Thomas Friedman’s Theory of McGlobalization has been proved wrong.

One minor casualty of the recent conflict in Georgia was the doctrine of peace through McGlobalization — a belief first elaborated by Thomas Friedman in 1999, and left in ruins on August 8, when Russian troops moved into South Ossetia. “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s,” wrote Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Not that the fast-food chain itself had a soothing effect, of course. The argument was that international trade and modernization — and the processes of liberalization and democratization created in their wakes — would knit countries together in an international civil society that made war unnecessary. There would still be conflict. But it could be contained — made rational, and even profitable, like competition between Ronald and his competitors over at Burger King. (Thomas Friedman does not seem like a big reader of Kant, but his thinking here bears some passing resemblance to the philosopher’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” an essay from 1784.)

Is this the emergence of a New Cold War as author Scott McLemee seems to speculate? I’m dubious. I think Vladimir Putin is a cult of personality just as powerful as Barack Obama, except with a wider license to steal and write new rule books on a whim.

With former KGB man Vladimir Putin as head of state (able to move back and forth between the offices of the president and of the prime minister, as term limits require) and the once-shellshocked economy now growing at a healthy rate thanks to international oil prices, Russia has entered a period of relative stability and prosperity — if by no means one of liberal democracy. The regime can best be described as authoritarian-populist. There have been years of frustration at seeing former Soviet republics and erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies become members of NATO. Georgia (like Ukraine) has recently been invited to do so as well. So the invasion of South Ossetia represents a forceful reassertion of authority within Russia’s former sphere of influence.

The 21st century will be full of new paradigms, including the end of single world superpower. Whether or not we recognize it, the nation-state itself is dying, and the United States is leading the slow decline.

“It is difficult,” writes Furedi in a recent essay, “to discover clear patterns in the working of twenty-first-century global affairs….The U.S. in particular (but also other powers) is uncertain of its place in the world. Wars are being fought in faraway places against enemies with no name. In a world where governments find it difficult to put forward a coherent security strategy or to formulate their geo-political interests, a re-run of the Cold War seems like an attractive proposition. Compared to the messy world we live in, the Cold War appears to some to have been a stable and at least comprehensible interlude.”

Follow the fortunes of private mercenary army and megacorporation Blackwater, which despite its tarnished public reputation continues to thrive. The New Cold War will be a very different animal. The United States has been overextended for five years and the Georgian conflict is an exclamation point on the sentence that tells us where we’re headed.

The Duck of Minerva – an academic group blog devoted to political science – has hosted a running discussion of the news from South Ossetia. In a post there, Peter Howard, an assistant professor of international service at American University, noted that the most salient lesson of the invasion was that it exposed the limits of U.S. influence.

“Russia had a relatively free hand to do what it did in Georgia,” he writes, “and there was nothing that the U.S. (or anyone else for that matter) was going to do about it…. In a unipolar world, there is only one sphere of influence — the whole world is the U.S.’s sphere of influence. Russia’s ability to carve any sphere of influence effectively ends unipolarity, if there ever was such a moment.”

What if, instead of Russia invading Georgia in response to a stupid move by a politician, it had been China invading Taiwan in response to a stupid move by a politician? The conflict between Russia and Georgia is far from being over, and there are at least ten other flash points in the world that could blow up in the face of the world’s self-appointed policeman at any moment.

The cult of Obama apparently doesn’t extend to everyone. Four idiots are being held on suspicion of plotting to kill our next President. The story itself is highly suspect. The parts don’t add up.

Law enforcement sources told Maass that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”

The story began emerging Sunday morning when Aurora police arrested Tharin Gartrell, 28. He was driving a rented pickup truck in an erratic manner, according to sources.

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, wigs, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and 44 grams of methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.

A 750-yard shot from a high vantage point is very difficult on a human sized target, even with an high caliber rifle and an appropriate scope. You’d need to pre-sight your weapon from your actual vantage point, or have a spotter assisting you. Maybe both.

The last person who could make such a shot is a methhead. Look carefully at these two individuals. They are supposedly charter members of the Methhead Presidential Assassin’s Club. These doofuses don’t look competent enough to tie their own shoes, let alone carry out the type of plan that would end the life of Barack Obama from 750-yards away.

I think there are two possibilities.

A) These idiots were actually plotting to kill Obama. If so, they had a snowball’s chance in hell. I’d put 200,000 to 1 odds on failure.

B) This is just some sort of publicity stunt set up by the campaign to help further the cult of personality Obama seems to have become.

Either way, Obama was never in danger. He’ll be the next President and I’ll be irritated by most of what he says and does for the next four years. Remember kids, drugs and hitmen don’t really mix. Competent assassins don’t get high and drive around in pickup trucks with their weapons waiting to be arrested.

This whole story is just a plot to distract us from the fact that Obama’s only meaningful contribution to society is that he promises to take money away from some people, take a cut, and give the remainder to other people - all in the name of fairness.

Remember those “rebate” checks Uncle Sugar sent out earlier this year? They failed to achieve a “stimulus.”

The evidence is now in and that optimism was unwarranted. Recent government statistics show that only between 10% and 20% of the rebate dollars were spent. The rebates added nearly $80 billion to the permanent national debt but less than $20 billion to consumer spending. This experience confirms earlier studies showing that one-time tax rebates are not a cost-effective way to increase economic activity.

These conclusions are significant for evaluating the likely impact of Barack Obama’s recent proposal to distribute $1,000 rebate checks to low- and middle-income workers at an estimated cost of approximately $65 billion. His plan, to finance those rebates with an extra tax on oil companies, would reduce investment in refining and exploration, keeping oil prices higher than they would otherwise be.

I fail to see how giving me back some money that you’re just going to steal again from my next paycheck is going to solve 50 years of rampantly irresponsible entitlement programs and the deleterious effect said programs have had on the American public, which is now, by and large, a bunch of whiners and gimme, gimme sycophants who vote for whichever stinking rotten liar promises the most free stuff.

The poor effects of the Bush tax rebate as fiscal stimulus, however, let Feldstein now attack the Obama plan for a $1000 tax rebate.  Nothing wrong with that - McCain has nothing better however - but what Feldstein doesn’t say is that if you follow the logic of his two op-eds (and this is not something I would necessarily buy into) the conclusion should actually be that fiscal stimulus would work better if it ran through government spending.

Government will always do the most expensive and least efficient possible job of managing any given problem. Government has no motivation to solve any given problem because if it did, then it would have to shrink itself. How many bureaucrats do you know who would be willing to eliminate their own job?

Michelle Obama doesn’t strike me as a person I would get along with. She’s got the air of someone with a huge chip on her shoulder. To be fair, some people might say the same thing about me.

Interviewed by Ebony magazine, Michelle Obama was in no doubt about life after the November election when voters will decide between her husband and Republican John McCain.

“My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief,” she said, “making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.”

Malia Obama, 10, and her sister Sasha, seven, are being brought up with the help of Michelle’s mother as their parents campaign. They would be the youngest residents of the White House since president Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy.

Michelle Obama’s certainty of tone could rile some on the right and foster charges by the Republican Party — which has set up a website called “Audacity Watch” — that her husband is arrogantly assuming the election is won already.

Obama, who is a style icon for her admirers and a lightning rod for conservative critics who question her patriotism, said she embraced the challenge of answering any concerns felt by voters.

I’m in agreement that this election is already as good as won for Barack Obama. I also think Barack Obama is highly likable. That’s why he’s going to win. Michelle Obama is not likable. She seems mean and grumpy. I am not looking forward to being exposed to her opinions for the next four years.

Barack Obama has demonstrated a clear penchant for ignorance when it comes to American government and he seems to be ill informed on world history as well. There are not 57 American states at this juncture in history, and Americans did not liberate Auschwitz. Perhaps he meant his Kenyan uncle?

Barack Obama is either ignorant, lying, or doing what military people call “talking out of your ass.”

If you really pay attention to the many sound bites coming out of this man’s mouth, you begin to realize that he, like every Democratic player in the last 50 years, is just trying to say what he thinks you want to hear. He wants American to believe he is incredibly intelligent but he lacks a basic knowledge of world history. He wants you to elect him President of these States but he doesn’t even know how many of them there are.

Yes, I can understand a few gaffes - campaigning for President of the Socialist States of America is an exhausting process. Keeping track of who you are promising to help and who you are promising to steal from to provide that help is a very taxing process, particularly now that we have 100 million cyclone victims in Myanmar that we are responsible to care for. The federal government is just the agent that keeps us all honest. I’m not saying his main competitor Hillary is honest. Far from it. Hillary is just a more accomplished liar. She has more practice talking about nothing while making it sound vaguely messianic.

Unfortunately for Hillary, she sounds about as sincere as the Wicked Witch of the West. Barack can talk about visiting 57 states of America and sound honest, and that makes all the difference in the world when you are pandering to greedy, fat and dumb Americans who want a sugar daddy to take care of them.

Unfortunately for Obama, not all of us are looking for a messiah to save us from our own pathetic natural state of being. With that in mind, here are some more gaffes gathered from around the web:

• Marking the anniversary of the March 1965 “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., Obama, speaking at a church, said his parents got together “because of what happened in Selma.” Obama was born in 1961.
• The Tribune dug this up: Obama, in his memoir, Dreams of My Father, writes of a story in Life magazine that influenced him — about a black man trying to bleach his skin white. No such article could be found in Life or Ebony.
• “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.” Um, dude, fallen heroes are six feet under, not in the audience.
• “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.
• Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by honing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.
• More recently, Obama as he traveled through Florida seemed to give some contradictory statements about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Colombian terrorist group FARC. On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and “one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.” OK, so a strong declaration that Chavez is supporting FARC, which Obama intends to push him on. But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated. “We will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments,” he said in a speech in Miami. “This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation, and - if need be - strong sanctions. It must not stand.” So he will meet with the leader of a country he simultaneously says should be isolated? Huh?

What is the bottom line? Political leaders shouldn’t pretend to be experts in areas they know little to nothing about. Voters should expect Presidential candidates to have a good handle on international and domestic history and politics. Obama fails the litmus test. He is a classic demagogue. John McCain isn’t a guy I’d vote for, but in the areas of domestic and international politics as well as history, John McCain is much better informed, more knowledgeable and more savvy. I’m still going to cast my vote for Ron Paul.

In conclusion, have you ever tried sitting in an attic all day? They get pretty damn hot. I call bullshit.