McCain -- I Get My Foreign Policy Speeches from Wikipedia

By Keith Schmitz

We've all been guilty of it from time to time when we have, like a big test to cram for, to go to the reference works.

Behind a background of flags and fine paneled wood walls, presumptive nominee John McCain delivered a speech slamming the Russian invasion of Georgia to emulate in a mini way the Obama sweep through Europe and the Middle East a few weeks back.

But the effort one makes to look presidential can get seriously undermined when chunks of your saber-rattling speech is apparently from Wikipedia. If so, not a good idea.

Not a good combination of phoning it in and possible conflict of interest.

The tough part of running for a third Bush term is in case like this invasion, we don't have moral leg to stand on, the army to respond to it, or the luxury of Russia turning off the oil spigot if we do anything about it.

Iran -- Fighting Us with Photoshop

By Keith R. Schmitz

Seems that all the lather worked up by the Iran missle tests might have been unwarranted. Comments from a Harry Farid in the Scientific American.

Well, at first glance it looks like the second missile from the left and its trail was possibly copied in the original and then pasted in as the second missile from the right in the edited version. But I'm not so sure it's that simple a story. If we look at the trails from these two missiles, for starters, there's a black dot just under the second-from-right missile that's not there on the other one.

Then there's the smoke plumes rising from the ground. If you look at the smoke plumes underneath two rockets on the right, those folds of smoke on the right-hand side of the trail look pretty similar, too, though. But if you look very closely, they are not identical; the pixels don't line up exactly. This distortion could have happened when the JPEG file [a common kind of digital image] was compressed, so it could just be cloned image. Or, it may be that the same kind of missile can make a very similar-looking plume.

Something else to notice here is that in the edited version, the rockets look a little bigger and thicker. This means that they are closer to the camera or the ground. So, it's a possibility that that so-called edited and the original are actually different shots entirely, taken by two people who took the pictures almost at the same time but from slightly different distances from the launch.
It's a good thing there is not the same mental climate we had in 2002/2003 to go off half cocked for sure when the US chugged off to Iraq.

What is interesting is that it seems the Bush administration and Iranian Revolutionary Guard need each other to play to their respective bases:

"There have been several comments about our missiles' tests, especially by the United States, and all of them are wrong," said Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani at the Friday prayer ceremony in Tehran.

Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guards test-fired during the last three days several medium- and long-range missiles, including the Shahab-3 missile which is said to have a range of 2000 kilometres and therefore capable of reaching any part of the territory of Israel.

Rev. John Hagee Is a Bigoted Whack Whose Endorsement McCain Sought and Received

via mal contends

How can a complete whack like the Rev. John Hagee whose endorsement of and political relationship with John McCain are a matter of public record not dominate the airwaves?

The apocalyptic-minded and anti-Catholic Rev. John Hagee was pursued by John McCain, and Hagee ultimately endorsed McCain in late February when they appeared together in San Antonio. (picture at right)

Hagee is a bigoted nut, but also a major Republican political player whose specific foreign policy prescriptions are seen by him as preparing the way for the Second Coming, and are identical to the controversial policy positions taken by McCain on Iran and Iraq, now.

Turns out that Hagee, of the let’s-bomb-Iran corner of the rightwing, is also a prominent signer of the Forgotten American Coalition's statement proclaiming that we need to stay in Iraq and that the “… Iraq War must be seen in the broader context of Islamo-fascism's war on America and Western Civilization. It is one front in a global conflict fought from Europe and the Middle East to Africa, the Balkans, the Indian Subcontinent and, finally, to the streets of our cities. ...”

If those words sound familiar, it’s because McCain had been repeating them in substance in his stump speech for months.

What has not been repeated for months is Hagee's venom coming from the Founder and National Chairman of the religious right's Christians United for Israel.

As Frank Rich writes this morning of Hagee:

Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is 'the Great Whore,' Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking 'the blood of the Jewish people.' That’s because the Great Whore represents 'the Roman Church,' which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Have a look at this video and you'll get the picture; I bet former State Senator Tom Reynolds is even blushing.