2009 - Puerto Rico - 14.3% - Not Found



In 1928 Roosevelt became Governor of New York. (click here)
He was elected President in November 1932, to the first of four terms. By March there were 13,000,000 unemployed (approximately 25%), and almost every bank was closed. In his first "hundred days," he proposed, and Congress enacted, a sweeping program to bring recovery to business and agriculture, relief to the unemployed and to those in danger of losing farms and homes, and reform, especially through the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
By 1935 the Nation had achieved some measure of recovery, but businessmen and bankers were turning more and more against Roosevelt's New Deal program. They feared his experiments, were appalled because he had taken the Nation off the gold standard and allowed deficits in the budget, and disliked the concessions to labor. Roosevelt responded with a new program of reform: Social Security, heavier taxes on the wealthy, new controls over banks and public utilities, and an enormous work relief program for the unemployed.

Everyone needs to stop pouting because they lost their 'Republican feel good feeling' and find the veracity (devotion to the truth) of being a 'real' American. The Great Recession is due directly to the failed economic policies of eight years of Republican hubris.

The Obama Administration isn't interested in the 'flash in the pan' economics of Bush/Cheney that distracted the country from the immoral and illegal activities of their administration.

The Democratic Executive Branch and Legislature is interested in 'sustained' change to the country that isn't based in 'mythological economics.' Sustained change that will encompass changes in energy and transportation.

Last I looked, I didn't notice President Obama's Magic Wand compliments of Harry Potter.

The New Justice Sotomayor, I hope she has an interesting day.


...The first Hispanic to be nominated for the court (click title to entry - thank you), Sotomayor faces what's expected to be a week of hearings that feature largely polite and only occasionally pointed questioning, most of it from Republicans. The committee has 12 Democrats and seven Republicans.
Leahy, D-Vt., opened Monday's hearing by recalling other "firsts" on the court and how their races or ethnicities once raised questions.
Today, however, Leahy said, "we're in a different era," and he said he hoped that Sotomayor would get the same kind of consideration as Sandra Day O'Connor, whom President Ronald Reagan named as the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1981. O'Connor won overwhelmingly bipartisan support.
President Barack Obama "has done his part" in nominating Sotomayor, Leahy said. "He's made an historic nomination."...