I haven’t blogged here in ages, but I do like to blog about bees. Or rather, our disappearing ones. I was surprised that Haagen-Dazs has joined in the cause. Well, what d’ya know, someone is making a documentary about our dwindling bee population. I don’t know why this bugs me (ow, bad pun) when there’s so much else to really piss me off, too. Maybe it’s because things like almonds are 100% bee dependent for pollination. Can you say pollution? Because they’re not dying in Australia.

Bee ecology expert and University of Florida professor Jamie Ellis said earlier this year that genetic weakness bred into bees over time, pathogens spread by parasites and the effects of pesticides and pollutants might be other factors.

But Barack can body surf without drowning hisself.

This will no doubt cause an immediate reaction amongst the kerner conspiracy theorists among the 101st fighting keyboarders, who all know black people can’t swim, let alone surf, and will be trying to use this to prove Obama is a Kenyan-born Islamunist Rooskie sleeper agent implanted into this country to destroy Exxon-Mobil’s quarterly profits.

Sandy Beach has great body surfing, if you can avoid getting clobbered by the body boarders because you’re a haole. Of course, Obama isn’t. . .

Somehow, this will be good news for McCain.

John Cole, on Bush’s verbal attempt to castigate Russia and get back his codpiece

If you really think Georgia is a vital national interest, and this is the best you can come up with, wouldn’t we be better served if we just said nothing at all rather than making idle and useless statements that only highligt how weak and inconsequential we are? Putin knows we are not going to go to war with him. We know that is off the table. So we really don’t have any leverage whatsoever if all we are willing to say is nonsense like this. So just shut up. We screwed up. Saakashvili screwed up. The Russians took advantage of it. Move on.

Amen. Or, in moronese, “ditto.”

After a few days of playing grabass with volleyball players and holding flags the wrong way at the Olympics, Bush pulls his head out and takes strong decisive action:

President Bush escalated the American response Wednesday to Russian military action in Georgia, ordering a humanitarian aid effort and dispatching Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the stricken region

That’s great — flap your gums a little*, then send the same incompetent diplomat who, just a few weeks ago, somehow failed to convey the message to Saakashvili that sending Georgia’s army into Ossetia was a very bad idea.

That’s gotta be reassuring as hell to Mikheil Saakashvili. I can hear it all now:

George Bush: You ain’t got no problem, Mikheil. I’m on the motherfucker. Go back in there and chill them niggers out and wait for the Rice, who should be coming directly.

Mikheil Saakashvili: You sendin’ the Rice?

George Bush: Oh, you feel better, motherfucker?

Mikheil Saakashvili: Shit, yeah, negro. That’s all you had to say.

Or maybe not.

*Yet Bush’s statement, along with the moderate measures that came with it, served to underscore the limited options available to the United States, which has neither the wherewithal nor the willingness to enter into a military conflict with Russia on its territorial border.

. . . . with the moronic Munich/Ossetia babble.

But World O’ Crap finds an even stoopiderer wingnut: some clown named Warner Todd Huston.

Huston’s Dissertation in Teh Stoopid — Georgia/Russian war: blame Obama.

Simply stunning.

From his op-ed in today’s WSJ Opinion-journal:

As Russian tanks and troops moved through the Roki Tunnel and across the internationally recognized border into Georgia, the Russian government stated that it was acting only to protect Ossetians. Yet regime change in Georgia appears to be the true Russian objective.

Imagine that — invading a country with the objective of regime change. Simply unprecedented.

Via Memeorandum: Troops Deployed Abroad Give 6:1 to Obama

According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain, and the fiercely anti-war Ron Paul, though he suspended his campaign for the Republican nomination months ago, has received more than four times McCain’s haul.

Despite McCain’s status as a decorated veteran and a historically Republican bent among the military, members of the armed services overall — whether stationed overseas or at home — are also favoring Obama with their campaign contributions in 2008, by a $55,000 margin. Although 59 percent of federal contributions by military personnel has gone to Republicans this cycle, of money from the military to the presumed presidential nominees, 57 percent has gone to Obama.

This is, I am sure, somehow Good News for John McCain. But maybe, just maybe, 16 months sounds better and more realistic to these men and women than “it doesn’t matter how long we stay.”

While wingnut tools like Pantload and Assmissile had their hearts all aflutter following McCain’s bellicose-yet-viagra-deficient threat to, in the words of NRO’s John Derbyshire, “do such things, what they are, yet he knows not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth,” Georgia’s president is seemingly underwhelmed by McCain’s strident gum-flapping.

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili on Wednesday called for John McCain and other American leaders to do more for Georgia in their response to the conflict in his country.

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

If there was anything McCain should have learned from watching Bush for eight years of Mission Accomplisheds and Bring ‘em ons! it was that a president or potential president has to be careful about blowing too much smoke out of his ass in public. Instead, McCain has been grandstanding, playing tough guy, making threats he can’t follow through on and promises he cannot keep.

Apparently, Johnny Mac wasn’t paying very close attention these last 8 years. But no doubt this will somehow be good news for McCain.