The New York Times is reporting that Russian troops have detained 21 Georgian soldiers in the Georgian port of Poti.  The Georgian soldiers, and 5 U.S.-owned Humvees that were in the port awaiting shipment back to the United States after being used in joint Georgian-U.S. military exercises last summer, were taken to a Russian military base in Abkhazia.  The port of Poti is in undisputed Georgian territory, well outside both Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

I apologize in advance for the short diary, but does anyone know the status of notifying people about tickets for Barack's acceptance speech?  I called and emailed confirming that I wanted them, and never was able to contact a live human being.  It's apparently the DNC's convention committee, rather than the Obama campaign, that's issuing them.  But all I hear when I call the DNC is that the local Campaign for Change office (if there even is one in Maryland) will contact me.

Supposedly, they were going to start notifying people yesterday, but so far, I've heard nothing.  If we were able to get them, my wife and I were planning to make that part of our summer vacation, but we need to hear something one way or the other pretty soon.

The networks and the New York Times are saying that a verdict has been reached in the first Guantanamo case -- the one involving Osama bin Laden's driver.  It hasn't yet been announced what the verdict is, but it will apparently be announced shortly.  I saw that one interesting argument made by the defense was that if this driver was guilty of a war crime for transporting missiles that were to be used against military, rather than non-combatant, targets, then any United States personnel who transported missiles that were used by the Mujahedeen against Soviet military forces were also guilty of a war crime.

I'll update this as soon as there is more information.

This would be unbelievable, except that given the track record of this administration, it's totally believable.  The United States government has announced that it may hold Guatanamo detainees indefinitely, EVEN IF THEY'RE ACQUITTED BY A MILITARY TRIBUNAL!  Yes, you read that correctly.  Even if a jury of United States military officers, in a proceeding that has been highly tilted in favor of the prosecution, decides to acquit a detainee, our government nevertheless claims the right to keep him at Guantanamo (or presumably wherever else we decide to hold him) forever.

My wife and I recently switched from Comcast's regular (non-digital) cable package to Verizon FIOS.  The channel selection on Comcast's digital package was pretty comparable, but they were only willing to guarantee the package rate for cable, internet and telephone service for one year, compared to two years for Verizon FIOS.  Having now enjoyed a vastly wider collection of channels, I can say that I wish we'd made the switch long ago.  Just having access to BBC World News is well worth the difference in price.

No, they're not considering admitting that IN SO MANY WORDS (and obviously won't do so), but that's the inescapable conclusion from the policy discussions that are currently going on and reported in today's New York Times.

Today's story below the fold:

It looks like the Bush politicization of the government has reached into the ranks of the military.  Either that, or the military has abandoned its tradition or not getting directly involved in politics, or ABC has taken some statements by top military officers completely out of context.  Right now, ABC News has on its website an article entitled Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Plan May Prove Difficult: U.S. Commanders in Iraq Warn of Security Dangers, See Logistical Nightmare

The ABC News article suggests that removing one to two brigades per month is a massive undertaking that could only be accomplished if they left their equipment in Iraq.  That's simply absurd.  We've currently got about 140,000 troops in Iraq.  Pretty clearly, if we wanted to leave their equipment behind, we could have them all out within a couple of months after the withdrawals began.  But nobody wants to leave their equipment behind, which is why OBAMA'S PLAN IS FOR THE WITHDRAWAL TO TAKE ROUGHLY 16 MONTHS, rather than a couple of months.

Thomas Friedman has a superb column in Sundays' New York Times about what he calls the Bush administration's "massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy."  And it gets better after that.

He discusses how everything the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans have proposed would further INCREASE our dependence on oil, rather than decreasing that dependence as we need to be doing.  And even the steps that might (very temporarily, and only after a significant lag time) decrease our dependence on FOREIGN oil would, by reducing the market incentives for conversion to renewable resources, ultimately increase our dependence not only on oil generally, but also on foreign oil.

This one is for all of us, but especially for some people that I remember from my 59+ years of life:

It's for the very elderly and frail black man who was the first voter I ever registered, as part of a college political science class non-partisan voter registration project in a public housing project in Bloomington, Illinois.  He had recently arrived from Mississippi, and he literally had tears in his eyes as he thanked me, and told me that this was the first time in his life that he had been able to register to vote, and the first time in his life that he felt like a real citizen -- and I've literally got tears in my eyes as I sit here thinking about him, 41 years later.  I'm sure he's been dead for many years now, but I have a feeling that somewhere, he's smiling today at this day that I'm sure he thought would never happen.

Right now, it appears as though Hillary Clinton still has roughly the same chance of being the Democratic nominee as the Confederacy had of winning the Civil War on the day before Lee's surrender at Appomatox Courthouse.  Lee had received orders from Jefferson Davis to disperse the Army of Northern Virginia to get them past the Union lines, and then to continue to fight a guerilla war in the mountains.  There's a book, April 1865: The Month That Saved America, of which that episode forms a big part.

But Lee and his top subordinate generals had been horrified at the carnage that had accompanied guerilla war in Kansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia, looked at the situation, realized that it was over, and that their obligation to the people of the South, and indeed of the entire country that they had considered theirs until a few years previously, was to accept reality with dignity and grace, and not to cause any more useless carnage.

Lanny Davis just appeared on "Morning Joeless," and gave the clearest indication yet that Hillary isn't pulling out until votes have actually been cast at the Convention.  He told Mika Brzezinski that it definitely won't be over next week, and that until the votes are actually cast at the Convention, including the votes from Florida and Michigan, this contest will continue.

He continued with a bunch of blather about how Hillary is the stronger candidate in the general election, and that superdelegates should exercise their own independent judgment about who will be the stronger candidate.  The rather clear implication was that even the superdelegates who have already declared for Obama should change their minds.

It seems clear now that Hillary Clinton is going to pursue her scorched earth policy all the way to the Democratic National Conveniontion, and that the main goal of her campaign is now to assure that if she can't have the nomination, it won't be worth anything to anybody else.  I simply don't know how else to take  the latest blatherings from Terry McAuliffe.

On -- where else -- Fox News Sunday, McAuliffe has now taken the scarcely believable step of blaming Barack Obama for the controversy.  There was widespread outrage about these comments before the Obama campaign ever said the FIRST WORD about them, and Barack Obama's comments about them have been unfailingly gracious and generous.  But grace and generosity, as we've all learned, aren't characteristics that one associates with Team Clinton.

Dear Senator Clinton:

I have never supported you, and never entirely trusted you, but during the month I spent in Iowa volunteering for Barack Obama, whenever I met a Clinton supporter (and at that time, you were the favorite for the nomination), I told them that while I wasn't supporting you in the primary, I'd be enthusiastically supporting you in the general election if you were the nominee, and that I hoped that they'd support Obama if he was the nominee.  AND I MEANT EVERY WORD OF IT.

But no more!  A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and your comments tonight changed that flow into a raging torrent.  You're a year or two older than me, so you remember as well as I do what I call now "the time of the assassinations," when the hopes and dreams of so many Americans were dashed, and dashed again, and dashed yet again.

Hillary Clinton's FEC filing covering the month of April is now online, and it's even worse for her than I anticipated.  She received $21,066,827.18 in gross contributions during the month, but had refunded contributions of $340,647.29, leaving her with net contributions for the month of well under $21 million.

But her debt situaion is even worse.  She reported debts and obligations of $19,480,893.26, but this did NOT include the $10,000,000 that her campaign owed to her as of the end of the month, leaving a total owed of $29,480,893.26, between vendors and herself.  (The other $1.4 million that her campaign reported she lent it apparently was lent after the end of April.)  [Correction: As pointed out by lizardbox in a comment, the debt DOES appeart to include the $10 million she lent to her campaign, since while it's not specifically listed, that's the only way the numbers add up.  I've also changed the other references to the debt in the diary to reflect this.]

There seems to have been an influx of total and obvious trolls lately who may post a few entirely innocuous comments to get a few "recommends"  and who then post a completely off-the-wall hate-filled diary that has no business being on this, or any other, site.  Right now, there are at least two of them on the "Recent Diaries" list. (Maybe even more, since I haven't read every diary on the list.)  

This creates at least two problems:  First, it moves worthwhile diaries off the list before that would otherwise happen.  And even more importantly, this hate-filled drivel can then be used by our political enemies to discredit this site.

The outrages from the ironically named Department of Homeland Security just keep coming.  Now, it's been revealed that in the event of a major hurricane heading toward the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, citizenship documents will be checked by the Border Patrol before anyone gets on the buses in place like Brownsville, McAllen, and the other cities and towns in the Valley.  And the Border Patrol will maintain its checkpoints on the roads heading north, presumably to assure that those who are evacuating themselves and their families in privately-owned vehicles aren't harboring illegal aliens:

"It's business as usual at the checkpoints," said Dan Doty, spokesman for CBP's Rio Grande Valley sector. "We'll still check everybody."

Last night, I heard a comment by some talking head on MSNBC to the effect that while Clinton would probably win Pennsylvania, it might not be a "blowout" like Ohio.  This must mean that Clinton's margin of victory in Ohio constituted a "blow-out."  That margin was 10%.  But if a 10% margin of victory is a "blow-out," then what do you call the following margins of victory enjoyed by Obama in other states:

On April 1, Hillary Clinton was quoted by MSNBC as saying,

"We're raising the money we need, and we're paying our bills. We're keeping going."

I was tempted to say that this was another lie, but maybe I should be charitable and say that since it WAS April 1, perhaps it was just an April Fools Day joke.  And the joke is on anybody who actually believed this statement.

The Clinton campaign has now filed its April Monthly campaign finance report (which was apparently filed on time, even though it wasn't up on the FEC website by midnight), and it's an ugly sight to see if you're a Clinton supporter.  

More below the fold.