Some links

Lance Armstrong and Dave Wiens' 100-Mile Duel in Leadville

HuffPo: Frances Beinecke: Distraction, Misleading Energy Claims, and the Washington Post

The Nation: Robert Scheer: Georgia War: A Neocon Ploy?

Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviews Ron Suskind on his important new book, The Way of the World: How the Bush Admin Deliberately Faked an Iraq-al-Qaeda Connection and Undermined Diplomacy, Democracy in Pakistan and Iran

OneGoodMove: The Daily Show's Jon Stewart interviews Ron Suskind

Download Human Rights Org's Elect to End Torture '08 kit

Video: Olbermann on Dobson's asking followers to pray for rain on Obama's speech at Invesco Field, Denver

John Kerry emails video on the new SwiftBoater lies about Obama and what we need to do to counteract them

Utne Reader on Peak Population and its ramifications

Just a reminder that Russia isn't thru until Saahkashvili is gone...

"They shot their brother Russian peacekeepers, then they finished them off with bayonets, so we are not going to see them there any more," said Dmitri Rogozin, the Russian ambassador to Nato in Brussels.

Medvedev spoke by phone with the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solanaand told him "there are a few things that need to be discussed to get a full ceasefire," said a European official.
"The Russians are saying that they will never again accept Georgians in any form in South Ossetia. They see them as a Trojan horse that started the attacks last week."

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/215810.html

COL. SAM GARDINER: Absolutely. Let me just say that if you were to rate how serious the strategic situations have been in the past few years, thiswould be above Iraq, this would be above Afghanistan, and this would be above Iran.

On little notice to Americans, the Russians learned at the end of the first Gulf War that they couldn’t—they didn’t think they could deal with the United States, given the value and the quality of American precision conventional weapons. The Russians put into their doctrine a statement, and have broadcast it very loudly, that if the United States were to use precision conventional weapons against Russian troops, the Russians would be forced to respond with tactical nuclear weapons. They continue to state this. They practice this in their exercises. They’ve even had exercises that very closely paralleled what went on in Ossetia, where there was an independence movement, they intervene conventionally to put down the independence movement, the United States and NATO responds with conventional air strikes, they then respond with tactical nuclear weapons.

It appears to me as if the Russians were preparing themselves to do that in this case. First of all, I think they believe the United States was going to intervene. At a news conference on Sunday, the deputy national security adviser said we have noted that the Russians have introduced two SS-21 medium-range ballistic missile launchers into South Ossetia. Now, let me say a little footnote about those. They’re both conventional and nuclear. They have a relatively small conventional warhead, however. So, the military significance, if they were to be conventional, was almost trivial compared to what the Russians could deliver with the aircraft that they were using to strike the Georgians.

I think this was a signal. I think this was an implementation on their part of their doctrine.

Full interview by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman: Transcript