That headline could have revived the John McCain's election hopes if sneaky Putin & Mevdev had not delayed the missile move until..(did you notice when?-answer below).

President W has been baiting Russia all 2008 - flaunting America's ‘new-star-wars' project of placing attack nuclear missiles close to Russia's borders in Poland. Even that little war in Georgia was part of the bait. Would Russia react against Poland. John McCain prepared himself with a pushy attitude towards Russia which was perfectly exemplified in the first debate by his words "I'm willing to negotiate with Russia as long as they don't misbehave"! Russia not misbehave!? This is more than a bit rich coming from America that...really....the list is so long.....let's just say... a bit rich coming from America.

There is an important history here - 3 western invasions of Russia - Napoleon 1815, Germany in 1915 and Hitlers Reich 1941. Russia's defeat of Hitler saw a bit of old Germany transferred to Russia. Later there was the American effort to gain a nuclear first strike capacity by placing missiles in Turkey in the 1960's. This led to a counter effort with Russia placing missiles in Cuba and the famous 1962 confrontation which almost led to nuclear war. With both countries on attack alert it was negotiated that Russia and America would both withdraw their respective missiles from Cuba and Turkey. America did not admit the existence of its Turkish missiles but did withdraw them. In the 1980's there was also the agreement between Gorbachev and Reagan where it was agreed that NATO would not place any offensive weapons into east European countries that the USSR allowed to leave its Warsaw Pact. But none of that, or history itself, counts to the W Bush neocons who believe that all international agreements bind other people but never America. ‘American Exceptionalism' is this weird arrogance that Americans, even Obama, embrace as pride not arrogance even when it flies in the face of science and commonsense.

They thought Russia was gone even though it still has enough nuclear missiles to destroy all of America! So they've been trying to surround it with their weapons - innocently, of course.

Now Russia struck back intelligently (the bastards!). They took no chances. They waited until the US election results were in and McCain had conceded and then announced the move of nuclear missiles into the Kaliningrad enclave (deep in Poland) which until 1945 was part of Germany. It was like a perfect chess move by a master with exquisite timing and manners. Hardly any Americans noticed it because of all the Obama news except for the neocons who would have been off their face ‘See that's why we had to elect McCain' but no-one was listening to them anymore. Russia stepped around the neocon strategy (to checkmate Russia) by deciding to put nuclear forces behind the proposed new NATO front line. Check. Very quietly. Double check. In August Russia had easily defeated the American puppet government's attack in Georgia and now it was reminding us that it has a central European territory available for military use - something many had forgotten - ‘where did that come from?' - it was there all the time.

If the American public barely noticed, that was not true of Europe. The Polish complained that it was unfair of Russia to come up with a counter-plan to Poland's wish to aim missiles at Russia. The Germans no doubt sent surveyors to check the exact distance from their border. The French had already been in close contact with the Russians negotiating details of the Russian withdrawal in Georgia and in mid-November President Sarkozy met with the Russian President Medvedev at a European Union - Russian summit in Nice, France. At the summit Sarkozy spoke out against the United States plan to set up a new missile defense system in Europe, arguing it would only set back security in the region. People throughout Europe noticed. The Russian President then called for all sides to avoid unilateral measures. How ‘well behaved'! Plans are now in train for a 2009 conference on pan-European security to include Russia. John McCain and the powers-that-be will not be happy with this at all.

The gap between western European perceptions and the American imperial view (which not all Americans hold) is widening. We all hope Obama is not a captive of the imperial view but past democrats like Clinton have been, have embraced it enthusiastically and, with Bill's wife as Secretary of State, it will take a massive effort on Obama's part to turn the ship of state towards another direction.

Meanwhile Europe, excluding England, will try to get a process that recognizes Russia is part of the European continent and that the headline that the neocons would have loved to run "Russia Invades Europe" is inherently a wrong headed Cold War denial of reality - look at the map - it looks like Russia is part of Europe to me.

It's fairly obvious that the imagery of a white christmas is at odds with the reality of an Australian summer, but still people try to combine the two contradictory set of symbols.

Why?

I'm guessing it's to give an Australian christmas the air of legitimacy by using images of northern hemisphere traditions while also paying respect to the uniqueness of the Australian experience.

Why bother?

Our christmas is so much more beautiful than our northern neighbours and the fact is our traditions- like having a picnic at the beach, prawns and champagne- should really be the inspiration and point of jealousy for the drab christmas goers of up north.

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He seemed to make the point (and then reiterate it later on in the interview) that the U.S. would not take the lead on the issue until there were similar efforts matched by other big polluters.

He said, and I'll try and quote as best I can, that they wouldn't want to design a system whereby developing countries like Brazil and Russia would just replace America and China as the world's biggest polluters thereby solving nothing.

Huh?

For one, this perspective completely disregards America's considerable soft power (its ability to influence through attraction rather than coercion). If the U.S. was to sign a strong ETS the news, like that of the recent health-care reforms, would travel worldwide and heap enormous pressure on other countries to follow America's good example.

Secondly, even if other countries don't match the U.S. and China in lowering their carbon footprint surely restructuring the economy away from fossil fuels and reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere can only be a good thing. . . read more

What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture--yes, we still torture--only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel's brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured? How does it look for Obama to call for democracy and human rights from Egypt, where we lavishly fund and support the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East?

We may thrill to Obama's rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration. The wars of occupation go on or have been expanded. Israel continues to flout international law, gobbling up more Palestinian land and carrying out egregious war crimes in Gaza. Calcified, repressive regimes in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are feted in Washington as allies.

The speech at Cairo University, which usually has trucks filled with riot police outside the university gates and a heavy security presence on campus to control the student body, is an example of the facade. Student political groups, as everyone who joined in the standing ovation for the president knew, are prohibited. Faculty deans are chosen by the administration, rather than elected by professors, "as a way to combat Islamist influence on campus," according to the U.S. State Department's latest human rights report. And, as The Washington Post pointed out, students who use the Internet "as an outlet for their political or social views are on notice: One Cairo University student blogger was jailed for two months last summer for "public agitation," and another was kicked out of university housing for criticizing the government."

The expanding imperial projects and tightening screws of repression lurch forward under Obama. We are not trying to end terror or promote democracy. We are ensuring that our corporate state has a steady supply of the cheap oil to which it is addicted. And the scarcer oil becomes, the more aggressive we become. This is the game playing out in the Muslim world.

The Bush White House openly tortured. The Obama White House tortures and pretends not to. Obama may have banned waterboarding, but as Luke Mitchell points out in next month's issue of Harper's magazine, torture, including isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation and force-feeding, continues to be used to break detainees. The president has promised to close Guantanamo, where only 1 percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are kept. And the Obama administration has sought to obscure the fate and condition of thousands of Muslims held in black holes around the globe. As Mitchell notes, the Obama White House "has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment. It has sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees."

Muslim rage is stoked because we station tens of thousands of American troops on Muslim soil, occupy two Muslim nations, make possible the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, support repressive Arab regimes and torture thousands of Muslims in offshore penal colonies where prisoners are stripped of their rights. We now have 22 times as many military personnel in the Muslim world as were deployed during the crusades in the 12th century. The rage comes because we have constructed massive military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and established basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The rage comes because we have expanded our military empire into neighboring Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It comes because we station troops and special forces in Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And this vast network of bases and military outposts looks suspiciously permanent.

The Muslim world fears, correctly, that we intend to dominate Middle East oil supplies and any Caspian Sea oil infrastructure. And it is interested not in our protestations of good will but in the elemental right of justice and freedom from foreign occupation. We would react, should the situation be reversed, no differently.

The brutal reality of expanding foreign occupation and harsher and harsher forms of control are the tinder of Islamic fundamentalism, insurgences and terrorism. We can blame the violence on a clash of civilizations. We can naively tell ourselves we are envied for our freedoms. We can point to the Koran. But these are fantasies that divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world, from facing our own responsibility for the virus of chaos and violence spreading throughout the Middle East. We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both.

Obama, whose embrace of American imperialism is as naive and destructive as that of George W. Bush, is the newest brand used to peddle the poison of permanent war. We may not see it. But those who bury the dead do.  . . read more

Work is done half-assed (or ignored), and day dreaming is so common that the world of work and play are largely indistinguishable.

For Australians, with the heat, the culture of the barbie and a work ethic that regularly dips below that of a sleepy cat- the hardest part is waking up. . . read more

After 15 months Rudd's environmental policies have failed to cut CO2 emissions yet and, more importantly, show no likelihood of getting back below 2007 levels until late in the next decade. The only big (short-term) reduction came from last year's oil price peak. There have been a lot of household and a few business efforts and even a few government efforts to make reductions but Rudd is, unbelievably, giving all those gains away with an Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) that gives all those gains to the CO2 emitters. Another $20 million in NSW today will reduce private emissions and increase emissions available to business. Even Ross Gittins (SMH 25/11/09 Page 13) complains that this mechanism is counterproductive and must be changed. Surely it can't be too hard to separate private use so as to quarantine those gains from the emitters. The scheme is a box with holes in it for more CO2 to escape. They promise to review it in ten years!

Costa has long been a Climate Change denier and is angry that Garrett's department is not rubber stamping new developments and that "green groups want to include global warming as an assessment trigger...to close down the nation's coal industry." Well, that's why Garrett needs to pull Rudd into line, Michael. Climate Change is happening already and every extra dollar spent now on new coal power stations and coal mining facilities is an utter waste of money. You may as well just burn the money because by the time new investments are up and running the world will be closing them down or else there will be devastation. But you refuse to believe this - you just want money now.

Garrett will be doing the Labor Party the biggest favour in his power if he tells Rudd and Wong that mass geo-sequestration will never work in our lifetime (that's why the coal industry won't R&D it) and tells them that the current ETS has so many holes in it it won't catch any CO2 emissions. Nothing will get better until people go public to get real emission reductions. Meanwhile people of goodwill will make submissions and run into Labor Party brickwalls including Garrett's. As the Oils once sang "Brave faces ...fall silent ...got those tears in their eyes". Does it make sense to you, Peter?