That the Republican water carrier and New York Times columnist David Brooks would blast Barack Obama's Berlin speech was utterly predictable.  (Kevin Drum even predicted the title of the piece, "Playing Innocent Abroad.")  To be sure, by slandering Obama's call to "remake the world" with epithets including "saccharine," "treacle," and "Disney," Brooks did not disappoint.  Of course, even less surprising is that back in 2005, David Brooks had only glowing praise for President Bush's democratization agenda and its audacious vision to "imagine new worlds."

I recently wrote about the two aides that were removed for having lobbied on Burma's behalf, along with mentioning snippets of John McCain's other dubious connections to shady foreign entities.  Victor Yanukovych and Oleg Deripaska being two.  In fact, the Wall Street Journal has also begun to eye McCain's foreign connections.

John McCain isn't alone.  His wife's connections to shady foreign governments are now being noticed.

NATO deserves attention both in terms of its current activities in Afghanistan and because of the current debates revolving around NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. NATO’s quest for a new identity since the end of the Cold War has rightly resulted in much debate about the utility of the Alliance in a world with contemporary threats that can no longer be defined by East and West. Several articles published recently at the Atlantic Community provide an excellent framework for anchoring discussions around NATO.

This is an off-the-cuff, on-the-fly, simultaneous kind of diary. So don't expect any mind blowing links to storehouses of online information. The basic information is this: President Bush is in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, today to publicly support NATO Membership Action Plans for both Ukraine and Georgia.

This is controversial because Russia is opposed to granting MAPs (as they are called) to Ukraine and Georgia during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Bucharest summit later this week.

Bush is being seen as 'stirring controversy' over backing the aspirations of Ukraine -- where public opinion is against NATO membership, and Georgia, which still has to deal with Russia-backed separatists in two provinces.

more on the flip

The Dog Park is here to get our anger and frustration out with the intent to vent, so we’re not exploding all over each other in daily diary comments.  

Of course, our pets can be a great source of comfort, so if you want to talk about them, go for it.  I'll probably keep this up until the nomination season is over with.

This is a social experiment to try and keep kossacks* and kosters** from peeing and pooing all over each other. Despite our differences, dKos we are all on the same team.  Remember who our streams and projectiles are aimed at – conservatives without conscience, corporate robber barons, neo-con military industrialists, right-wing media, etc., etc., etc.  No lengthy posts necessary, but if you want to expound, go for it.

Cross-posted from ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1635, Cossack commander Ivan Sulyma was put to death in Warsaw -- a historical footnote unfolding during the rising action of Zaporozhian Cossacks' conflict with the Polish-Lithuanian empire then at the peak of its power.

It is my unrelenting duty to point out that the anti-nuke religion, which can go on for day after day after day, week after week after week, month after month after month after month, year after year, decade after decade about Chernobyl, couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuel accidents, dangerous fossil fuel war, dangerous fossil fuel waste, dangerous fossil fuel terrorism, and dangerous fossil fuel depletion.

In fact, Chernobyl was not the greatest energy disaster of all time - it's not even close - and, if you're paying attention, it is not even the worst energy disaster in Ukraine.  

The worst energy disaster in Ukraine - just like everywhere else on the planet - is coal.   Coal is a disaster even when it simply operates as intended, but in fact, that almost never happens.   Maybe the world couldn't care less about coal accidents - they're not sexy - but the parade goes on and on and on.  

have been killed in that "other spill" that is now just reaching our media's attention.

The ecological disaster that is unfurling in the Black Sea, is just disheartening.

More than 30,000 birds and countless fish have been killed in an "ecological catastrophe" wrought by thousands of tons of oil from a tanker that broke apart in a heavy storm near the Black Sea, the governor of the region said Monday.

Birds weighed down by thick coatings of the fuel oil hopped weakly along the shore or sat helplessly in the sand. Workers with pitchforks and shovels started the backbreaking labor of gathering up vast clumps of oil mixed with sand and seaweed. - SFGate

    Well, the Kossack Dance is part of "Mazeppa"; one figures that all the Kossacks here should know about...Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Cossack opera" Mazeppa (premiered 1884), at least a little.
    You can hear some of the L.A. Philharmonic version of the "Cossack Dance" here.

    Wikipedia notes,

   

    ...Mazeppa is a blood-thirsty tale of crazy love, abduction, political persecution, execution, and vengeful murder. The action takes place in Ukraine at the beginning of the 18th century. The protagonists are the historical figures Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa (c. 1640 – 1709) – the Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and Vasily Leontivych Kochubey (c.1640 – 1708), a very prosperous Ukrainian nobleman and statesman. ...

    And don't forget the "Drunken Cossack's Song" in Act 2, scene 3, either!

    ...I don't think Kos killed anyone, but it's funny to think of him riding around on a horse.

    Well, that's your Kossack art history for today. Questions?

         Russia now says it should be part of the proposed U.S. anti-missile shield, on the spot, what can Bush say now?
         In light of all the past stories I have done in relation to this proposed missile shield and the fact that Britain wants it there and the U.S. is proposing to set it up all around the world I looked at it myself as a threat to Russia as they also did or do. That is why I find it quite intrigueing that Russia also says it wants to be included. Does this ever raise a lot of questions and put the U.S. on the spot. Wow, put up or shut up!
         Russia now says it should be part of the proposed U.S. anti-missile shield because it's close to rogue states that might fire rockets, said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the lower house of parliament's foreign affairs committee.
         ``Even if one were to imagine hypothetically that North Korean missiles might one day be fired at targets in Europe, one doesn't have to be an expert in geography to realize that the greater part of their trajectory would be over Russia,''

My task at DKos - should you be unfamiliar with me - is to talk about nuclear energy, the truths and the myths surrounding it, and the role I think it should play in the desperate fight against climate change.   I make my arguments mostly in a technical way, but I try, within the limits of my abilities, to inject enough humor, human history, personal history, and analysis to make the subject fun, even though there is nothing very funny about climate change.    My goal in all of this is to give my party the best chance it can possibly have, as now we control at least part of the government, at governing wisely.    To me it is an inescapable fact that climate change must be ameliorated, though I very much doubt at this point that it can be arrested.   My oft stated view is that nuclear energy is simply the most powerful tool we have in this fight, the best tested and therefore the most essential.

Reading through comments in another diary regarding Nancy Reagan's and Gerald Ford's support for stem cell research reminded me of a diary I have in the works here and which is about to time out if I don't post it.

It's one of those things I don't really want to talk about but felt like something needed saying about it here in the liberal blogosphere.  It's because of the liberal blogosphere that I'm hesitant to proceed.  (Plus I get troll-bombed half the time, no matter what, and these diaries do take a bit of time and thought.)

UPDATE: Drudge has latched onto the BBC story and splashed it in red. Oh well, Here's my better sourced version.

George Bush doesn't believe in funding stem-cell research. In a horror story breaking out of the Ukraine, we now get to see exactly what kind of brave new world we're looking at. Failing to fund stem-cell research through orthodox channels has produced a black market that is so deep and dark and black to be positively satanic.

The BBC is reporting:

Healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells..Disturbing video footage of post-mortem examinations on dismembered tiny bodies raises serious questions about what happened to them.

Who needs regulation and legal research when the market can solve the problem?

Not!

Hate to open up old wounds, but this one deserves to be opened!

All this exploration into "how" the GOP may manipulate the vote, whether it's "calibration" issues, whether it's "intentional" or not... what is the #1 method used internationally for determining vote fraud? Exit polls.

From wikipedia, with numerous references cited there:

Exit poll interviews of voters leaving the polling place have been used in other countries to expose election fraud. In the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, for example, exit poll discrepancies were an indication of possible election fraud. A re-vote was eventually ordered and the election result was overturned.

Exit polls are more accurate than the "opinion polls" conducted on small sample sizes. For one thing, they occur immediately after the voter votes, so there's almost no chance at all of error in reporting. Second, the sample size is huge. As such, the margin for error is reduced from the typical Gallup-type poll MoE of 3-6% to something like .5-1% - this is well-documented information. There should be nothing controversial about what I've said so far...

In the movie, "Gangs of New York", Mayor "Boss" Tweed who ran the infamous Tammany Hall said "what really matters is who counts the ballots" when he heard there were not enough ballots to manipulate the results of the election.

Why isn't the Democratic Party concerned with who counts the ballots in next month's election?  Since the Republicans have previously demonstrated in both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections the ability and capacity to manipulate the results of those elections, Democrats should be extremely apprehensive about how the ballots are counted as well as which ballots are counted in November's election.  As America didn't learned the lesson of larceny that was committed by Republicans in those elections whereby either (1) votes were not counted or else (2) Americans could not vote because their names were taken off the voting roles, the risks for fraud, larceny, and manipulation in next month's election are substantial.

This began as an obscure message 300 down in a long thread:

http://www.dailykos.com/...

A couple of respondents thought it should be diaried.  Considering it got any attention that far downthread, and three positive strokes apart from the two readers who wanted it diaried, I'm spending an hour on breaking it out to a diary.  Just in case it might matter even a whit.  It just might.

Lead in:

It's great that things are looking so good for Democratic candidates going into the midterm eletions.

But we can't be stupid.

It's highly unlikely that Bush is going to allow himself to be made vulnerable to the things a Democratic House can do. These guys were willing to lie about WMD to get into a war; they use torture as a political issue; they've funneled billions to their pals in Iraq; they can wiretap anyone at any time for any reason; and they've got the real possibility of being charged with war crimes if they lose control of Congress. Stealing one more election is not that big a deal to them - especially when the alternative is allowing themselves to be investigated by Henry Waxman and John Conyers.

Especially since the downside of stealing elections is so minimal.

According to tomorrow's Parade Magazine, we've got another prime example of how our addiction to oil is warping our foreign policy.  Here's Parade:

While our leaders attack Moscow for backtracking on democracy, we're getting into bed with the Russian bear to met our growing energy needs.  Not only are major U.S. oil companies involved in joint energy ventures with Russia, but that nation also is rapidly becoming one our biggest sources of natural gas.  By 2020, Russia says, it will be supplying 20% of our natural gas imports.