As a Ukrainian, let me say that McCain, for once, has exactly the correct policy. Putin *is* KGB and he *is* Soviet revanchist.

Be brought back the old Soviet Союз нерушимый as the national anthem of independent Russia, reinstated military parades on Victory Day and has in every way tried to destabilize their neighbors.

He has supported separatists in Transdniester, Abkhazia and Ingushetia and his surrogate, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, has been agitating for Russia to abscond with Crimea from Ukraine.

These people are deliberately covering up and being apologists for Soviet historical crimes, including the murder of seven million Ukrainians in 1932-33, a crime increasingly being recognized as a genocide by governments around the world.

The people preaching rapprochement with Russia are those who do not understand Russia or think that somehow Russia will be an honest business parter.

Ask Mikhail Khodorkovsky about that.

McCain's Russia policy is the right Russia Policy and one can only hope Obama will emulate it!

If he's willing to let this pass, he has no credibility on civil liberties. Or as the Who once sang, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." I fear for America...

If you really wanna hit Obama in a meaningful way on this, that will catch his attention, publicize a fundraising moratorium for 72 hours or so to his campaign...when (if?) he sees the dent this campaign makes, he'll see who's really buttering his bread.

Eh?

The power failures were in Vienna, Austria, where the television centre for the tournament is, not in Basle, Switzerland, where the game was actually played.

The Fan Fest in Vienna was evacuated because of the lightning strikes and those unlucky fans never got to see any of the goals after it was 1-1 unless they found a bar.

Here in England, the BBC switched to the Radio 5 broadcast when the pictures went out.

And as for ESPN, I feel sorry for football fans in America...

First Exxon and now this...where is the right wing outrage about judges legislating from the bench now?

Alter's vision of how this restores the Constitution is clear: it is restored because it makes legal the illegal.

I've never understood this American love affair with Philanthropists...after all, philanthropy is a sign of a broken society, a society where disparity of income means only the über-wealthy can afford to fund social programmes.

See?

When the wealthy do it for you it's "philanthropy"...when it's done through taxation and you pay for it yourselves, it's "socialism".

Donovan Bailey wins the Olympic 100m Final, the World Standard for deciding the unofficial Worlds Fastest Man...oops, that blows American myth making and advertising out of the water.

Must...make....Americans....feel....goooooooodddddddddd....

So we get Michael Johnson, winner of the 200m, declared in any medium that would listen as Worlds Fastest Man!

Well, Mr. Bailey was of course running for Canada...

And now we have Mr. Morneau.

America, please, *grow up*!

The man was an unrepentant Russian imperialist...he did not merely long for the reinstatement of the Czar, he longed for that moment in time when Russia ruled all the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe with an iron fist.

He was incapable of reconciling himself with Russian independence...from it's imperial self, even if in the form of the old Soviet Union. And the very idea of Ukrainian independence was inconceivable to him...and is to all of his ilk in Russia yet.

He wrote books which popularly exposed Soviet crimes, but this does not make him a hero.

And how deliciously ironic was it to see the KGB apparatchik Putin sit by his coffin yesterday.

Satire is dead, not only in America, it seems.

Suskind suggests that "the White House's knowingly misusing an arm of government" would be "the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings."

I'm convinced that the reason the Republicans proceeded, in the face of public opinion, with the impeachment proceedings against Clinton right to the bitter end was because they wanted to destroy impeachment as a weapon of Congress against the Executive.

And they have, at least inside the Beltway.

There appears to be no crime Bush, Cheney & Co. could be accused of that would warrant impeachment proceedings by the Congress.

That blue dress should go into the Smithsonian as an exhibit next to that "goddamn piece of paper" Bush swore an oath to uphold.

"I would like to apologize one more time to all the members and I would like to thank you for what you have done for me."

Thank you Sir, may I have another?

Does nobody realise that Russia has been arming these people and that they've been lobbing bombs at the Georgians (Hezbollah style) for years? All those "Russian Citizens" you read about there? They were given them by the Kremlin for political purposes.

As a Russian journalist noted here: http://www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=8288 (translated into English below)

"...there is no way the regime in South Ossetia can be in any sense called "separatist." Who there is a separatist? The head of the local KGB, Anatoly Baranov, used to head the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Russian Republic of Mordovia. The head of the South Ossetian Interior Ministry, Mikhail Mindzayev, served in the Interior Ministry of Russia's North Ossetia. The South Ossetian "defense minister," Vasily Lunev, used to be military commissar in Perm Oblast, and the secretary of South Ossetia's Security Council, Anatoly Barankevich, is a former deputy military commissar of Stavropol Krai. So who exactly is a separatist in this government? South Ossetian "prime minister" Yury Morozov?"

Putin is a revanchist and I fear Ukraine will be next, you will see a lot of agitation about Crimea soon.

The Cold War is back, I'm afraid.