Has GOP Vitriol Against President Obama Undermined Diplomacy and Emboldened Putin?

by Nomad

If Putin doesn't seem very worried about President Obama's warnings against Russian new expansionist policies, it shouldn't come as a shock. 

With the Republicans launching attack after attack on the President, attempting to undermine his authority, it's only natural that Putin wouldn't take the American president seriously.

Kent Schäfer, Outreach Program Director for Progressive Centralists, asks a important question in the op-ed piece below. By constantly painting the president as a weak leader, Schafer asks, have Obama's right wing critics and Putin admirers simply emboldened the Russian leader?

First, I believe that Sarah Palin's praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in concert with other harshly worded conservative statements, crafted to paint Barack Obama as weak  -- have played a significant role in the Russian proxy-invasion of the Crimean Peninsula, eastern Ukraine, and in the death of those killed in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight-17. 

Do my thoughts come easily? Am I just lambasting my opponents with empty rhetoric? No. 

It hurts my patriotic soul to think that Americans, in an unabashed quest for fame and voter support, would undermine our country and our president and risk much to further their self serving "free speech" condemnation of our foreign policy. We (the U.S.) represent a chief obstacle to Putin's unlawful expansion by force throughout Europe —and not for a second should any American believe that Russian leaders and their Oligarchy would not continue to invade (by proxy) countries at will if unopposed; 

—the Kremlin is just waiting with 'baited breath' for the opportunity to protract their crescive regional power and exploit the natural and human resources of each fallen state as they go.

Pitchforks and Fundraising Pitches: How the Threat of Impeachment has Backfired on the GOP

by Nomad

After so much loose talk about impeaching President Obama, the GOP appears to be scoring own goals for Democratic campaign fundraising efforts.

In yet another example of a Republican self-inflicted wound, the Washington Post yesterday reported that, due to the threat of impeachment from top conservatives, the Democrats are cashing in big time.

Only Themselves to Blame
The Post article explained that the the Democrats' congressional campaign arm managed to rake in $2.1 million over the weekend, thanks, analysts say, largely because of the casual (and largely groundless) talk from House Republicans of impeaching President Obama.

Democrats have consistently used impeachment -- a prospect that has been floated by several prominent conservatives but has not been embraced by most of the Republican establishment -- to fill their campaign coffers and their polling has shown that fear of an impeachment attempt as well as the House GOP's current attempts to sue President Obama have the potential to drive midterm turnout on the left.

As the House Rules committee marched forward with a legal action against the president and his use of executive action, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has collected more than 114,000 donations since last Thursday.

If, fundraisers warn, the Democratic party loses control of both chambers of Congress, the next step will be impeachment.
Fear-mongering or a likely scenario? 

That depends on which side of the aisle you sit. Using the dread of a long and tiresome (and expensive) impeachment process- which could drag out for the remainder of Obama's presidency- appears to be a effective fundraising pitch for the Democrats.  

And the most humiliating part is that the successful pitch was laid in their laps by the Republican Tea Party rogues. 

In Memory of Owen Brooks: Mississippi's Civil Rights Veteran

by Nomad

Remembering one of the veterans of the civil rights movement who never stopped fighting for the Mississippi's black community.

Owen H. Brooks is probably not a name you've heard of. I know I hadn't before I saw his obit in a Mississippi newspaper the other day.

As a civil rights leader in Mississippi for over 40 years, Brooks was one of those rare types who possessed both the motivating idealism but also the stamina and long-term commitment to make a difference.

Brooks, the son of West Indian immigrants, was born in New York in 1929 and raised in Boston. He said that he had become politically active at the age of 13. No surprise, perhaps.
 It was a part of his upbringing.
His mother was reportedly a big supporter of Marcus Garvey, a black leader in the early years of the 20th century who promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.

Another childhood icon was African-American singer and actor Paul Robeson whose advocacy of anti-imperialism, affiliation with communism, and criticism of the United States government resulted in his being blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s. (Brooks actually met Robeson on several occasions.)

Brooks graduated Northeastern University as an electronics engineer but gave up that comfortable career to join the civil rights movement. Attending the March on Washington in 1963, along with more than 200,000 Americans Owen was moved by the speeches of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders.

While in Boston, Brooks had been an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and helped with fundraising efforts in Boston Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most important organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.   

He decided to put his idealism to the test and took a major step which would change his life. During early to mid-1960, all liberal eyes around the country were focused on Mississippi. In response to discriminatory state policies, thousands of idealistic civil rights workers flooded the state to defeat segregation. 

In 1965, Brook was one such "outside agitator."  

Apocalypse Avoided: Did Nazi Germany Plan to Nuke New York City?

by Nomad

Two years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, a claim  by a top level US missile defense chief reveals how close we came to nuclear war.

While trawling the archives, I stumbled across an August 2 1947 newspaper article. According to the piece, a top level official for Air Force alleged that Germans had made plans to launch a nuclear attack from the other side of the Atlantic in order to destroy New York City.

That allegation was made by Brig. General William L.Richardson in a CBS science radio show. As  chief of the Guided Missiles Division in the Office of the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff for Operations at Army Air Force headquarters, Richardson is clearly a person who ought to know what he was talking about.  His career was, to say the least, illustrious. Here's a snippet of his biography prior to this statement:

Joining the War Department General staff in June 1941, he was assigned to the Planning Branch of the Operations and Training Division.

Going to England in August 1942, General Richardson was assigned to the Eighth Air Force staff where he organized and trained its airdrome defense units. The following February he went to North Africa to study air defense operations, and in March 1943 returned to Fort Bliss, Texas, to organize and train the 51st Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade. Four months later this brigade was assigned to the Fourth Air Force, which was defending the West Coast and training Air Force units for overseas theaters.

In December 1943, General Richardson organized and trained the Ninth Air Defense Command of the Ninth Air Force, and planned the air defense operations for the continental invasion. 

According to Richardson, the Germans had developed a two-stage rocket known as the "A" series, a progression of advanced rocketry. This series included the V-2 rockets which were used to devastate London and other cities in Great Britain. 

It is not hard to visualize what might have been in store for the Allies had the Germans been given sufficient time to complete developments.

The article is quite specific. Richardson explains that each of the "A" series was developed primarily for research. However, the A-4, was the only rocket design that actually became operational when it was re-named the V-2. The A-series, according to Richardson, was to culminate in the A-10, a weapon to bomb New York City from launch sites in Europe. 

The project was, in fact, codenamed Projekt Amerika with a launch date of 1946. (The rocket reportedly had one weakness, its guidance system was inaccurate at such long distances, requiring a pilot to make the one-way trip across the Atlantic.) 

Although that weapon was never actually constructed, all design studies and computation had been completed. So how close did they come to realizing the goal? 

Richardson claims that the A-10 "could have been built and served its purpose provided the German had been given another year of development and production."

  

Of course, some historians- with the advantage of historical perspective and later uncovered evidence- might not concur with Richardson's assessment.

A Century Old Historical Mashup: Malaysian Flight MH 17 and the RMS Lusitania

by Nomad

They often say history repeats itself but that's not actually true. Usually some elements of past history are re-formed to create something vaguely familiar.

The downing of Malaysian Flight MH 17 bears some strange and ominous similarities to the sinking of the RMS Lusitania nearly one hundred years earlier.

Last month marked the 100-year anniversary of the advent of World War I. On 28 June 1914, a seemingly regional event, the Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist, set off a chain of unexpected events that led to global war. 

It seems, historians tell us, that no nation was prepared to back down. The inescapable gravity of war pulled nations into a conflict that would eventually lead to the deaths of millions of lives. 

That conflict also marked the first use of poison gas on the battlefield.  In January 1915, the German military fired shells of a lethal gas, xylyl bromide, at Russian troops near the Polish village of Bolimów on the eastern front. More than 1,000 were reportedly killed as a result of this frightening new weapon. Had it not been for the cold weather, the number of fatalities could have been far higher. 

Yet as dreadful as that was, it turned out to be just a preview of things to come.

On April 22, 1915, German forces shocked Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium.

The release of the gas formed a gray-green cloud that drifted across positions held by French Colonial troops from Martinique. The soldiers were terrified and fled, abandoning their trenches and left the front line exposed. In spite of that "success", the German army was unable to seize the advantage. They too were terrified of the effects of the gas.

This was a red line that no other nation had yet dared to cross.
When Allied armies claimed the gas was a clear violation of international law, the Germans simply argued that technically it was not. That ban, they claimed, cover chemical shells. The lethal gas in this battle was released through gas projectors, (or spraying mist projectors similar to those used in neighbors mosquito eradication.)

The Dangerous Illusion of Security 
As horrible as the escalation was, it too, only a month later, the world would be shocked speechless into abject revulsion.

On May 15, 1915, the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat  while  en route from New York to Liverpool, England. Warnings from the German Embassy had been published in newspapers about the risks of traveling into a war zone.

In February of that year, the German navy had adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and ,had decided to up the ante by blockade the British shipping lanes (Later investigations proved that the Germans were correct in their assumptions that munitions were being shipped via the passenger ship. That did not make the sinking of an unarmed passenger liner any less of an atrocity, of course.)

To the travelers, however,  that risk was thought to be exaggerated. The very idea of any civilized nation daring sink a huge commercial liner filled with innocent victims.
It was unthinkable.

And yet, tragically, the unthinkable sometimes happens.