This is my father's fault.

He found it, he forwarded it. I swear, I'm just the messenger!

I hope Palin's husband is an obsessively devoted father.

I knew the Alaskan first family had a child with Down syndrome, but I'm only just now figuring out that the kid was born this April.

I'm not making any kind of political thing out of that. I just hope there's some pretty damn wonderful adult nearby that's going to be able to look after the little guy during the campaign season - preferably the father, but even a grandparent, aunt, uncle, or patron saint of all nannies. Just somebody.

So she's a Republican, then.

Sen. John McCain's choice of a running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, questioned the science behind predictions of sea ice loss linked to global warming and opposed a state initiative that would have banned metal mines from discharging pollution into salmon streams.

Duly noted.

Sullivan's on fire!

As the afternoon's worn on, Andrew's reaction to the Palin choice has gone from skeptical to hilariously appalled. I shouldn't keep quoting the guy, but the outrage is just too much fun.

On Palin:

So one tenth of her campaign financing in 2002 was from oil company bosses, she's being investigated by her own legislature for a scandal where she appointed a sexual harasser, she vetoed wind and clean coal energy projects, and wanted to impose Christianist censorship on public libraries. I mean: did anyone even vet her?

And:

Oh God. This is now getting officially painful. Just listen to this audio of Palin talking about Iraq. It's excruciating. She doesn't "know what the plan is to ever end the war"? She sounds about as informed as someone you would grab off the subway at random.

On McCain:

John McCain first met Palin in February of this year and had a telephone conversation with her. That is the full extent of his familiarity with Palin until he spent time with her last week. That's how seriously he is taking the presidency of the United States. It's simply unbelievable recklessness. It's Bush-level recklessness.

Putting country first? This is a reckless act of egotism and politics. The more you think about it, and the more you consider how many charges he has leveled against Obama's alleged inexperience in a time of peril, the more outrageous it is that she he picks an unknown local politician he has only met once before to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Palin isn't the issue here. McCain's judgment is. It's completely off the wall. Is there something wrong with him?

Wow.

Troopergate.

I regret - and almost deleted - the "Palin addendum" post from an hour or so back. For all I know, some or all of the allegations against the governor's ex-brother-in-law are unsubstantiated, and I made a mistake in alluding to them, even vaguely, as though they weren't. The only reason I'm leaving the thing up is because a little bit of embarrassment is probably good for my soul and/or blogging ethics.

All of that said, there's a handy timeline of the scandal up here. It doesn't mention that the fired official, Walter Monegan, seems to've been fairly popular, while his replacement is embroiled in what I take to be a minor sexual harassment scandal - but, hey, that's what you've got the Wall for!

Ezra on McCain's call.

This was, for McCain, a major decision. And we can learn from it. And here's what even his supporters must admit: Country did not come first. Polls did. The calculations are fully transparent. Understanding that he needed to broaden his electoral coalition, he picked a woman. Understanding he needed youth, he picked a young politician. Understanding he needed to emphasize his reformist credentials, he picked a onetime whistleblower. What he didn't pick was anyone able to help him govern, or capable of stepping forward in a moment of crisis. Palin is not an experienced foreign policy hand like Lieberman or a successful and experienced governor like Tommy Thompson. Today, McCain chose his campaign over his presidency. Over our presidency. Palin seems like a promising young politician, but McCain increasingly seems like a desperate one.

If McCain actually knew the woman well, I'd say that that was unfair - but, from all accounts, he doesn't, so it's not. [Ambinder reports that McCain first met her in February.]

I said before it was a ballsy choice he made, and in some respects I think it has the potential to be politically advantageous for him. On the other hand, it has to be said that Palin favors domestic policies totally at odds with the preferences of most of the country, and as far as I can tell she has literally no known foreign policy views; if she had entered into the Republican primaries as a presidential candidate, she almost certainly would've been crowded out by Mike Huckabee long before the wider American public had a chance to politely reject her. And now she's the designated heir to a dude with decades of known health problems?

Right now, she's an unknown who's benefiting in a lot of ways from comparison with her senior partner in the ticket, but she urgently needs public vetting - much more public scrutiny than veep candidates usually receive. We've got to know what we're in for if she ends up in the Oval Office.

Palin addendum.

Okay, in her defense, it sounds like her ex-brother-in-law maybe shouldn't be a trooper after all. That said, firing his boss and trying to cover it up don't collectively amount to a totally reassuring approach to problem-solving.



LATE EDIT: I've actually developed some regrets about this post - see here for more.

Sarah Palin.

Huh. Credit where credit is due: McCain made a ballsy choice.

Is it a bad one? There's already a great deal of commentary out there trying to make the case that Governor Palin's inexperience undercuts the "not ready to lead" attack against Obama, but if you're McCain you probably really feel that Obama's problems are linked to naivete rather than inexperience, per se; I don't know that he's going to perceive any inconsistencies, and I'm just about positive he's not going to pull back the attack dogs. Meanwhile, it's a significant bid to tap into some of the hopes for transformation that Obama and Clinton roused - albeit with someone who may be too rabidly anti-choice to capture the love of many feminists - and also a pick that might turn Biden's notoriously pointed debate style against him.

On the down-side:

In short, she's accused of using her pull as governor to get her ex-brother-in-law fired as a state trooper. The brother-in-law is embroiled in an ugly divorce and custody with Palin's sister. And after his boss wouldn't fire the brother-in-law, she fired the boss. Palin originally insisted there was nothing to the story. More recently, she was forced to admit the one of her top deputies had pushed to get the guy fired.

That's just a little bit worrisome. Plus, she apparently hates polar bears. Plus plus, she's apparently already opened her campaign on a demonstrable untruth, she has a history of associating with fringe right-wingers, and it's really hard to make a compelling case that her experience would actually help McCain govern in any substantive way as he steps into office. [In the case of Obama, I really believe demonstrated wisdom is a more significant factor than cold experience; absent demonstrated wisdom, though, some knowledge of the system certainly would be kind of a plus.]

No idea how her campaigning skills are - but since she's pulling something like 85% approval ratings in Alaska, I'm gonna assume she's not a disgrace with a podium.

Anyway, on a personal level, she pretty much forfeits any chance of gaining my respect when she describes intelligent design flim-flammery as "information," but I guess - all things considered - America is better off for having the Republican ticket be something other than the traditional two rich white guys. Don't get me wrong: at first glance, she looks like she'd be terrible in office! But at least she might do some metatextual good - more than one could say for Pawlenty.

Putin: No, really, it's all Bush's fault!

Putin's current assertions rely on an American passport, ostensibly found somewhere near the South Ossetian capital. Even if the story's true, it doesn't provide too much information that wasn't already in the public sphere; we knew there were something like a hundred and thirty American military advisors assigned to the Georgian military, and we even knew that a thousand or more Americans were in the country just before the start of this mess (and possibly later), having contributed to Operation Immediate Response 2008. There was nothing particularly covert about any of it, and, as far as I can tell, nobody's alleging that they ended up joining the troops on the Georgian front lines.

Assuming I'm not missing something fundamental, the real question here is whether the Bush administration gave Saakashvili bad advice at the outset. With these guys I wouldn't care to rule it totally out, but right now there's no visible proof one way or the other - certainly not in Putin's possession.

But, regardless, the idea that poor Vladimir Putin was offering proportionate response to startling aggression is laughable on its face. I may be dumping a great deal of the responsibility for this mess on Saakashvili's lap, but I don't believe for a second that the Russians hadn't been looking for a pretext to do what they did. Saakashvili might've been reckless in provoking them - and doubly so for doing it with a goal of moving beyond border security and simply smacking down the principle of South Ossetian self-determination - but Putin, the man who made a graveyard out of Chechnya and gave a wink to every fresh monster that crawled out of Milosevic's Greater Serbia, really has no business pretending to be a baffled innocent.

That said, the point wasn't to convince the likes of me. He's feeding a myth to the Russian people, and he's telling the Bushies that they're not intimidating him. It's all kind of heavy-handed, but that's the way he rolls.


EDIT: All of that said, I do find it a little bit odd that there's been so little mention of Immediate Response `08 in the American press - particularly since the American forces seem to've been in Georgia at least as late as August 12, according to this cached article from Stars and Stripes. And, in fact, the article confirms the base from which the operations were conducted - Vaziani - was a Russian bombing target a few days later.

Sullivan says . . .

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn't shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Yes.

Okay, that's it. I'm turning off whatever remained of my skepticism and my critical thinking skills, and just coasting on good feelings for a couple of hours. Right now, there's no sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and for a life-long Democrat that's an absence to be savored.

The acceptance speech.

I haven't gone on line to see how the yammering punditry is evaluating it; for better or for worse (generally for worse), the commentariat inevitably becomes as important to a speech's success as the speaker and the words.

With my own yammering hat on, though: I thought it was excellent. Absolutely excellent. It won't be remembered for its rhetoric the same way the "Yes, We Can!" speech is, I think - though the last ten minutes or so were killer - but it's resistant to charges of new age frothiness in ways some of his more poetic speeches aren't. He named specific goals, he pointedly refuted most of the recent Republican portrayals of his character and his life, and it pretty clearly cast the race to come as idealistic pragmatism (or pragmatic idealism) versus unthinking adherence to right-wing orthodoxy, particularly in matters of domestic politics. I think it's a good pitch, and it has the added virtue of being terrifyingly true.

On a more personal level: I spent the first twenty minutes genuinely, irrationally afraid that he'd get shot. I know the Secret Service must've absolutely killed itself to make sure it got this one right, but this is a single man arguing in the most visible way possible that America can be better than it is, and it's just so easy to imagine some unhappy soul finding that threatening, or hungering to find a way to devour the moment and appropriate its power for himself.

I thought it was a great speech; I loved it; thank God it's over.



EDIT: And now a view into the McCain camp's reaction, care of Josh Marshall and the TPM empire.




EDIT 2: Very nice write-up here from Kevin Drum.

I guess Putin overreached more badly than I realized.

The Chinese are stepping back.

Russia suffered a significant setback here on Thursday, as members of a regional security group in which the Kremlin plays an important role offered little support for Moscow’s military action in Georgia.

Dmitri A. Medvedev, the Russian president, arrived in this sleepy Central Asian capital for the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with hopes that the six-member group would provide the strong international backing the Kremlin has so far lacked after its incursion into Georgia. Moscow has urged other nations to follow its lead and recognize Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

Instead, the organization, which also includes China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, took a neutral stance, urging Russia and Georgia to resolve their differences peacefully.

In hindsight, I guess it's not a huge surprise that there'd be some wariness in some of these quarters about legitimizing secession movements.

Mind you, none of that is to say that heavy-handed bullying from Cheney couldn't drive these guys to take a harder anti-NATO line.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."

A McCain health care guru gives us enlightenment: the solution to the American medical crisis is to stop categorizing people as uninsured, since anyone can go to an emergency room!

Ezra Klein makes the obvious point about the utility of this approach to people in need of prolonged treatment, so I don't have to. Instead, I'll just say that George Orwell would blush at the language games that the Republicans like to use in place of actual governance (as well as those involved in spectacles like the McCain Disavowal Dance).

See also: Truth, Ministry of.

. . .

No, seriously. They really used the phrase themselves. The awfulness is so perfect it's almost beautiful!

Oh, good.

The Democrats are competitive with the Republicans in secretive cabals with industry ties! Now I know we've arrived as a party!

Hope you don't like scientific competitiveness!

The Republican Party platform now calls for a total ban on embryonic stem cell research in the United States. Expect one of McCain's more painfully insincere smiles if he's ever called upon to defend this particular plank.

More.

So, naturally, I missed Kerry's speech while I was off commenting on Clinton's. That's not the sort of thing I expect to regret, but the consensus is that J.K. spoke in exactly the way he should've spoken four years ago. God help me, I've heard the phrase "barn-burner" spoken!

I did catch Biden, and was relieved. The man has a genuinely distinguished legislative career, but I'd never really watched him closely enough as a campaigner to have a solid sense of how much help he'd be in getting Obama elected (since delivering Delaware isn't all that much of a coup); now I can put him in the plus column. The speech was a bit longer than it needed to be, I think, but he knows his stuff and he's deeply passionate without seeming unhinged or mean-spirited. And, since any campaign is conducted in a mirror universe of Republican stereotypes, it should be said that he's not gonna help the Rovians pin the "condescending elitist" label any more firmly on Obama than they've already done. The advantage to picking an earnest guy with a track record of mouthing off is that it's almost impossible to portray him as pretentious.

Did his speech top Clinton's? I don't think so, but it certainly didn't embarrass the speaker - even by comparison - and that was enough.

[I should add that it contained bits that made me very uneasy - including some really belligerent language on Russia - but that doesn't mean it wasn't successful.]

Obama's appearance at the end wasn't any kind of a surprise for the home obsessive; his flight arrived in Denver in mid-afternoon. And, yet, it surely did make an impression, albeit one that's kind of hard to characterize.

Most politicians don't get to heights like the one Obama's occupying now without being comfortable with a crowd, but Obama's bearing goes way beyond the minimum expected. The guy's just got a public poise so perfect and casual it's almost unsettling; I don't know if it was pure self-confidence, or trust in that audience, or what - but when he came out to salute Biden for the speech, he might as well have been Sinatra striding out onto a Vegas stage. Clinton was definitely the biggest political dog in that hall before that moment, but once Obama meandered on in (carrying a mic instead of relying on the podium) and grinned like he was in on a joke with all America, I think he officially took over the Democratic Party.

Smart stagecraft - but, man, I can't imagine how comfortable you'd have to be in your own skin to pull it off.

We got Good Bill back.

President Clinton looked better than he has this whole long primary season - more fit, more alert, and just generally more himself. My recent campaign differences with him notwithstanding, I'd really worried that his heart surgery had done lasting (if reasonably subtle) damage to his faculties - now, happily, not so much.

So, yeah, it was a very solid speech, and all the more welcome in that it gave us some concrete, data-driven indictments of the Republican era that's passing, as well as of McCain's intent to continue all the major policy approaches that made it what it was. Specifics and facts are the Democrats' friends this year; they really should be more in evidence.

[I apologize for totally failing to do the obvious and cite them myself, but all you need to do is Google American poverty rates, income inequality, real wages, or job growth, and you'll get a sense of the domestic picture.]

But, man, God help Biden. Unless maybe you're Barack Obama, you just don't want to be the guy who comes out to speak after Clinton in a room full of passionate Democrats.



LATE EDIT: Ezra speaks truth. This bit in particular stands out:

And, lastly, no one can humanize policy like Clinton. The speech he offered could have been a joint release from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Policy foreign affairs department. But somehow, when Clinton reads it, policy slips free of the weighty terms and looping sentences that press it down, and drifts upward to read easily as part of the human condition, engaged with our everyday experience. It's a remarkable skill, and one that no other current politician possesses.

Agreed.

Nice!

Hillary Clinton moved to suspend the roll call vote and nominate Barack Obama by acclamation. The motion was passed, and Nancy Pelosi formally extended the nomination to Obama. Obama accepted the nomination, becoming the first African-American to represent a major party for president.

And now the story's as much about Clinton's magnanimity as it is about Obama's nomination. Well, fair play to her - unless her loyalists feel more betrayed than I'd think they would, the party as a whole wins!

I miss Ted Turner.

Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I really think CNN didn't always suck this badly.

"Tiny."

So, the McCain campaign is trying once again to make Obama's sanity into a disadvantage; a few months back, the senator from Illinois mentioned that the United States of yore maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which was considerably more of a geopolitical threat than Iran, and that no one ever took that as a sign of weakness. We should be secure enough in our own power and positions to talk, said Obama.

The McCain ad takes from that this:

Iran. Radical Islamic government. Known sponsors of terrorism. Developing nuclear capabilities to 'generate power' but threatening to eliminate Israel.

Obama says Iran is a 'tiny' country, 'doesn't pose a serious threat.' Terrorism, destroying Israel, those aren't 'serious threats'?

Obama -- dangerously unprepared to be president.

Thankfully, this time around even the TV news folks - at least some of them - are calling bullshit.

Still, it's worth noting - as Andrew Sullivan helpfully does here and here - that this does signify a real difference between the two candidates, however dishonest the particulars of this ad might be: that difference is that McCain and his camp are borderline nuts.

My own feeling, at this point, is that McCain simply doesn't perceive much of a difference between the dictates of his personal codes of behavior and the proper, effective actions of the most powerful country in the world. [To be fair, there's probably a lot in the man's background - from his time as a fighter pilot to his time as a POW - that would've made an almost solipsistic attention to the powers and limitations of his own person almost necessary; an awful lot of his life at those points came from what he could or could not do as an individual actor, rather than from what he could accomplish as part of a larger institutional system. If anything, he was probably trained not to project larger consequences too far out.] One of many reasons why most presidents don't approach points of geopolitical tension the way a dude in a bar would approach a drunk shouting at a waitress is that the institution of the presidency and the reputation of the country simply provide a more versatile suite of tools with which to work than just the equivalent of shouting louder or popping the guy in the mouth - but, at the same time, they also mean that confrontations are less discrete and more consequential than McCain seems to think.

More concisely: the idea that the guy could become president, particularly after Bush, just becomes scarier and scarier to me.

Night two of the DNC.

So, this really was a look at the Democratic Party of the next ten years, wasn't it? Warner and Patrick and Schweitzer and H. Clinton: all up-and-comers, in one sense or another. None of them buckled and failed under the pressure, I think - though I'll admit I missed an awful lot of Schweitzer's speech (which looked unusually raucous and therefore kinda wonderful) because someone at PBS thought I'd rather hear Mark Shields pontificate about Deval Patrick's.

Still, the real home run was definitely Clinton's. I think her campaign's responsible for an awful lot of the lingering ill-will within the Democratic fold - attacks on Obama himself, even the dishonest ones, were par for the course, but the efforts to delegitimize the Democratic electoral process were ultimately really destructive - but this speech did as much as anyone could've hoped to repair the breaches (see Greg Sargent's notes here for some of the more effective lines), while still giving the senator room to hold Obama's feet to the fire on health care. Basically, she acknowledged the passions and the preferred political narrative of her die-hards, and she pivoted and argued that it could all in good conscience be shifted over toward Obama's candidacy; to the people who thought she didn't spend enough of her time talking about him, I think I'd say that her role as on-site grief counselor was probably more important than that of Cheerleader Number One.

Beyond that, she's improved hugely as a public speaker since the start of the campaign; she may not be in Obama's league, but I think she's ten feet ahead of Warner, or even Patrick. God help whatever poor shmoe the Republicans send up to run against her in New York next time around.

It's official.

The Russians have recognized South Ossetian and Abkhazian sovereignty. Wider Russian ambitions notwithstanding, one can actually see some value in making it as clear to Saakashvili as possible that military adventurism along the border isn't going to do his country any good; one just hopes that the Russians give a damn about the rights of the ethnic Georgians within the breakaways. It certainly seems like the Ossetians with guns don't.

The simple joys of understatement.

Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled the country during 28 increasingly repressive years, declared that he had “every expectation” of striking a power-sharing deal with the opposition, but his government seemed to be further embittering its rivals and complicating prospects for a settlement by locking them up.

Priceless.

Here's a surprise.

Good news from Zimbabwe? Could it be?!

Zimbabwe's main opposition party won the top job in parliament Monday, scoring a surprise victory that could give President Robert Mugabe's foes leverage in power-sharing talks.

It is the first time since Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980 that the speaker's post has not been held by an ally of the autocratic Mugabe.

The election of Lovemore Moyo of the Movement for Democratic Change on a 110-98 vote brought cheers, with opposition legislators breaking into a song declaring "ZANU-PF is finished!" The result indicated some members of the ruling ZANU-PF may have voted for Moyo in the secret ballot.

Now, obviously, positive developments in Zimbabwe are only meaningful insofar as the bad men with guns are willing to respect them - and, of course, Mugabe himself can dissolve parliament at any time.

That said, insofar as the man's own political base is fragmenting even slightly . . .

[And, as an aside, how the hell did a closed ballot vote ever get past Zanu-PF after the last few months?]

. . . his leverage seems suddenly weakened. Along with actual military force, Mugabe's greatest asset is arguably the appearance that people at every level of power are willing to be complicit in whatever crimes are needed to keep him in power; in a mutant counterinsurgency, it's a crude kind of force multiplier. If that political support is seen to soften, then the onus goes back to the military and paramilitary forces - and maybe this time they could be induced to break. High-profile weapons shipments from China seem to've fallen through; I assume the African black market is fairly robust, but is it enough to supply armament in the numbers Mugabe needs in times of crisis? Might the demands of survival among the officer corps be forced to change?

Okay, probably not. But a little bit of hope is very welcome right now.

I wonder how the Republicans will spin this one.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki said Monday there would be no security agreement between the United States and Iraq without an unconditional timetable for withdrawal — a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which insists that the timing for troop departure would be based on conditions on the ground.

"No pact or an agreement should be set without being based on full sovereignty, national common interests, and no foreign soldier should remain on Iraqi land, and there should be a specific deadline and it should not be open," Maliki told a meeting of tribal Sheikhs in Baghdad.

Maliki said that the United States and Iraq had agreed that all foreign troops would be off Iraqi soil by the end of 2011. "There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil," Maliki said.

A translation error, maybe? A misunderstanding?

Nah, I'm teasing you. The answer's in the article; they're currently opting for outright dismissiveness.

But the White House disputed Maliki's statement and made clear the two countries are still at odds over the terms of a U.S. withdrawal.

"Any decisions on troops will be based on conditions on the ground in Iraq," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in Crawford, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing. "That has always been our position. It continues to be our position."

Fratto denied Maliki's assertion that an agreement has been reached mandating that all foreign forces be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

"An agreement has not been signed," he said. "There is no agreement until there's an agreement signed. There are discussions that continue in Baghdad."

Well, there you go, then.

The other shoe drops, but lightly.

Sharif and company have (apparently rather gracefully) pulled out of Pakistan's governing coalition, largely over Asif Ali Zardari's efforts to keep the former Chief Justice from coming back into power and screwing up Zardari's bid for the presidency. Zardari's PPP still has a working majority, so the government won't be dissolved, but one rather expects more cracks to show.

Meanwhile:

Pakistani Taliban gunmen attacked a district government official's home in the Swat Valley, northwest of Islamabad, on Monday, killing three family members and seven guards.

Signaling what could be a new Taliban tactic to undermine foreign forces in Afghanistan, gunmen in the port city of Karachi set fire on Sunday night to two armored vehicles bound for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The violence and political uncertainty, on top of weak economic data, have undermined investor confidence and sent the country's financial markets sharply lower.

The Pakistani rupee closed at a record low of around 76.60/70 to the dollar on Monday. Shares were nearly 2 percent lower.

Pakistan's stock market, which rose for six consecutive years to 2007 and was one of the best-performing markets in Asia in that period, has fallen about 30 percent this year.

Marcus Aurelius still looks good.

New developments in statuary for the archaeology nerds in the audience!

Uncle Teddy.

I missed Michelle Obama's speech tonight - I'm gratified to note that the reviews I'm reading seem very positive so far - but I did catch Kennedy's. I got the sense that he hasn't been getting as much exercise in the last few months as he had in the preceding years; he's a little heavier than I remember, and more easily winded, and I wouldn't think any of that would be a direct function of the tumor.

[I am, however, a medical ignoramus, so take my thoughts with several grains of salt.]

Anyway, he was on his feet, and didn't seem to be in desperately great pain - that was good to see. He also made it quite clear that he had no intention of dying any time soon, and I propose we hold him to that. He'd be utterly impossible to replace.

As far as the speech itself goes: the delivery may have been lessened by the constraints of the flesh, but the words themselves were fine, and they could only have come from Kennedy - and they're all the more meaningful at this point in his career. The senator presented Obama as the latest agent of a progressive tradition with which he, Kennedy, had lived his entire life, and though that may seem kinda banal in a one-sentence summation it was really quite touching.

Robert Mugabe: still a thug.

In a sign that President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe may be trying to consolidate his control of Parliament, police officers arrested two opposition lawmakers Monday as the legislature opened in the capital, Harare. Opposition officials said they feared more arrests could follow on Monday, the day members of Parliament were to be sworn in.

“Now we have two of our M.P.s arrested, another one feared abducted and more could just be taken away as well,” Luke Tamborinyoka, director of information for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said Monday. “We don’t know what really is happening.”

For the first time since the country’s independence from minority white rule in 1980, the opposition in March won a majority in Parliament over Mr. Mugabe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF. But its edge is narrow, with 110 seats to ZANU-PF’s 99, and it depends on the support of 10 members from an opposition splinter group that has been squabbling with the main wing of the opposition.

Here's the whole thing. Don't expect to be surprised.

Not good.

Ayatollah Khamenei has apparently decided he wants partial ownership of Ahmadinejad's wildly ineffective economic policies (to say nothing of the nukes program); that, of course, is still another kick to the groin for Iran's reformers.

[If you can think of a better word for Ali Rafsanjani - something that combines pragmatism and a whiff of corruption - you're invited to suggest it.]

I've really been hoping that Khamenei would find some political caution, see that Ahmadinejad's basic incompetence is pretty much unsustainable, and kick him to the curb - but that's apparently not happening today.

Good grief.

According to the McCain campaign, Obama's selection of Joe Biden was a big ol' dis for Hillary Clinton. In a new ad, they ponder the question: why would Obama do such a thing?

A voiceover announcer says, "She won millions of votes but isn't on the ticket. Why? For speaking the truth."

I gather that's mostly the truth about Obama being so gosh-darn negative, in case you're wondering - maybe with a dash of Rezko-truth tossed into the mix. Professional right-wing fabulist Bill Kristol, on the other hand, alludes to outright sexism and encourages Democratic constituencies to be outraged! Outraged!

It's all transparently dishonest, but now that Obama's back from his vacation and they don't have the airwaves to themselves, I guess these little nonsensical jabs are the best the McCainiacs have to work with. That said: to her credit, Senator Clinton has been shooting this one down, and I'd think a good speech at the convention would pretty well kill it for good.

Whereupon, it seems, the McCain campaign would go back to the tried and true method of strip-mining the most traumatic years of its candidate's life in the hopes the discomfort it would engender would more than balance out the continuing damage to his dignity and stature. Good thinking, guys!

I love the smell of recklessness in the morning.

With the bulk of Russian troops now withdrawn to the enclaves or to Russian soil, Mr. Saakashvili framed the war against South Ossetia and Russia — a military defeat that imperiled his government and threatens Georgia’s fragile economy — as a seminal moment that offered the seeds of political and national success.

In an interview in his office that stretched until nearly 2 a.m., Mr. Saakashvili said that Georgia had gained allies in the world and would embark upon a campaign of rebuilding. He predicted continued American support, and noted that he spoke by phone with the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Senator John McCain, as often as twice a day, and said that he was in regular contact with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has been picked to run for vice president on the Democratic ticket.

He also said that the Bush administration had not communicated disappointment or signaled a decline in its support for him since he gave the order late at night on Aug. 7 to attack Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.

He said that while he may face pressures in the months ahead, as the effects of the war ripple through the economy, he said he expected to weather any troubles. “There has been tremendous solidarity,” he said.

The Kremlin has characterized Mr. Saakashvili as delusional and dangerous.

Sitting in his office as he discussed the effects of the war — tens of thousands of refugees; the scattering of a national army that abandoned its dead and its hardware on the battlefield; the loss of territory to Russia and the hardening of separatist sentiment in the enclaves — he seemed prepared to resume the policies that had set Georgia and Russia at odds.

I do get that Saakashvili is in a very complicated position; politically, he needs to frame the last month in a way that makes him look visionary (or at least not catastrophically short-sighted) - and, even beyond that, as a passionate nationalist he's not going to want to signal any ambivalence on the matters of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At the same time, the Russians kicked his ass and set up camp in his back yard, and if they'd chosen to do more he couldn't even have slowed them down. It's not a really enviable position for a head of state to occupy.

That said, saying - in effect - that everything he did will be (or, in some sense, already has been) vindicated, and that his policy toward the provinces he invaded remains exactly the same as it was really does seem kind of dumb. I'm under the impression that it doesn't reflect the broader Georgian mood - which is to say, grief - and it will only make the South Ossetians and the Russian people more convinced of the legitimacy of Russian troops fortifying the security zones outside the breakaways. It doesn't strengthen Russia's hand much, to be sure, but it does strengthen it, and doesn't seem to get much in return.

Incidentally, I really do hope that the Bush administration hasn't really been egging this guy on still further. I'm taking that line about their not having expressed disappointment as leaving room to believe they expressed exasperation, but . . . well, you never know with these guys.

Still more on Fournier.

From Steve Benen, at the rejiggered Political Animal. Lots of examples of the gentleman at the AP going off the rails, but it's the quote at the end that really seals it for me.

Sandy Johnson, the former DC bureau chief of the AP, was asked about Fournier and the bureau when she was forced out as part of a staff shake-up. "I just hope he doesn't destroy it," she said.

That probably shouldn't have been taken as a good sign.

And here come the assholes.

I'm sorry, but come on. Here's Ron Fournier, from the Associated Press, with a gem titled "Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence." Behold the objectivity!

The candidate of change went with the status quo.

In picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, Barack Obama sought to shore up his weakness — inexperience in office and on foreign policy — rather than underscore his strength as a new-generation candidate defying political conventions.

He picked a 35-year veteran of the Senate — the ultimate insider — rather than a candidate from outside Washington, such as Govs. Tim Kaine of Virginia or Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas; or from outside his party, such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; or from outside the mostly white male club of vice presidential candidates. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't even make his short list.

The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

. . .

So the question is whether Biden's depth counters Obama's inexperience — or highlights it?

After all, Biden is anything but a change agent, having been in office longer than half of all Americans have been alive. Longer than McCain.

And he talks too much.

On the same day he announced his second bid for the presidency, Biden found himself explaining why he had described Obama as "clean."

And there's the 2007 ABC interview in which Biden said he would stand by an earlier statement that Obama was not ready to serve as president.

It seems Obama is worried that some voters are starting to agree.

It should be noted that none of the people Fournier cites, quotes, or obliquely references for this article support that contention. Not one. The opinion is his own.

Which is fair, I guess, but it invites the reader to ask who the hell Ron Fournier is and why his opinion should be trusted. Well, the "who" is "the acting Washington bureau chief for Associated Press." The "why he should be trusted" is harder. See, that biographical link contains a nice little snippet about an email exchange he had with Karl Rove after the death of Pat Tillman.

Karl Rove exchanged emails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line "HE-R-O." In response to Mr. Fournier’s e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, "How does our country continue to produce men and women like this," to which Mr. Fournier replied, "The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight."

That's disturbingly chummy, to be sure. But maybe, on its own, it might suggest a friendship (albeit a vaguely inappropriate one) rather than a political bias, "Keep up the fight." notwithstanding.

On the other hand, given that the man was subsequently offered a job in a "senior advisory role" for the communications office of the McCain campaign and then took a while to consider it . . . well, look, Caesar's wife looks kind of loose. Also, she's writing unsubstantiated hit pieces.

The AP should really collectively be just a little bit embarrassed.



LATE EDIT: There's more on Fournier here.

What if the bear goes hungry?

According to a new article at McClatchy, sustainability isn't really a watchword in Russia's economic rise.

The Russian oil boom, which has produced a gusher of cash, political power and an opulent elite — and has helped fuel the country's renewed assertiveness in Georgia and elsewhere — is on shakier ground than officials in Moscow would like to admit.

Most of the oil produced after the country's 1998 financial collapse has come from drilling and re-drilling old Soviet oil fields with more advanced equipment — squeezing more black gold out of the same ground — and efforts to develop new fields have been slow or non-existent.

That strategy is potentially disastrous, said Valery Kryukov, who researches oil companies in western Siberia for a government-funded think tank.

"If the situation which exists now stays the same, oil production will start to decline seriously in two years," Kryukov said in a phone interview from his offices in the city of Novosibirsk.

The implications extend far beyond Russia's borders. Last year, Russia was the world's second-largest oil producer. If its output begins to decline or is hampered by inept or corrupt business practices, the price of oil could begin climbing again.

The concerns about Russia's oil industry also raise questions about the health of the nation's economy, which has enjoyed stratospheric growth thanks to high oil prices since the economic crisis a decade ago, according to interviews with a dozen economists and analysts.

. . .

A Western diplomat in Moscow said drilling in old fields makes sense from the perspective of Russia's ruling elite, who control energy companies only as long as they remain in power.

"If you're running Gazprom (a Russian natural-gas producer) but you don't really own it, then your interest is maximizing short-term profits, not long-term development," said the Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. "If you look at most of the Russian companies — the energy companies — that's precisely what's happened. They have focused on profits or dividends and less so on long term development and replacing reserves."

In a nation with a history of economic tumult and social unrest, the diplomat said, it doesn't bode well for the future.

"They're not Keynesians," the diplomat said, "they're Russians."

And that was a bit of a low blow.

Still, if the problem is as described, it's a moderately serious one and it's only going to get worse.

So, it's Biden for Obama's VP.

So ends the speculation.

He's certainly not the worst choice Obama could've made, but he has a history of truly embarrassing (and occasionally borderline incomprehensible) screw-ups that makes me nervous. He's remembered best from his own 2008 presidential campaign for accidentally making the word "articulate" into a racial scandal; his 1988 campaign, on the other hand, went down in flames when he borrowed just a bit too heavily from a Neil Kinnock (Neil Kinnock!) speech without accreditation.

And by "just a bit too heavily" I mean he even took the part about growing up the son of a coal miner.

Moreover, the media is making his great selling point out to be his foreign policy experience - but, let's remember, what differentiated Obama from the rest of the pack from the start was that his own foreign policy views (particularly on Iraq) were the most glaringly vindicated of the lot. By seeming to accept, however tacitly, the argument that his internationalist credentials needed burnishing by way of a guy that voted for the war, Obama may be diluting his own sales pitch.

All of that said, Senator Biden is a lefty professor of constitutional law, he's on the judiciary subcommittee on human rights, and he can be expected to be a vigorous advocate of the campaign's positions on major issues. If we're going to clean up President Bush's many messes, those aren't bad qualities to bring into play.

The latest from the Caucasus.

Russian troops pulled out of the Georgian city of Gori Friday in what Moscow said was compliance with a cease-fire agreement, but they blew up Georgian military installations on their way out and set up checkpoints north of the city.

U.S., French and Georgian officials later disputed Russia's assertion that it had complied with the pullout provisions of the cease-fire accord.

The Russian withdrawal from Gori made good on assurances from Moscow that the troops would be out of the city by 8 p.m. local time. But around that deadline, a loud blast shook a Georgian military installation, and Georgian sources said the Russians had blown up a major arms depot. Other explosions followed, and thick clouds of black smoke could be seen billowing up from at least two locations in the city.

Apart from the fact that the Russians actually left Gori proper, this seems very much like a "dog bites man" story these days.

Deadpan humor.

Sen. John McCain's inability to recall the number of homes he owns during an interview yesterday jeopardized his campaign's carefully constructed strategy to frame Democratic rival Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist . . . .

Heh.

The latest from Pakistan.

I should probably preface any comments on Pakistani politics with an acknowledgement that the Bush administration going to the mat for India's nuclear industries probably isn't adding to regional stability.

In fact, consider the preface made!

But major Pakistani players aren't doing the country a whole lot of good, either. Case in point: Benazir Bhutto's dizzyingly corrupt widower, Asif Ali Zardari, is now up as a candidate to replace Musharraf in the presidency, and it appears that he's using his influence to block, or at least delay, the reinstatement of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (whose illegal expulsion was a pretty key factor in Musharraf's fall), lest said Chief Justice rule against the amnesty Musharraf granted Zardari as a bribe to get Bhutto back in-country as a possible fig-leaf for the despotate. [It's kind of like Italian politics under Silvio Berlusconi, only without the joi de vivre.] The ruling coalition is straining at the seams as a result, which would be bleakly comic were it not for the Taliban killing scores of people in the background.

This doesn't really bode well.

Good news and bad news in Iraq.

Good news? The U.S. has apparently arrived at a draft agreement with Maliki's government that provides for a withdrawal of American forces next year, should the situation on the ground remain reasonably stable. It's an embarrassment for Bush and a worse one for McCain, but Maliki wouldn't settle for anything less.

Bad news? The Iraqis are still imperiling the stability by stirring shit with the Sunni community.

The Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is driving out many leaders of Sunni citizen patrols, the groups of former insurgents who joined the American payroll and have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation.

In restive Diyala Province, Unites States and Iraqi military officials say there were orders to arrest hundreds of members of what is known as the Awakening movement as part of large security operations by the Iraqi military. At least five senior members have been arrested there in recent weeks, leaders of the groups say.

West of Baghdad, former insurgent leaders contend that the Iraqi military is going after 650 Awakening members, many of whom have fled the once-violent area they had kept safe. While the crackdown appears to be focused on a relatively small number of leaders whom the Iraqi government considers the most dangerous, there are influential voices to dismantle the American backed movement entirely.

“The state cannot accept the Awakening,” said Sheik Jalaladeen al-Sagheer, a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Their days are numbered.”

The government’s rising hostility toward the Awakening Councils amounts to a bet that its military, feeling increasingly strong, can provide security in former guerrilla strongholds without the support of these former Sunni fighters who once waged devastating attacks on United States and Iraqi targets. It also is occurring as Awakening members are eager to translate their influence and organization on the ground into political power.

But it is causing a rift with the American military, which contends that any significant diminution of the Awakening could result in renewed violence, jeopardizing the substantial security gains in the past year. United States commanders say that the practice, however unconventional, of paying the guerrillas has saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers.

“If it is not handled properly, we could have a security issue,” said Brig. Gen. David Perkins, the senior military spokesman in Iraq. “You don’t want to give anybody a reason to turn back to Al Qaeda.”

Partisan hack outreach.

Everyone out there who was worried for Hans von Spakovsky can rest easy. Having been blocked from taking a seat at the FEC because of his egregious record of vote suppression, the future seemed dark for our hero - but just when all hope seemed to have failed, lo, he found full-time consulting work at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, whose activist Democratic employees (fully twenty-five percent of the sitting commissioners of an ostensibly non-partisan agency!) were threatening to drag the nation into anarchy by complaining in the fall if black people and Latinos were illegally kept from voting!

*sigh*

The lefty blogosphere keeps coming back to Spakovsky because his history is uncommonly bad even for a Bush favorite. His presence in an outfit meant to safeguard voter rights - at the government's highest pay grade, no less - is just a bad, bad sign. It's particularly galling that he apparently got the job only because his patron refused to give his name to the rest of the commissioners when they authorized the hire.

Can we panic yet?

In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday.

And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year.

If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland.

Super.

The (other) housing crisis!

So, the other day, someone from Politico asked McCain how many homes he owned, and the candidate couldn't answer, referring the question to his sundry attendants for study. That turned out to be a very bad way to handle the situation - team Obama leapt in with a new ad and a punchline or two in a speech that played up the obvious unflattering allegation: dude's so rich and out of touch he can't even keep track of his houses! There's also an even more potentially damaging subtext about his age and his memory and the cost of living which we must all one day pay, obviously.

Now, without actually seeing footage of the way he reacted to the question, I have to entertain the suspicion that he could've answered the question in a fuller way, but chose to punt rather than describe the lavish way of life his fortune permits. It's possible the truth is worse - there really have been times when he's seemed genuinely confused over the course of the campaign - but without evidence I'd've been inclined to write this off as a good, but largely meaningless, gotcha from the Obama camp, and I wouldn't have mentioned it here.

But, of course, the McCain people have elevated it above the rest of the day's political nonsense by the desperation of their response. First of all, they announced they were going to run on Obama's land deal with Tony Rezko, as Hillary Clinton tried to do in the spring.

[I actually think that's fair, though unfortunate. I take a lot of comfort from Obama's long discussion with the Chicago Tribune on the matter, but giving a hundred grand to a man under investigation for fraud and whatever else demonstrated, at the very least, a real lapse in Obama's political judgement.]

Second, they decided to characterize the whole issue of McCain's inability to answer a direct question as a cruel attack on . . . wait for it . . . Cindy McCain. Quoth an unnamed spokesman (probably Brian Rogers): "She owns the homes. I thought he said the wives were off-limits."

Right, then.

Look, yes, extraordinary amounts of capital are something of a PR liability in this day and age, particularly for a candidate who hangs with Phil "The economy's sound! America is a nation of whiners!" Gramm, but them's the breaks. McCain's political career has been very much driven by the resources his wife and her family made available to him, and the price he has to pay for that is he can't claim it's a scurrilous attack when people call him rich. I challenge anyone to argue otherwise convincingly.

Third, and last (for now, the campaign chose the cry for decency. For God's sakes, America, didn't you know McCain was a POW?!

[Rogers] also added: "This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years -- in prison," referring to the prisoner of war camp that McCain was in during the Vietnam War.

Rogers called the house story "by far the most personal attack" of the campaign, and said "it comes from a candidate who said he was against this kind of thing."

By far the most personal attack of the campaign, yes. Obama calling attention to McCain's inability to say how many houses and condos he owns is way worse than those times McCain accused Obama of treason.

Regardless, this isn't the first time the McCain camp has tried to defuse its own gaffes by reminding the world that the candidate spent five years in hell. The way he carried himself then was heroic; unfortunately, the telling of it is becoming kind of a joke, and it's the campaign's own fault.

I don't know whether it's the whining or the overall dishonesty that bothers me more, but cumulatively they bother me a lot. The point is clearly to neutralize the issue by staging a faux scandal over Obama's ethics, and maybe it'll even do them some good in the short term - but, honestly, McCain's campaign is making its candidate seem infantile as well as insulting the public. Surely - surely! - they can do better.

Quoted whole.

It's bad of me, I know, but here's Robert Farley for you:

Via ID, it appears that the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is deploying from Murmansk to the Mediterranean. The expectation seems to be that she will operate (at least for a short period) out of the Syrian port of Tartus, which has been the focal point of negotiations between Russia and Syria for quite some time. Ironically enough, Admiral Kuznetsov was originally named Tbilisi.

A couple thoughts... Kuznetsov deployed to the Med for exercises last year, so this isn't a radically unusual move. Still, I think it has to be interpreted as yet another "No, we really are serious" message from the Russians to the West. Kuznetsov is the largest, most powerful unit in the Russian Navy (excepting SSBNs), and moving her invariably carries political as well as military significance. And although Russia has been engaged in negotiations with Syria over the base at Tartus for a while, I still have to wonder if the Russians don't relish this deployment as an opportunity to send a message to Israel. Noah Shachtman has a fine post at Danger Room discussing the extent of Israeli military cooperation with Georgia, a relationship that the Russians are now complaining loudly about. Noah also notes that the Israelis saw the danger of war, and decided to substantially cut back on arms shipments to Georgia at the end of the last year. This included canceling a deal for Merkava tanks. The Israeli justification for slowing down cooperation was the need to maintain good relations with Russia in order to place additional pressure on Iran.

Russia, Georgia and oil.

Kinda self-evident, but worth reviewing.

Nerd pushback!

Okay, I was much more into GURPS in my impressionable gaming years than classic D&D, but that doesn't mean I didn't find Michael Goldfarb's attacks on Gary Gygax's magnificent time-sink and the people who play it really annoying; it's a personal, petty delight to see military gamers respond.

Now, if someone will just talk to the Israelis . . . .

Time bombs.

There's a good, concise look over here at some of the unresolved issues underlying the new, improved Iraq. Nothing I haven't mentioned before - and nothing the likes of Marc Lynch haven't explored more fully elsewhere - but a healthy reminder nonetheless.

Billmon's short history of post-Cold War NATO expansion.

From the disgruntled American perspective, of course. It's an indictment of Congressional habit as much as anything else, and distinctly worth a read.

[By the way, this post should've gone up last night, but I've had some connectivity issues.

[Stupid, largely self-inflicted connectivity issues.]

The Russian strut continues.

Russia took the first steps toward a troop pullback from Georgia on Tuesday but at the same time paraded blindfolded and bound Georgian prisoners on armored vehicles and seized four U.S. Humvees.

. . .

On the diplomatic front, NATO foreign ministers suspended their formal contacts with Russia as punishment. Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said "there can be no business as usual with Russia under present circumstances."

But the NATO allies, bowing to pressure from European nations that depend heavily on Russia for energy, stopped short of more severe penalties being pushed by the United States.

The Russian Ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, dismissed the impact of the emergency meeting in Brussels, Belgium: "The mountain gave birth to a mouse."

Yep.

The crusader.

On a frozen winter evening at a Town Hall meeting in a school in the Manchester, N.H., suburbs, John McCain expressed surprise and irritation with an intelligence report downplaying the threat of Iran's nuclear program.

At the end of a long list of reasons to be suspicious of the Iranians, McCain declared: "And they sure don't share our Judeo-Christian values."

It seemed at the time to be an odd thing to say about a Muslim country. After all, even if there were no nuclear program, no oil, and no rabble-rousing president, Iran still wouldn't have Judeo-Christian values. And it's troubling to wonder if that alone would be a reason for suspicion.

Even President Bush has resisted framing the war on terrorism as a clash of religions; his inexpert use of the word "crusade" early in the conflict set off a wave of criticism and backtracking. He's never repeated it.

Perhaps McCain's comment was a similar mistake.

But on Saturday, at the nationally televised forum at evangelist Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California, McCain declared: "Our Judeo-Christian principles dictate that we do what we can to help people who are oppressed throughout the world."

And a review of online records by the Globe library shows that McCain uses the term "Judeo-Christian values" quite often, and in varying contexts. For example, last week in York, Pa., he praised small-town Americans by saying, "The Judeo-Christian values that they hold are the strength of America."

He has also repeatedly urged that illegal immigrants be treated in a manner "consistent with Judeo-Christian values." In February, he declared that job training was a Judeo-Christian imperative.

"We've got to educate and train these people," he said, referring to laid-off workers. "It is a Judeo-Christian values nation and it's an obligation we have and we are not doing it."

I don't think the reasons here are particularly mysterious - McCain's got less credibility with the Republican religious base than any major candidate (bar Mitt Romney) since at least Bush the elder, and sucking up to them is an absolute necessity if he's going to win in November.

It's not doing the country any good, though, and it's not clear that the man's self-aware enough to know it.

The Georgians had some prisoners after all.

The exchange is underway.

Has Russia started leaving Georgia yet?

Doesn't look like it to outside observers - it'd be nice to have some satellite footage on-hand.

But, for the moment, it seems safest to assume that Putin is continuing to be stubborn here, and that simply blows my mind. What worries me most is that the man may well feel that he missed his chance to declare victory and get out; the longer Russia occupies Georgia, the more international pressure there'll be to leave, and the more likely it is that the hardcore Russian national greatness types will see pulling back without causing any more havoc to be a kind of surrender. It's way too easy to imagine a bunch of guys in a nice, tight political bubble overcommitting to this invasion after the Polish missile defense deal and the shows of solidarity from the Baltic states, and now having no idea how to disengage gracefully before some new match gets struck.

Musharraf resigns.

C'est tout.

John McCain.

“Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2 [2002], Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

This was months before the Bush administration proper was talking about anything but Afghanistan, I have to stress; in fact, on September 12, 2001, he was publicly calling out Iraq, Iran and Syria as key parts of the terrorist menace we urgently had to confront, despite the fact that none of them turn out to have had any decisive ties to al-Qaeda.

Anyway, the above is taken from this article, which outlines the arc by which McCain traveled from conflicted realist to "national greatness" belligerent. The focus is mostly on the post-September 11th period, in which - again - McCain agitated for war, embraced Ahmed Chalabi, and seized upon every piece of bogus evidence Doug Feith's disinformation shop could produce, and just did everything in his power to ensure that President Bush and the American public wouldn't back away from invading Iraq while we (or, rather, the world) still had the "will" to do it.

If the candidate's responses to the reporter's questions are really representative of where his head's at, he considers almost every decision he made along the way - barring the support of Chalabi - to have been correct, and possibly even a source of pride.

Finally, as American troops massed in the Persian Gulf in early 2003, Mr. McCain grew impatient, his aides say, concerned that the White House was failing to act as the hot desert summer neared. Waiting, he warned in a speech in Washington, risked squandering the public and international support aroused by Sept. 11. “Does anyone really believe that the world’s will to contain Saddam won’t eventually collapse as utterly as it did in the 1990s?” Mr. McCain asked.

In retrospect, some of Mr. McCain’s critics now accuse him of looking for a pretext to justify the war. “McCain was hell-bent for leather: ‘Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, we have got to teach him, let’s send a message to the other people in the Middle East,’ ” said Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts.

But Mr. McCain, in his e-mail message, said the reason he had supported the war was the evolving threat from Mr. Hussein.

“I believe voters elect their leaders based on their experience and judgment — their ability to make hard calls, for instance, on matters of war and peace,” he wrote. “It’s important to get them right.”

Better still, he feels that the exigencies behind those decisions are the same ones arising out of Iran today.

Just something to keep in mind.

"This is a war of cowards."

A look at a couple of days in the life of Major Adil Muhammed, an explosives expert in the Iraqi First Division.

The latest.

But instead of thinning out their forces in South Ossetia, the Russians appear to have been consolidating their presence there by deploying SS-21 missile launchers and, American officials say, by installing surface-to-air missiles near their military headquarters in Tskhinvali. Such moves appear to buttress assertions last week by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, that South Ossetia and Abkhazia are to be separated from Georgia.

Western officials have also been monitoring Russian troop movements, which may be intended to strengthen Russian forces in and around Georgia. A battalion from Russia’s 76th Guards Airborne Division has been deployed from Pskov to Beslan, a city in North Ossetia. Several additional battalions from the 98th Guards Airborne Division at Kostroma also appeared to have been preparing over the weekend for possible deployment to the Caucasus region.

Beyond South Ossetia, the Russian military has taken other steps to raise its profile. In recent days, several Bear-H bombers have carried out training missions over the Black Sea, according to American officials familiar with intelligence reports. The Russian bombers are capable of carrying nonnuclear cruise missiles, and government intelligence analysts have told the Pentagon that a recent Bear training flight appeared to simulate a cruise-missile attack against Georgia.

The Russian moves are seen at the Pentagon as a way for Russia to show that it considers its sphere of influence to include Georgia and other parts of the so-called near abroad zones — Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus and the Caspian — close to Russian territory. In general, the actions are seen as a matter of muscle flexing, or “force projection,” in Pentagon parlance, and are not viewed as signs that Russia intends to make a major military push to take Tbilisi.

More here.

It should probably be noted that pretty much all the anecdotal evidence available suggests that the South Ossetians prefer having the Russians there to the alternative - the ugly converse of which is that radical South Ossetians seem to've burned out just about all the territory owned by ethnic Georgians in the disputed areas, with the nominal leader of the province, Eduard Kokoity, publicly adding that the Georgian refugees wouldn't be allowed back. Meanwhile, the Ossetians are apparently taking Georgians hostage with an eye toward a prisoner exchange; the Georgians claim they have no prisoners to exchange.

The Russians are still occupying Gori, and may even be fortifying it; a pullout has been promised for later today, though, for however little that's worth. The citizens seem to be in varying degrees of misery, but aid does seem to be getting through, and the violence has basically stopped; this isn't Darfur.

That should very much be taken as damning with faint praise.

Meanwhile, there's a write-up of the politics and mixed signals that led to this mess over here; if you're looking for quotes from anonymous Americans who now feel bad for having misled and/or failed to discourage Saakashvili and his government ("a small circle of men in their 30s with virtually no military experience") in matters pertaining to adventurism and American support thereof, this is the place.

Hurrying to get that surveillance state built.

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.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

"That some say?" Really? That's in question? For God's sake, that's been Cheney's explicit raison d'être since this administration came lumbering into office! Ah, journalistic even-handedness, you get funnier by the day.

Anyway, the passage quoted above came from here, if you care to read more.

Phelps!

Now that we've confirmed that he's superhuman, I propose that he and Tiger Woods mistakenly get into a brawl, resolve it, and then band together to fight crime.

Progress?

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic.

An Iraqi government investigation concluded that the security contractors fired without provocation. Blackwater has said its personnel acted in self-defense.

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas.

Apparently, there's some question about the legality of charging State Department contractors under the legislation (particularly within the White House, which really likes accountability-free operations), but to me the case that Blackwater is furthering DoD operations seems like a fairly unassailable one.

The story's up here.

David Remnick on Putin and Georgia.

Remnick's the chief high muckety-muck at the New Yorker now, of course, but I first came across his writing in the rather excellent (and, yes, Pulitzer Prize winning)Lenin's Tomb, and then Resurrection; it's almost nice to see him coming back to Russia, albeit amid terrible circumstances.

The whole article is worth reading, but my preferred approach to fair use is to take a few sentences and use them to bludgeon home a simple political point, and so I offer you the following:

Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar analogies: the Nazi threat in the late nineteen-thirties; the Soviet invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putin’s actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond, such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.” Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous return of what some conservatives seem to crave—the other, the enemy, the us versus them of the Cold War.

Only one with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the spectacle of the leaders of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states standing by Saakashvili last week at a rally in Tbilisi. But Putin is not Hitler or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business élite are all in his pocket—and there is no opposition. But Putin also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current practitioners.

No kidding.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, nobody seems to be on the same page.

Now, arguing against brilliant American foresight . . .

President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn't cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.

"The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank," said a senior administration official.

In all fairness, we're talking about the president, not one of the deep thinkers.

After McCain slipped up . . .

. . . and hinted he already saw himself as president, Josh Marshall had a few thoughts:

I am curious how this interlude in the campaign ends up playing. McCain's stance on this issue [Russia] shows him to be close to certifiable -- not only on specific policy points but also in what I guess I would call affect. But it's not lost on me that people without much background on what actually happened might think this shows him at his strongest, best, etc. On the other hand, he really has gone considerably beyond what's ever been considered appropriate or acceptable for a presidential candidate. He's worked at fairly evident cross-purposes with the president of his own party. He's been in several times a day phone contact with one of the key players in the drama. He's dispatching his own faux diplomatic delegations to the scene. Probably it's all too much inside baseball to register with anyone who's not already watching closely and decided. But who knows?

In all fairness, sending his own team of shadow diplomats into a tense situation does indeed look presumptuous and reckless, but there might be a more innocent explanation. Say, maybe he just wants Joe Lieberman out of his hair for a while - the American people could respect that!

So, let me see if I've got this right.

After close but poorly documented contact with a number of highly-placed Americans, Mikheil Saakashvili takes it upon himself to try to gain control of South Ossetia for Georgia; the attacks backfire, bringing overwhelming Russian force into the contested regions, and then into Georgia proper. Saakashvili, bereft of American and NATO military support, is forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty, that turns out to contain loopholes sufficiently broad to allow Russia to send its forces ambling throughout the country, dismantling anything they see with more military potency than a broken slingshot. This then scares the hell out of Poland, which responds by cutting a deal for a missile defense system designed to protect against a basically nonexistent Iranian threat, with the proviso that the system will be operated by Americans who'll protect Polish territorial sovereignty from the Russians, who surely already knew the difference between de facto annexing two piss-poor provinces which were already effectively theirs and invading Europe, but are now presumably even more pissed off than they were two weeks ago.

Winner: American weapons manufacturing sector.

It all makes perfect sense, given that we live in an irrational world, but I'm embarrassed to say I didn't see it coming. Rob, I officially apologize for arguing against the likelihood of American tactical brilliance at work here; I find your cool cynicism a thousand times more convincing now than I did three days ago.

Here's hoping it doesn't all spiral further out of control, though - the Russians are more than capable of expressing their displeasure by demonstrating how little the West can do to help Georgia.

We won't have Pervez Musharraf to kick around anymore!

The last dominoes are finally falling:

Faced with desertions by his political supporters and the neutrality of the Pakistani military, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, an important ally of the United States, is expected to resign in the next few days rather than face impeachment charges, Pakistani politicians and Western diplomats said Thursday.

The bad news, of course, is that the current Pakistani government is generally feckless and weak, and the main thing that's been holding it together is the unifying loathing of the great dictator. Once he's gone, the competing parties won't have much to keep them from one another's throats - which is likely to be good news for the Taliban, and bad for the Pakistanis, at least in the short term.

The world is upside-down!

According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain's haul.

Despite McCain's status as a decorated veteran and a historically Republican bent among the military, members of the armed services overall -- whether stationed overseas or at home -- are also favoring Obama with their campaign contributions in 2008, by a $55,000 margin. Although 59 percent of federal contributions by military personnel has gone to Republicans this cycle, of money from the military to the presumed presidential nominees, 57 percent has gone to Obama.

Whoa.

More for the Georgian conspiracy files.

If you're looking for evidence of an American/Republican bankshot hidden somewhere in Georgia's recent moves, it's worth noting that Condoleezza Rice and Karl Rove both paid visits to Mikheil Saakashvili in July. It's almost impossible to imagine that Rove didn't say something dangerous and irresponsible - that's his oeuvre, after all - but I don't suppose we can put his fingerprints directly on the recent madness.

That said, between Rove and Randy Scheunemann, there's been an awful lot of Republican politics happening in and around the Saakashvili government, and it seems to me that that would be inappropriate for all involved even if these guys weren't spectacularly stupid in matters of actual policy.

Breaking . . .

The Russians finally seem to be pulling out of Gori.

Alternatively, Saakashvili might just be nuts.

On Monday, President Mikheil Saakashvili, his army in retreat and his Western allies still surprised by the intensity of the Russian attack, was the very picture of vulnerability, dodging Russian military jets.

By Wednesday he seemed an almost preternaturally reinvigorated man, once again raising the temperature in Georgia’s bitter disagreements with Russia, and invoking special ties with American democracy and freedom.

Moments after President Bush appeared at the Rose Garden to say that the Pentagon would begin a humanitarian aid mission to support Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili was on the phone with a Western reporter, talking fast. “This is a turning point,” he said. Soon he appeared on national television, his tousled hair combed back flat and wearing a freshly pressed suit, assuring his country that the worst had passed.

. . .

He was asked Wednesday night whether if he could turn back the clock to late last week, when he said he received signs of Russian troops moving to the border, he would order an attack again.

“Absolutely,” he said, and couched the answer in terms of his own political survival. “We have an obligation to react to it. Any Georgian government that wouldn’t have reacted to it would have fallen instantly.”

Man, I hope he doesn't really believe that.

Something I only just figured out.

The U.S. participated in a joint exercise in Georgia through the last two weeks in July, and there are still a thousand Americans attached to that exercise in the country, presumably somewhere around Vaziani. One could imagine that having some impact - unfortunate impact - on Saakashvili's decision-making back in early August.

Views on the Georgia disaster from around the Black Sea.

Interesting stuff.

AAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!

Remember when I wrote down a few doubts about the timeliness of Mark Penn's political obituary? It wasn't that long ago.

Well, on that front, the Atlantic's Joshua Green has come along with a new doomsday scenario.

[Evan] Bayh gets major play in today’s New York Times for being on, and possibly even atop, Obama’s vice-presidential short list. He has many attractive qualifications. But in choosing Bayh, Obama would be pairing himself with someone awfully close to Mark Penn.

Please. Please. Someone, make the bad man go away.

Propriety.

It's worth noting that John McCain's top foreign policy advisor is a former lobbyist for Georgia, and is still co-owner of a lobbying firm with a two hundred thousand dollar contract with the Georgian government. McCain himself is a friend of Saakashvili's, and rather famously despises Putin, so it's fairly reasonable to assume that all the positions he's taking now are very naturally his own (setting aside the question of their wisdom), but this is still less than an ideal situation; blatant conflicts of interest in matters of war just generally aren't advisable, if only because they needlessly undermine political leverage.

Georgia on our minds.

It's hard to tell exactly what's happening now; the impression I get is that active combat has stopped - which is to say, what's left of Georgian forces generally aren't trying to engage the Russians, and Russian bombing has been discontinued - but that Russian forces have moved into Gori, have cut lines of transportation across the country, and are dismantling as much of the Georgian military infrastructure as they can. At the same time, even more Russian troops seem to be moving into Abkhazia. Meanwhile, human rights investigators are moving around the north, and are pretty systematically deconstructing the preferred Russian narrative: it seems that Ossetian fatalities were much lower than the Kremlin has claimed, and that most of the ongoing ethnic violence has actually been directed toward Georgians in the autonomous territories (though the perpetrators seems to be South Ossetian rather than Russian). [See here and here, for a start.]

[I'm surprised by a lot of this, incidentally. The Russians have pretty conclusively demonstrated that the Georgian military is useless against them, so the business in Gori just seems borderline gratuitous even from the Kremlin's point of view (and horrendously over the top to the rest of us) - and the longer they're in violation of the terms of the cease fire, the more international opinion is going to coalesce against them. Unless they're really considering grabbing the whole country, it's hard to see how this whole endeavor isn't now somewhere on the far side of a point of diminishing returns for them.]

On the pro-Georgian side, Mikheil Saakashvili seems to be flailing, even going so far as to describe U.S. military/security action that pretty clearly isn't coming. That said, the U.S. is sending aid, and Condoleezza Rice, and hopefully they'll do some good.

More to come.