(you place the CD into the player)

  (sounds of ocean waves rumbling)

  (soft, piano music begins playing)

OBAMA: Welcome to the Self-Help Hypnosis Series.  I'm Barack Obama, and I want to help you overcome your problem of voting for idiots.

By Candace Talmadge / North Star Writers Group

The Washington Post reports today:

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

"So what else is new?" you may ask.  After all, the Bush Administration's attack on civil liberties and privacy has been unrelenting since they day took office.

But the next part of the report is what caught my attention:

 

So I hear on Free Speech Radio News today that US special forces trained the same exact Georgian troops that invaded South Ossetia just days or weeks before the invasion.  And so then I looked and found an article from 1 month ago which discusses these US servicemen obeying their orders to train Georgian troops, the same Georgian troops that turned around and invaded South Ossetia.

This is an outrage and of course begs the question:  what exactly was the Bush administration's involvement in the instigation and lead-up to this invasion during the Olympics and right before an election.

This is of course classic "wagging the dog" before an election.  And who has more motive than the criminal Bush administration to wag the dog?

There's a news article today floating out there that says the Russians are telling their people that the war was started by Dick Cheney to prevent Obama from becoming president.  Is this what really happened?  Let's take a look at some events and facts to see if this might be possible. See you below the fold.

There will be wars... and rumors of wars.

It’s not enough for the Pentagon to have the best; the newest, and the most destructive weapons (and the most of them) on the planet. No, the Pentagon has to have the most lethal weapons that can strike anywhere, anytime against anyone -- then not have to lay claim to any such strike(s) -- for the sake of political expediency. It’s just what the doctor neocons ordered for trying and unstable times like these; a highly effective weapon that delivers its payload anonymously -- the perfect compliment to McCain’s war du jour mentality.

It’s affectionately referred to at the Pentagon as the "long-range blowtorch." But the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is designed like no other weapon in the world. It has the ability to remain anonymous as to its source. This is the perfect tool of war-whacked imperialism.

August 13, An Undisclosed Location. Do you agree with Florida Democrat Robert Wexler and Ohio Democrat Dennis Kuchinich that Bush and Cheney should be impeached? Do you feel that the war in Iraq was conducted with the incompetence that rivals FEMA in New Orleans? Or that it was a mistake? Do you feel that rather than enhance our national security, the war - 4,000 dead, 19,000 wounded, and $1 Trillion spent, has strengthened Iran and weakened the United States? Do you feel that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, should be an effective emergency response force, or an agency of incompetence and a gold mine of patronage? Do you believe that the Department of Justice should focus on race, religion, party and politics when hiring and firing staff and investigating and prosecuting corruption? Do you work? Do you need health care? Do you want your children to be able to get an education, then find rewarding work? Do you believe in "government of the people, by the people, and for the people?"  The "DemoPunks" don't.

Here is another immigration nightmare. This is not the America I know.
My friend's husband will be deported in 90 days.  Her husband was born in Thailand and adopted as a child.  Somehow the adoption paperwork was never finalized, his parents died, and he did not even know he was not a citizen.  He had a felony conviction as a teenager, served time, then turned his life around; married, had kids, worked for Texas Instruments for 16 years.  When he applied for a college loan, he was found to not be a citizen, was arrested by ICE and put in jail (February 2007).  

Pass the tinfoil:

*  The State Department gave Russia the green light to go into South Ossetia if Georgia made a big move, thinking that the Russians had made an implied commitment to stay out of Georgia proper.  But they never told the Georgian government

*  Knowing that the Russians were baiting Saakashvili, State kept telling the Georgians to keep cool.  Nonetheless, no one who works for the U.S. government had any advance warning of Saakashvili's decision to advance on Tskhinvali.  The U.S. advisers attached to the Georgian Army were kept in the dark, and Saakashvili didn't give Washington a heads-up about his big gamble.  

*  Our satellites were so busy watching Pakistan that we didn't notice Russian tanks massing in North Ossetia.

Yes, you read all of that right.

I did a search on this and hadn't seen anything show up. If it is a duplicate, please let me know.

Update: Sorry, my local rag of a paper said it was awarded. The linked story only shows Flora as being on the shortlist. Even so, the rest of the concerns are still valid.

A new national biological lab is being built in a Flora, Mississippi, a small town of only 1500 people. This has caused a great deal of concern, as the town was among the lowest ranked among the 17 applicants.

The Homeland Security Department swept aside evaluations by government experts and named Mississippi -- home to powerful U.S. lawmakers with sway over the agency -- as one of five finalists for a new $451 million laboratory to study biological threats, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.

For reasons not directly relevant to this posting, I have been going through a large number of my previous diaries, and encountered one posted 4/12/2006 entitled "Living in a bulls-eye."  As I read it I was somewhat shocked to realize how relevant it still was, given our current dispute with Iran and especially in light of the recent conflict in the Caucasus.

I had not intended to do a diary today - I have many other tasks.  But since this merely requires me to repost, I thought I would, and see if you, like me, still think what I wrote more than two years ago here is still relevant.

BTW - the original was not on the recommended list, but it was part of diary rescue.

Peace.

Cross posted from www.21stCenturyDems.org/blog

Apparently, George "the environmental President" Bush is at it again. This time he's cherishing America's natural beauty by gutting the Endangered Species Act. The Bush Administration seems to think that the "protection" part of EPA means that their job is to protect corporate profits from nasty mother nature. The Republicans already tried to do this when they had control of Congress, but since they couldn't get the votes then they'll try to do it through back-door deregulation. This is not a surprising strategy for the Bush, who has already demonstrated a historic love for secret executive orders and signing statements.

... in fact, The United States has far less control over events in Iraq than John McCain and his lapdog press corps would have us believe.

It’s a real tragedy that 147,000 American troops are essentially being held hostage in Iraq by the ever-changing political winds swirling 'round an ancient culture we know little about. Yet, after five-years this is our basic strategy, and it shall remain so if John McCain is somehow elected to the Oval Office.

Relying on current, relatively calm conditions in Iraq (as McCain is doing) to sustain the claim that the so-called surge escalation is working is a flawed strategy. Truth is; if McCain actually had half the "experience" in foreign policy that he thinks he does he’d realize there’s more trouble blowin' down the road in Iraq.

If China’s leaders took note of it, which they probably didn’t because they are too busy presenting themselves as "the Middle Kingdom" (the "middle" between Heaven and Earth) to the rest of the world, they would doubtless have been amused by Rush Limbaugh’s case of China-envy:  

See, the ChiComs need their economy growing.  They need people driving around, moving around.  They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they're subsidizing fuel.  They're not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes.  They're buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy.  Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth.  So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain't the United States of America.

Presumably, what Rush would like is for the U.S. to subsidize gas so that people in the U.S. could live large like the Chinese leaders and fuel our economic growth.

A major question that the McCain stream Media is NOT asking is what did President Bush know about Georgia's planned military raid into South Ossetia, and when did he know it?

President Bush and Vice President Cheney had promoted Georgia as an ally and a beacon of "Democracy" [Although the current crisis was partly precipitated by recent parliamentary elections that the opposition claims were rigged in favor of the ruling party] on the preiphery of the old Soviet empire. And they were pushing for their entry into NATO. So, does anyone seriously believe that the Bush administration was unaware of the Georgian plans to go into South Ossetia with force?

In her recent AlterNet column, Iliana Segura gets a lot right:

If the United States really wants to improve the situation in Afghanistan, it should start by ending the occupation. It should then cough up money for humanitarian aid and reconstruction. (One estimate puts the tab at $10 billion.) This is not just for the sake of Afghanistan, but for the sake of Americans as well, who are no safer today than they were when the planes hit the towers. Ending the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is the first, crucial step in that elusive goal of "winning hearts and minds" that the United States claims to be so committed to in the region. As Iraq has demonstrated, occupying armies are not a deterrent to terrorism. Occupying armies breed terror.

    Progressives have long charged that Bush's judicial appointments have been in part intended to ensure that the independence of the judicial branch in our government is modified to limit their independence to matters not of concern to the Republican party and the people who appoint them.  Unfortunately, a clear example of that has now appeared, reported in the New York Times here  in respect of the hundreds of immigrant workers at a meatpacking plant in Iowa
  The strange speed with which the Iowa Federal court dealt with hundreds of cases within four days was shocking enough when it happened, but now, unfortunately we hear how it was done. Let this be a lesson to the rest of us.

Do we realize that in lieu of John Edward's personal life spread all over the news,there seems to be an awfully big push by current and former communist factions in the world to expand? Plus the Bush administration in its final months is pushing to put through some bad environmental moves. There should be a much closer focus on these movements relative to our welfare.

Knowing about John Edwards's affair will not do us an iota of good. So he's like every other "good-looking" male whose spouse has had long time illness. That just about says it all doesn't it? Especially in America where we struggle to be this big moralistic society yet live side by side with a burgeoning pornographic industry, whose financial sources appear to be hard to trace. Remember the Diane Sawyer expose about it? Profits from pornography are seldom on anyone's books. Porn continues to flourish and sex encompasses far too much of our daily thoughts. We're literally bombarded with it.