Noteworthy items

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There is now a full-scale war between Russia and Georgia. Russia has aggressively bombed Georgian cities and attacked the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which transports oil from the Caspian Sea to Turkey.  But where are the anti-war protesters?  As of this writing, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Gods Politics, and one of Oklahoma's prominent peace activists, James Branum, have absolutely nothing on their sites about the days-old bloodshed in South Ossetia.  Which, sadly, seems to reinforce the notion that liberal peace activists only care about bloodshed when America or Israel are involved.  But if anyone will be marching on the Russian embassy or sending human shields to Georgia during the upcoming week, I'll blog about it ASAP.

Blogger see-dubya, writing at Michelle Malkin.com, comes down hard on the Vladimir Putin and the Russians, likening this attack to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary:

Russia’s attacks are not only without justification, but they’re also indiscriminate and far out of any doctrine of proportion. No imminent threat justifies their actions. Nothing except a desire to punish and subjugate Georgia motivates their shelling of civilian targets far from South Ossetia. Russia should be ashamed of itself and of its leader.

I hope this naked aggression backfires on Russia like their catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. They poured blood and treasure into that project for years, and earned the world’s opprobrium even as they hastened their empire’s downfall through their folly. We helped that defeat happen, of course, and I want to see us help out again.

(Monday, Aug. 11, noon) Still no word about the war from Christian Peacemaker Teams, only a report about an anti-Iraq protest that involved delivering "symbols of death and destruction" to the office of Illinois Congressman Rham Emmanuel.  When will they be delivering these items to the Russian embassy in Washington, DC?  When will their "human shields" be leaving for Tbilisi and Gori?

God's Politics finally has information about the war in their news roundup, but no opinion pieces about the war, and no plans to protest Russian aggression or aid the Georgian people.

Blogger Tigerhawk notes that International ANSWER, Code Pink, and other well-known anti-war groups who feverishly protested America's involvement in Iraq are also silent on the Russia-Georgia conflict.  Stop The War Coalition is blaming Bush and Cheney (seriously!).  To their credit, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for an end to civilian casualties in Georgia.

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Medical researchers in England have apparently created a daily pill that halts the advancement of Alzheimer's disease.  80% of patients receiving the drug showed no significant decline in mental ability when taking the drug.

Despite the emphasis that his campaign has placed on small donors, fully 1/3 of the cash raised by Barack Obama has come from donations of $1000 or more.  Obama has been working to build a strong network of big-money donors for the past two years.

The Great Oil bubble Has Burst, so says London's Telegraph.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian dissident author who brought Western attention to the horrors of Stalin's gulag through his monumental work The Gulag Archipelago, died at the age of 89.  Solzhenitsyn, along with Andrei Sakharov, worked tirelessly to bring down the Soviet Union from the inside.

"The U.S. had 12% fewer homeless last year than in 2005, and the greatest decline occurred among those who chronically live on the streets or in emergency shelters," reports USA Today.  But due to the fact that this sharp decline occurred during the evil Bush years, the story received little notice outside of this article.

The Agriprocessors kosher meat packing plant in Potsville, IA has been charged with child labor violations involving dozens of teenagers.  This is the same plant that was raided in May, when authorities discovered that hundreds of its workers were in the country illegally.  Plant officials have also been accused of helping workers obtain forged documents and violating state wage laws.   This plant serves as a prime example of the willful exploitation of workers who are in this country illegally -- workers who are blackmailed and abused and made complicit in criminal activity, all because they believe that if they do not cooperate they will be turned in and deported.  This kind of thing makes me sick.

Finally, on the lighter side, Egotastic! is reporting that the stunning Anna Kournikova still looks amazingly hot.  And I think I will have to agree with them.