links for 2008-08-12 [delicious.com]

A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia.

Georgia’s army was in complete disarray tonight after troops and tanks fled the city of Gori in panic and abandoned it to the Russians without firing a shot.

It’s what conservative bloggers are buzzing about: the financial relationship between Do-Nothing Nancy Pelosi and Big Wind pusher T. Boone Pickens.

#dontgo reports that according to disclosure statements, “in May 2007 she invested in T. Boone Picken’s clean energy fuels corp., CLNE, which is the sole sponsor of a proposal in California to funnel $5 billion in state funds and $5 billion in Federal funs to this corporation which will indirectly help them create a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle.”

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized the United States for viewing Georgia as the victim, instead of the aggressor, and for airlifting Georgian troops back home from Iraq on Sunday.

"Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages," Putin said in Moscow. "And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds—these leaders must be taken under protection."

Nancy Pelosi says that she is trying to save the planet and prevent global warming, but the reality is that, according to disclosure statements, in May 2007 she invested in T. Boone Picken’s clean energy fuels corp., CLNE, which is the sole sponsor of a proposal in California to funnel $5 billion in state funds and $5 billion in Federal funs to this corporation which will indirectly help them create a giant wind farm in the Texas panhandle.

Yet Edwards' transgression — indeed, his excuse — would test the patience of his most ardent supporter: I did it, but only while my wife's cancer was in remission. This suggests that the one-time rising star of the Democratic Party has not yet made contact with human reality and believes he can dissemble his way out of this, à la Bill Clinton.

The decent option is to tell the public the whole truth, without lawyerly equivocations. Then he has the difficult task of healing his family. He should recall his own wisdom in 1999, when with great clarity he described Clinton's affair as "breathtaking" for its "remarkable disrespect … for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter."

Twelve people have taken out papers for two seats on the Conejo Valley Unified School District Board of Education, including both incumbents, Dorothy Beaubien and Dolores Didio. However, only one person, past candidate Peggy Buckles, has returned her documents and is officially on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Among the 10 other possible candidates are Marlo Hartsuyker, president of the governing board of MATES, a proposed charter school; John Anderson, past candidate and frequent school board meeting speaker; and Laura Jane Dunn, a special education teacher in the Oxnard school district and wife of current board member Mike Dunn.

Others who took out papers: Elizabeth "Betsy" Connolly, Dirk De Kreek, Gary Izumo, Paul Kessler, Dennis Ray Hatland and John Hollister.

Several Georgian state computer servers have been under external control since shortly before Russia's armed intervention into the state commenced on Friday, leaving its online presence in dissaray.

Frustrated supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) are planning multiple rallies at the Democratic convention in Denver, coupled with television and print advertisements.

The disenchanted Democrats want to express their disappointment with the party’s presidential primary process.

Russia issued an ultimatum to Georgia on Monday to disarm its troops along the boundary with the pro-Russian separatist enclave of Abkhazia as Russian tanks rolled across the border and occupied a western military base.

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

But Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.

Why not require DNA testing?

As Obama plays the race card some more……

Where is NATO?

Nope….But, nice try Hill

Interesting fuel for the "If there were some terrible scandal in Obama's past, Hillary's people would have found it" argument. One of her rivals had this in his background, and her people couldn't find it.

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

Hillary Rodham Clinton will headline her own night at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama's campaign announced Sunday in a nod to her strong second-place showing in the party's presidential primary.

The former first lady will speak on the second night, Aug. 26 — the 88th anniversary of the women's right to vote. The campaign and convention committee in a statement called her "a champion for working families and one of the most effective and empathetic voices in the country today."
The Obama campaign is trying to avoid hard feelings among Clinton's supporters at their carefully orchestrated convention. But they still haven't reached a deal on whether Clinton will be included in the roll call vote for the nomination, which could make the party appear divided heading into the final stretch of the White House race.

While many questions remain unanswered regarding John Edwards' affair with a woman he hired to produce videos of him, some Democrats are already writing off the impact of the news.

What a joke! John Edwards has repeatedly lied and it is OK?

As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”