Once the potato reaches the top and you've filled in right to the top of your garden, then it is either time to quit and let all the new potatoes form, or if you've gotten an early start in the season, some people like to go to our High-Rise Method where you build a 12" x 12" square bottomless box and put it right over that square foot. Make sure it is small enough to sit on the inside of your grid. You continue the process of filling in and the plant just keeps growing. I've found that 6 more inches is a little too much for the potato, so I like to use a 1 x 4 lumber so that you have the first six inches to grow in plus another 4 inches.

Finally, when you are through covering the plant, it will grow to maturity and you can either dig the potatoes out near the middle of the season to get the smaller ones, or you can let them finish the season. You will know when the plant is finished because it dies off, withers and turns brown and is rather unsightly looking, but that is nature's signal that it is all over for this year and the new potatoes are all in the ground waiting for you to harvest them.

As events move swiftly, and ominously, in the conflict between Georgia and Russia, an understanding of the background of the conflict is essential. Several pieces have appeared just today providing some good context and analysis.

First, Ellen Barry (with whom I once worked at the Moscow Times) gives an overview of South Ossetia's history and the tensions that have stalked the region since the break-up of the Soviet Union in this analysis piece from the New York Times. (The NYT's news roundup of the latest events is co-written by Anne Barnard, yet another former colleague from the Moscow Times.)

Over at the Guardian, David Hearst provides an excellent analysis of the current conflict. Here's an excerpt:

Observers had little doubt the operation to take South Ossetia back under Georgian control bore the hallmarks of a planned military offensive. It was not the result of a ceasefire that had broken down the night before. It was more a fulfillment of the promise the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, made to recapture lost national territory, and with it a measure of nationalist pride.

The assault appears to have been carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the Olympic games when the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was in Beijing. Tom de Waal of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and an expert on the region said: "Clearly there have been incidents on both sides, but this is obviously a planned Georgian operation, a contingency plan they have had for some time, to retake [South Ossetia's capital] Tskhinvali.

"Possibly the Georgians calculated that with Putin in Beijing they could recapture the capital in two days and then defend it over the next two months, because the Russians won't take this lying down."

(Tom de Waal is, yes, yet another Moscow Timesnik from my days there in the mid-1990s. In addition, The Times of London's front-page print piece on the war was written by Kevin O'Flynn, whom I knew as a laid-back, long-haired youth on the sports desk at the Moscow Times. It's been like old home week for the MT crowd of that era.)

Hearst further notes:

The Russians are far from blameless. They have a long and dirty history of dividing and ruling, fomenting strife to weaken opponents in a critical frontier zone. But Russia could claim in the UN security council to be defending its own citizens and its own peacekeepers. Sabine Freizer, Europe programme director of the International Crisis Group said: "Russia should not be blamed for the fighting, but Russia should now be pressured not to go beyond its peacekeeping mandate, and to ensure that armed militia do not cross the border into South Ossetia."

However, the fighting is rapidly spreading beyond the "peacekeeping mandate," with Russian planes bombing targets in the Georgian city of Gori (Stalin's birthplace), killing several civilians. This brutal assault -- including a murderous airstrike on an apartment house -- only underscores the savagery that awaits if the conflict cannot be tamped down quickly.

It seems clear at this point that Georgia has taken an enormous gamble in launching the initial attack into South Ossetia, hoping for a quick knock-out blow and then strong support from Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili's Terror War pals in Washington, as Jim Heintz notes in an insightful piece for the Associated Press (You'll be relieved to know that I did not work with Heintz at the Moscow Times):

With Vladimir Putin in Beijing for the Olympic opening ceremony and the world's attention fixed on China, Georgia may have been betting it could pounce on an opportunity to quickly wrest control of its breakaway province. But the gamble may backfire: Washington hasn't endorsed Georgia's power play, and Moscow's counteroffensive has brought the two sides into a fight it will be hard for Georgia, a former Soviet state, to win...

One analyst suggested Georgia's unexpected assault may have been rooted as much in a sense that its NATO bid was faltering as in antagonism with Russia. Earlier this year, NATO quashed Georgia's drive to get a so-called road map for alliance membership amid alarm that President Mikhail Saakashvili was backtracking on democracy with his violent suppression last year of opposition rallies.

Georgia got assurances that it could eventually join, but "this pushed Georgia into a philosophy of self-reliance - the idea that Georgia will be able to regain breakaway entities only by its own means," said Nicu Popescu of the European Council on Foreign Relations. "The elephant in the room behind this whole story is Georgia's NATO prospects."

He also speculated the timing of the attack, hours before the opening ceremony in Beijing, could be a signal from the Georgian government. The Russian resort region of Sochi, just miles from the border of Georgia's other separatist region of Abkhazia, will host the 2014 Winter Games.

"It might be a signal to the Russians saying that the Sochi Olympics will not go the way Russia wants if there is no progress on the settlement in Abkhazia," Popescu said.

Heintz also notes a fact that seems to be slipping away from many media narratives on the conflict: that Saakashvili ordered the heavy bombardment of the South Ossetian capital just hours after declaring a supposed "cease-fire," and that Georgian forces targeted and killed several Russian peacekeeping troops that had been stationed in the region for years. These brutal and boneheaded moves provided the perfect excuse for the Kremlin to flex its muscles and secure an even tighter hold on Georgia's breakaway regions:

Georgia's withering artillery barrage came hours after Saakashvili declared a unilateral cease-fire ahead of negotiations set for the next day - and the separatists reportedly agreed to follow suit.

If Georgia violated its own cease-fire, it could be a crushing blow to its drive to integrate with the West.

Heintz also notes a point we mentioned yesterday: that the West's recognition of Kosovo's illusory "independence" helped spark the recent rise in tensions and cross-border incidents that Georgia used to justify Saakashvili's long-declared intention to bring all of what was Soviet Georgia under his control. Heintz further notes that almost every South Ossetian considers their region part of Russia; another fact frequently overlooked in the resurrection of Cold War rhetoric that has greeted the conflict:

South Ossetia was trouble waiting to happen for years - a "frozen conflict" with tensions building just below the surface. Georgia's thunderous assault may have been a go-for-broke move by a country that felt it was out of options amid Russia's growing dominance in the region. Or South Ossetia's separatists may have provoked Georgia once too often.

A grudging cease-fire that ended a separatist war in 1992 left the region mostly under control of an internationally unrecognized government, but dappled with areas held by Georgian forces. South Ossetia longed to be incorporated into Russia, whose province of North Ossetia contains their ethnic brethren. Georgia firmly rejected the prospect: Ceding the territory would bring Russia within 50 miles of the Georgian capital.

Negotiations were sporadic, often foundering on who should participate. Clashes broke out, especially near the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali, which is in a pocket nearly surrounded by Georgian-held territory.

Tensions rose markedly this year after South Ossetia basked in Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia, calling it an international precedent that legitimized its own refusal to remain part of Georgia. Moscow boosted ties with the separatist government - and with a similar regime in Georgia's other separatist region, Abkhazia - and repeatedly denounced Saakashvili's push to join NATO.

None of the previous clashes this month had been anywhere close to the magnitude of the explosions that shook Tskhinvali throughout the night.

II.

Neither side has nor will cover themselves with glory in this bloody episode. The depredations of the Putin regime are well-known; there is little to be expected from that quarter but power politics at its most brutal. Putin is a war criminal responsible for vast atrocities in Chechnya and a security apparat that uses black ops, assassinations and terrorism with as much aplomb as their American counterparts.

Meanwhile, Saakashvili's tenure in Tblisi -- which began as a self-proclaimed reformist revolution -- has deteriorated into a regime marked by much of the same kind of corruption, cronyism and repression that it puported to overthrow. One of Saakashvili's partners in the revolution, Irakli Okruashvili, had a dramatic falling-out with the boss last year. When he announced he was running for president against Saakashvili, he was arrested "and taken to Tbilisi's notorious Isolator Number 7, the scene of well-documented torture of political prisoners since 1991," as Mark Almond of Oriel College, Oxford, noted in an article last year. After subjection to "strenuous interrogation techniques," Okruashvili "recanted" his charges against the president, and coughed up $6 million in shakedown "bail" money to win his release.

And what were Okruashvili's charges? Almond provides this quote from the former defense minister in Saakashvili's government:

"The style of Saakashvili's governance ... has made dishonesty, injustice and oppression a way of life. Everyday repression, demolition of houses and churches, robbery, 'kulakization', and murders, I would stress, murders, have become common practice for the authorities."

You can see why George W. Bush has embraced Saakashvili so enthusiastically. Saakashvili is also a war criminal, albeit at a much smaller level than his patron Bush or his enemy Putin. Saakashvili has eagerly taken part in the greatest war crime of our still-young century (I'm sure we ain't seen nothin' yet): the war of aggression against Iraq, which has already led to the slaughter of at least a million innocent people. No one forced Saakashvili to be an accomplice to this horrendous crime; he chose to do it willingly, and he cannot escape the guilt.

There are no white hats in this conflict; but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to see the reality of what is happening. In Saturday's Guardian, Almond gave this view of the background:

Back in the late 1980s, as the USSR waned, the Red Army withdrew from countries in eastern Europe which plainly resented its presence as the guarantor of unpopular communist regimes. That theme continued throughout the new republics of the deceased Soviet Union, and on into the premiership of Putin, under whom Russian forces were evacuated even from the country's bases in Georgia.

To many Russians this vast geopolitical retreat from places which were part of Russia long before the dawn of communist rule brought no bonus in relations with the west. The more Russia drew in its horns, the more Washington and its allies denounced the Kremlin for its imperial ambitions.....

In 1992, the west backed Eduard Shevardnadze's attempts to reassert Georgia's control over these regions. The then Georgian president's war was a disaster for his nation. It left 300,000 or more refugees "cleansed" by the rebel regions, but for Ossetians and Abkhazians the brutal plundering of the Georgian troops is the most indelible memory.

Georgians have nursed their humiliation ever since. Although Mikheil Saakashvili has done little for the refugees since he came to power early in 2004 - apart from move them out of their hostels in central Tbilisi to make way for property development - he has spent 70% of the Georgian budget on his military. At the start of the week he decided to flex his muscles.

Devoted to achieving Nato entry for Georgia, Saakashvili has sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan - and so clearly felt he had American backing. The streets of the Georgian capital are plastered with posters of George W Bush alongside his Georgian protege. George W Bush Avenue leads to Tbilisi airport. But he has ignored Kissinger's dictum: "Great powers don't commit suicide for their allies." Perhaps his neoconservative allies in Washington have forgotten it, too. Let's hope not....

Saakashvili faces a domestic economic crisis and public disillusionment. In the years since the so-called Rose revolution, the cronyism and poverty that characterised the Shevardnadze era have not gone away. Allegations of corruption and favouritism towards his mother's clan, together with claims of election fraud, led to mass demonstrations against Saakashvili last November. His ruthless security forces - trained, equipped and subsidised by the west - thrashed the protesters. Lashing out at the Georgians' common enemy in South Ossetia would certainly rally them around the president, at least in the short term.

Last September, President Saakashvili suddenly turned on his closest ally in the Rose revolution, defence minister Irakli Okruashvili. Each man accused his former blood brother of mafia links and profiting from contraband. Whatever the truth, the fact that the men seen by the west as the heroes of a post-Shevardnadze clean-up accused each other of vile crimes should warn us against picking a local hero in Caucasian politics...

The question now is whether the conflict can be contained, or whether the west will be drawn in, raising the stakes to desperate levels. To date the west has operated radically different approaches to secession in the Balkans, where pro-western microstates get embassies, and the Caucasus, where the Caucasian boundaries drawn up by Stalin are deemed sacrosanct....

Given its extraordinary ethnic complexity, Georgia is a post-Soviet Union in miniature. If westerners readily conceded non-Russian republics' right to secede from the USSR in 1991, what is the logic of insisting that non-Georgians must remain inside a microempire which happens to be pro-western?

Other people's nationalisms are like other people's love affairs, or, indeed, like dog fights. These are things wise people don't get involved in. A war in the Caucasus is never a straightforward moral crusade - but then, how many wars are?

Once upon a time when governments no longer served most of their citizens it was the most economically disadvantaged that could be counted on to rebel against tyranny and injustice. Times have changed, for the worse, despite the spread of democracy.

Here we are with a two-party plutocracy that preferentially serves corporate and wealthy interests and lets the middle class suffer and sink. Plausibly, the middle class is unready to revolt because it still maintains a relatively good standard of living despite rising economic insecurity. But what about the lowest 40 percent of Americans that are the working poor?

A recent survey of this group by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University conducted this past June looked at the beliefs of adults ages 18 to 64 working 30 or more hours a week, not self-employed and who earned no more than $27,000 in 2007. The results show a fascinating dichotomy. Though there is widespread pain and discontent there is also a stubborn faith in the American dream despite little help from government.

Ninety percent of this group sees the current economy negatively, either not so good or poor, with 52 percent feeling financially insecure and 50 percent feeling less secure than a few years ago. The fractions saying they have difficulty affording basic things are severe, including: 88 percent that cannot save money for college or other education for their children, 82 percent paying for gasoline or other transportation costs, 81 percent saving money for retirement, 65 percent paying for health care and health insurance, 65 percent handling child care, close to 60 percent paying credit card bills, monthly utility bills and rent or mortgage costs, and 47 percent buying food. Three quarters say it has gotten harder to find good jobs and nearly that fraction for finding affordable health care, and 68 percent finding decent, affordable housing.

In the past year this group has had to take many actions to make ends meet, including 70 percent that cut electricity use and home heating; 62 percent that took an extra job or worked extra hours, 51 percent that postponed medical or dental care and 50 percent that took money out of savings or retirement funds.

All this sounds pretty bleak. But are these people mad and pessimistic? Not exactly.

An amazing 69 percent are hopeful about their personal financial situation, 59 percent believe they are more likely over the next few years to move up in terms of their social class, 59 percent believe that their children will have a standard of living much or somewhat better than theirs, and 56 percent think they will achieve the American dream in their lifetime.

Do these lower economic class, hardest hit Americans that account for 25 percent of the adult population believe that government helps them? No. Only 22 percent believe that government programs are making things better for them. But apparently they have bought hook, line and sinker into Barack Obama's change rhetoric, with a 2 to 1 margin favoring him over John McCain. And when it comes to beliefs about which candidate will do better for them the margins favoring Obama go up to 3 or more to 1 for improving their own financial situation, the national economy and the national health care system. Similarly, Obama is seen as much more concerned with their needs and better represent their values. All very good news for Obama, except that only 70 are registered to vote and about a third saw no difference in whether Obama or McCain was in office.

Faith in Obama, however, pales in comparison to the other source of comfort for dealing with hard economic times. A striking 78 percent find religion or faith in God helps them get through tough economic times.

The unmistakable conclusion from all these data is that no rebellion against the power elites running the two-party plutocracy seems likely. If the bottom 40 percent of Americans in terms of income still believe in the American dream and change-spouting politicians like Obama, it is hard to believe that the more affluent middle 40 percent of the population are ready to support more radical change through political rebellion.

Interesting how gasoline prices are dropping as we approach the Republican and Democratic conventions and Election Day. Apparently, America's ruling class knows what it is doing. It can keep channeling more and more of the nation's wealth to the rich, Upper Class producing more economic inequality without fearing the kind of political revolution that Thomas Jefferson thought the nation needs periodically. Consider this: In the three decades after World War II household inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 90 percent increased 83 percent compared to 20 percent increase for the top 10 percent. In contrast, in the past three decades, the bottom 90 percent saw only a 10 percent increase while the top 10 percent received an increase of 232 percent! The two-party stranglehold on our political system has produced rising economic inequality.

Forget all that nonsense about the proletariat. Most Americans use their faith in God or religion or conventional politicians to cope, even in some of the most insecure economic times in American history. They remain overly confident in voting as the path to change. The ruling class has successfully used propaganda to dumb down and manipulate most of the public because delusion has become the opiate of the masses.

U.S. News: I've read recently that during his eight years in office, and even with control of Congress, George Bush has not increased the production of oil in the U.S. Some believe that there is a conspiracy for holding the price of oil up to benefit Mr. Bush's "Big Oil" friends. Now there is a conspiracy that has legs...about two inches long.

The current Bush presidency didn't increase domestic production for the same reason that the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and William Jefferson Clinton didn't increase production....WE REACHED PEAK OIL IN 1970!!!

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want a little thing like the truth to get in the way of a perfectly good conspiracy; otherwise we would have to take some sort of action to prevent total chaos. And that would go completely against our current form of planning which is best described as "crisis management."

I also read a statement recently that said ethanol could solve all of our energy problems and make us totally energy independent for ever and ever. Another said that maybe when we start drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, we might find enough oil to last us hundreds of years.

To these folks I say this, "Do the people at the asylum know that you're out?"

If all of the corn in the United States were used to produce ethanol, it would provide approximately 7% of the fuel consumed in autos alone. NO FOOD JUST FUEL!

Is ethanol a new concept? Those old boys down in Tennessee have known how to make corn burn with a blue flame for some time now, it's not a new concept, just a ridiculous concept that is creating massive subsidies for the anointed few. You now get to pay for fuel at the pump and at the grocery checkout.

We have known about peak oil since 1949 when M. King Hubbert said, "The fossil fuel era will be of a very short duration." Yet suddenly, it has become the news that can't be so. I have friends in nearly every sector of the oil biz, and not one of them believes this nonsense about huge new finds and cheap oil coming back.

So what's a body to do? Certainly waiting for the fecal matter to come into contact with the whirling apparatus does not seem a wise choice.

On the subject of where we go from here, I promised to say something about gold. I'm not a "buy gold and hold," guy. I'm also not an expert on the subject, but Mikeronomics leads me to this belief; gold is not a standard for currency and therefore has no set redemption value. The value of gold is simply based on belief or perception.

I have over the years found that belief standards are subject to change. Antiques quickly come to mind. During periods of economic prosperity, disposable or discretionary income is plentiful and antiques become precious heirlooms of considerable value. During periods of economic decline, a person's perceived value wanes and antiques become old junk.

Gold has very little industrial value and is primarily hoarded. I have said many times that a hungry man would trade a pound of gold for a sack of potatoes.

As far as the world going back on the gold standard? Don't hold your breath.

The American dollar is certainly in trouble and likely to get worse, as our leaders continue the promise of growth as the all-curing elixir. Nothing could be further from the truth, but like the ethanol example, what does truth have to do with anything?

But is gold the hedge against the dollar that those who sell gold promote it to be? I remember antique dealers saying that "Antiques are better than money in the bank." What they really meant was; better for them to have your money than for you to have it in the bank.

The U.S. will always have an economy that provides necessities, real goods and vital services. It will be the massive fringe sectors of our economy, the non-essentials, which will continue to fail as we fall deeper into recession.

BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Did we "win" by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people - mostly civilians - died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we "win" in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, the United States declared "victory" over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce "victory"? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a "war on terror."

Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.

Yes, Al Qaeda - a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics - was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. "We had to do something," you heard people say.

Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 - exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.

Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: "He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner." The doctor attending him said: "The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?"

Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.

Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate's foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, it was Putin's Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate's demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.

McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a "revanchist Russia" that should once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people.

How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori they would have found a museum still honoring the local boy, who made good by seizing control of the Russian revolution. Indeed five Russian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori's Stalin Square on Tuesday.

It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the United States, which championed Kosovo's independence from Serbia, now is ignoring Georgia's invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces.

Dear Uber Gruppenfuhrer Stevens,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Anthony (Fat Tony) Kennedy.

Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your bridge to nowhere and taking the heat off us with your bribery scandal, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Iron Cross 1st class with diamond clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair," formally "Rancho de Bimbo," on 08-23-2008. We salute you Herr Stevens, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney

If people can't see how this nation is teetering on the precipice of financial ruin and dragging the rest of this planet down with us as we destroy our ecology, too...and if people don't realize how desperate our situation is, then I must say, that's horseshit!

I am angry. No, I am incensed that hundreds of thousands of people are dead, dying, wounded, displaced from their homes or being imprisoned and tortured by the sadists that reside or work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the approval of their accomplices down the road in Congress. I am furious that I buried my oldest son when he was 24 years old for the unrepentant lies and the unpunished crimes of the Bush mob. Are you incensed? If not, maybe you should ask yourself: "Why?" Hypothetically: "Why am I not enraged that my country has killed or hurt so many people for absolutely no noble cause in my name and with my tacit approval?"

I am steamed that the working class has to, once again, pay for the excesses of the capitalist criminals that feeds its rapacious appetite with the flesh and blood of our children and won't rest until it owns every penny in this world and has all the power.

You may say, "But Cindy, it is not polite to be angry or to use such strong language in public." Horseshit! In my opinion, every citizen in this country should rise up in anger and DEMAND that George Bush and Dick Cheney not only be impeached and removed from office, but be tried and convicted for murder and crimes against the peace and humanity!

We should all walk off of our jobs and refuse to work and refuse to be cogs in the wheels of psychotic consumerism until our troops, military contractors and permanent bases are removed from Iraq and Afghanistan. We should, but most of us won't. We won't because it may mean that we would lose something of "value." Material possessions are so transitory, as are our lives. We can leave a lasting impression by our courageous activism and moral sacrifice, or we can leave a pile of rusting metal or rotting wood. I choose the former for myself.

We should come out of our comas of too much TV news and not enough non-biased information to push for alternatives to fossil fuels that are clean and renewable and protest nuclear facilities and off-shore oil drilling like we used to in the olden days when people actually cared enough about not poisoning our world to get off of their couches or (today) out from behind their computer screens to do something constructive instead of complacently shelling out hundreds of dollars a week for gasoline and food.

I get so pissed off when one of my supporters has a tooth ache and can't afford to go see a dentist to fix it or when my sister has had a cough for almost two years and doesn't have the health insurance she needs to get fully well. And when I think that almost 50 million people in this country are non-insured or under-insured, I see red. Why, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, do some have the "privilege" of being fully insured and healthy, when health care is a basic human right, not a privilege for the elitists? My heart hurts every night when the men who sleep propped up against my campaign office, huddled under their blankets against the San Francisco chill, wish me a "good night" and I can't choke the same words back to them, or do much of anything but give them coffee to keep warm and books to read to help pass the time. My campaign office is being visited on a daily basis by Iraq war vets who can't access the help they need to get physically or mentally healthy---and I am "extreme" because I actually want things to really change and choose to act on this desire and not sit around passively pretending that this horseshit doesn't exist?

Since Casey died, even though every day I am filled with pain and longing, I have tried to be the poster-mom for this pain telling my neighbors and fellow Americans how it feels to be profoundly hurt by the Military Industrial Complex and that it wouldn't be too long before the cancer of BushCo would strike every American home and now that this prediction is awfully coming true, I see more and more apathy and less and less action.

Three years ago today, I first sat in a ditch in Crawford, Texas and three years later, we are in dire straits, my friends, and the prognosis is not good, unless we all make a conscious effort to sacrifice some of today's comfort for the sake of our children and grand-children's futures.

Sixty-three years ago today, the monsters of the US war machine dropped a WMD on hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children and since then, this nation has just descended into a further spiral of war and profiting from war and preparing for war and more profiting from war; which is destroying every aspect of our society and we MUST reclaim our very souls from the Military Industrial Complex before it is too late.

Please don't wait for November, or January or for the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius because every second we allow this demented pattern to continue, is one second too long!