HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN CAPITALISM TO A MARXIST?

Obama in Rude Denial

Read on about our IGNORANT, useless IDIOT!

By The Prowler


IT'S ALL A GOP PLOT


The White House political and legislative operations were said to be livid with the announcement by several large U.S. companies that they were taking multi-million or as much as a billion dollar charges because of the new health-care law, the issue was front-and-center with key lawmakers. By last Friday, AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., and AK Steel Holding Corp. had all announced that they were taking the one-time charges on their first-quarter balance sheets. More companies were expected to make similar announcements this week.


"These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general," says a White House legislative affairs staffer. "Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative websites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It's BS."


On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacked them for doing so.


One Washington office head said that the White House calls were accusatory and "downright rude."


The companies are taking the charges because in 2013 they will lose a tax deduction on tax-free government subsidies they have had when they give retirees a Medicare Part D prescription-drug reimbursement. Many of these companies have more than 100,000 retirees each.

AT&T may have more than three-quarters of a million retirees to cover.


"Most of these people [in the Administration] have never had a real job in their lives.


They don't understand a thing about business, and that includes the President," says a senior lobbyist for one of the companies that announced the charge.


"My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general.


First the President didn't understand what they were talking about.


Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn't know what was in the bill."


It isn't just the President who didn't understand his own proposal. Late Friday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, announced that they would hold hearings in late April to investigate "claims by Caterpillar, Verizon, and Deere that provisions in the new health care reform law could adversely affect their company's ability to provide health insurance to their employees."


NOTE: Stupak and his other 11 "pro-life" supporters, who caved in and voted for the health care bill have NOW gone to Obama and asked for about THREE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS for their States as a thank you for the disaster they enabled.


Neither Waxman or Stupak -- who betrayed the pro-life community by negotiating for more than a week with the White House to ensure his vote on the health care bill -- had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individual citizens before they voted on the bill, says House Energy Democrat staff.


"We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them," says a staffer. "When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them. They really believed this bill would immediately lower costs. They just didn't understand what they were voting on."

NOT WHAT THEY EXPECTED

So much for President Obama's promises to build better relations with America's friends and allies overseas. Just 15 months into his administration, Obama has managed to alienate most of the major European allies, this time having a State Department functionary announcing in Brussels that U.S.-EU summits will no longer be held annually, and only when there are particular issues to be decided.


State Department officials, some of whom were holdovers from the Bush Administration, say the reasoning for the U.S. to end the annual summits, which had been held since 1991, was in part due to Obama and his team's feeling " slighted" by European leaders and their staffs, such as French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, both of whom have come away less than impressed with Obama's style and substance.


During Obama's much heralded European visits last year, he and his team were met with lukewarm enthusiasm by his fellow leaders. Obama responded by, as host last November, meeting with his counterparts for only three hours and sending Vice President Joe Biden to spend the rest of the time in the summit, including the official lunch. Other than a 15-minute meeting in the morning with Merkel (which on the schedule was supposed to be a half-hour), the summit meeting, Obama had an almost open schedule on that day, with only a late-afternoon meeting with Sen. Blanche Lincoln on the agenda.


Then in February Obama announced that he would not attend a U.S.-EU Summit in Madrid, Spain, scheduled to take place in May, thus ensuring the meeting would be canceled.


The Obama Administration got off to a rocky start diplomatically when it embarrassed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown by giving him official White House presents -- U.S. formatted DVDs that could not played in Great Britain due to different formatting, for example -- that created the impression Obama didn't seem to care much for Brown. He later, in meeting Queen Elizabeth II gave her an iPod, loaded with podcasts of his major speeches.


"People may not have liked some of the Bush Administration's style, but at least President Bush came to meetings and was gracious," says a current State Department staffer. " I won't say that the Europeans are missing Bush, but they feel that President Obama just doesn't care about the 'special relationship' that has existed between American and Europe.

 He's made it worse, not better."

OBA-HUSSEIN PLANTING HIS SEEDS TO DESTROY AMERICA

Obama’s OIC Envoy Didn’t Just Defend Al-Arian
Frontpagemagazine  - Justin Elizabeth Tabler


He condemned the United States for prosecuting just about everyone who was under indictment on terror charges at the time.

Obama’s click here newly-named Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference click here , Rashad Hussain click here, came under fire last week for statements he made in defense of Palestinian Islamic jihad’s  click here  leader in the US, Sami al-Arian, click here 
as well as for having initially lied about making them. Hussain had said that al-Arian, who pled guilty to providing material support to a designated terrorist organization, was a victim of “politically motivated persecutions,” then claimed that Laila, Sami’s daughter had made the statements, not him.

The cover-up click here itself is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it was large. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs deleted two paragraphs from a 2004 article – the two paragraphs quoting Hussain – and then claimed that Archive.org was lying and implied that anyone who wonders what happened to the article is a bigot. The White House then erroneously echoed Hussain’s claim that Laila al-Arian had made the statements. Then, last Friday, Hussain came clean and admitted to having said it all, while the White House admits nothing.

Second, the cover-up is intriguing because the reason why Hussain admitted to making the statements was not out of some sense of duty or honor, especially after having shifted the blame to another person, but because he got caught red-handed. Josh Gerstein of the Politico obtained audio click here   from the 2004 Muslim Students Association   click here conference at which he made the remarks. (Hat tip: Creeping Sharia click here .)

Gerstein’s article also reveals (although the audio above does not) that Hussain’s defense of al-Arian was part of a much broader condemnation of U.S. terrorist prosecutions, which should not be surprising since his speech took place at a conference for Muslim Brotherhood front group and he was a law student at the time. What is surprising is that he stuck up for just about every individual under indictment on terrorism charges at the time.

Hussain cited click here :

— The court martial of Capt. James Yee click here  , a Guantanamo chaplain initially suspected of treason and later charged with adultery. All charges were eventually dropped.

— The case of Jose Padilla click here    , who was held without charge for more than three years as an enemy combatant on suspicions of trying to detonate a radiation-laced “dirty bomb” in the U.S. In 2006, more than a year after Hussain spoke, Padilla was charged in a terrorist plot unrelated to the dirty bomb allegations. He was convicted by a jury in 2007 and sentenced to 17 years in prison.

— The imprisonment of Yaser Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan, held as an enemy combatant and released to Saudi Arabia weeks after Hussain spoke.

— The prosecution of an imam and a pizzeria owner in Albany, N.Y., for conspiring with an informant in a fictitious plot to use a missile launcher to attack a Pakistani diplomat. The men were convicted in 2006 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, though their lawyers claimed the pair were entrapped.

— The prosecution of a Somali man, Nuradin Abdi  click here , in 2004 for plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio. He pled guilty in 2007 to conspiring to support terrorism and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

— The imprisonment of an Oregon lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was jailed for more than two weeks in 2004 as a material witness on suspicion of involvement in the Madrid train bombings that year. He was never charged with a crime, received an apology from the FBI, which said it misidentified his fingerprints, and brought a lawsuit that led to a reported $2 million settlement from the government in 2006.

— The prosecution of four men as alleged members of a Detroit-based Al Qaeda “sleeper cell” plotting an attack. Two of the men were convicted on terror charges in 2003 but the convictions were thrown out at the government’s request after evidence emerged of prosecutorial misconduct and an unreliable informant. The prosecutor was charged criminally with concealing exculpatory evidence but later acquitted.

He then backtracked, calling his remarks about al-Arian “ill conceived.” He did not, however, retreat in his condemnation of the prosecution (or his perceived motivations for prosecution) of nearly every individual indicted on terrorism charges between September of 2001 and September of 2004, when he made the statements, nor has he repudiated any of his many troubling ties click here   to the Muslim Brotherhood, a genocidal click here  organization whose stated purpose click here  in the U.S. is to undermine our government and replace it with Sharia law. He spoke at a leadership summit hosted by a roll call of Holy Land Foundation click here   unindicted co-conspirators as recently as last May.

The case of Rashad Hussain is disturbing on too many levels. One should not surprised that Obama appointed someone like Hussain as Special Envoy to the OIC, which seeks to outlaw free and honest discussion of Islam and undermine the national sovereignty of free nations. His counterrorism approach click here  (why are lawyers crafting approaches to combating terrorism?) is one which essentially bends over backward to avoid dealing with the Islamic texts and tenets which call for violence, and which is pacifistic and appeasing in response to violent jihad both at home and abroad.

Van Jones  click here may be a 9/11 Truther who defended a Marxist cop killer, but he never defended any leaders of explicitly genocidal international terror organizations or attempted mass murderers like Jose Padilla, and Jones’ ties click here   to terror organizations pale in comparison to Hussain’s. Jones seems as innocuous as Opie from the Andy Griffith Show next to Rashad Hussain, yet, given the extent of the Obama administration’s dealings with individuals click here    and entities  click here   affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and given the fact that Obama  appointed an envoy  to the fascist murderers of the OIC at all, I do not expect Rashad Hussain to quietly resign in the middle of the night any time soon.

The author writes for NewsReal Blog  click here  . She also runs The Force of Reason click here .

VERY ILL ANTI-REGIME AYATOLLAH BADLY ABUSED IN PRISON

Using new cameras and phone interruption in Evin prison‏

Sat 2/13

Ayatollah Boroujerdi, arrested over a year ago, though a prominent cleric himself and son of the late-famous Ayatollah Boroujerdi,  is a strong, vocal opponent of the regime.  He has been badly abused in prison  and refused medical treatment in the hope of his dying from his diabetes and other serious illnesses.

This site, operated by his followers, tries to provide information about the abuses and the sad plight he and others suffer under the brutal regime.

=====================

Tuesday Feb 2, 2010 some new cameras have been put into operation in and out of different sections of Evin prison. According to the reports received, the prison authorities these cameras have been used even in the bathrooms and WC of the Special Court for clergy! This hideous action led to discontent and severe protest of the prisoners.


The prison authorities have presented no reason for their actions, but because of the intensification of public protests, Velayat-e-Faqih regime is scared of the people implementing a massive attack on the prisons to release their children and relatives, so they have intensified security systems by expanding use of  cameras.

Also phone communication in Evin prison especially in  the clergy section has completely been stopped since Feb 3, in order to prevent from spreading news by prisoners.

http://bameazadi-english.blogspot.com/2010/02/using-new-cameras-and-phone.html

http://bameazadi-english.blogspot.com/



Email: Bameazadi@Gmail.com  

Bameazadi.Ab@gmail.com

"NOT OVER TILL THE FAT LADY SINGS" - CHALLENGES TO OBA-HUSSEIN CONTINUE

Obama and Congress Request and Obtain Extension of Time to File Opposition Brief to Kerchner Appeal

February 13th, 2010

On January 19, 2010, I filed the Appellants’ Opening Brief in the appeal of Kerchner et al. v. Obama et al. which is currently pending in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

In that appeal, we maintain that the New Jersey Federal District Court erred in dismissing our case by ruling that plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge Obama’s alleged eligibility to be President and Commander in Chief of the Military and that our case presents a non-justiciable political question.

In our case, we have provided the Founder’s and Framers’ definition of an Article II “natural born Citizen” which is a child born in the country to citizen parents.

We maintain that Obama is not an Article II “natural born Citizen” because he lacks unity of citizenship and allegiance from birth which is obtained when a child is born in the United States to a mother and father who are both United States citizens at the time of birth.

Obama’s father was only a temporary visitor to the United States when Obama was born and never even became a resident let alone a citizen. Not being an Article II “natural born Citizen,” Obama is not eligible to be President and Commander in Chief.

We also maintain that Obama has failed to conclusively prove that he was born in Hawaii by publicly presenting a copy of a contemporaneous birth certificate (a long-form birth certificate generated when he was born in 1961 and not simply a digital image of computer generated Certification of Live Birth [COLB] allegedly obtained from the Hawaii Department of Health in 2007 which was posted on the internet by some unknown person in 2008) or through other contemporaneous and objective documentation.

Having failed to meet his constitutional burden of proof under Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, we cannot accept him as a “natural born Citizen.”

The defendants had 30 days within which to file their opposition brief.

Defendants have requested and obtained from the Court an extension of time to file their brief.

The Court has granted them until March 8, 2010 to file it. After that filing, I will then have a chance to file a reply brief within the next 14 days.

You may obtain a copy of my brief at this site. We will be posting here the defendants’ opposition brief after it is filed along with my reply brief.

I hope that many of you will take the time to read these briefs so that you may learn first hand what the legal issues and arguments are regarding whether the plaintiffs have standing and/or are precluded by the political question doctrine to challenge Obama on his eligibility to be President and Commander in Chief, and what the meaning of an Article II “natural born Citizen” is.

Mario Apuzzo, Esq.
February 12, 2010
http://puzo1.blogspot.com/

Related extended story links in original article:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25461132/Kerchner-v-Obama-Appeal-Appellant-s-Opening-Brief-FILED-2010-01-19

http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2009/08/law-of-nations-and-not-english-common.html

http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2009/09/natural-born-citizen-clause-requires.html

http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2009/04/article-ii-natural-born-citizen-means.html

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=124656

http://www.thepostemail.com/2010/01/27/a-chronology-of-forgery-deceit/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25461132/Kerchner-v-Obama-Appeal-Appellant-s-Opening-Brief-FILED-2010-01-19

http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2009/09/natural-born-citizen-clause-requires.html

HAWAII ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE WILL NOT DEFEND OBAMA BIRTH

HAWAII Attorney General’s office refuses to corroborate Obama’s HAWAII Birth - WON’T DEFEND FUKINO’S STATEMENT THAT HE IS “NATURAL-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN”
by John Charlton



Mark J. Bennett, HI Attorney General
(Feb. 2, 2010) — While political momentum is building within the Democratic Party from coast to coast to make the issue of Obama’s claims to be born in Hawaii a litmus test for its political opponents in the 2010 general elections for Congress, a key component in such a strategy has been undermined by the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office.

In correspondence with The Post & Email, Jill T. Nagamine, Deputy Attorney General for the State of Hawaii, has made it clear that her office will not corroborate or back in any way the July 27, 2009 Statement of Dr. Chiyome Fukino, Director of the Hawaii Department of Health, which declared Obama Hawaiian-born and a “natural-born American citizen.”

The stunning admission was made in an email sent to the Editor of this paper yesterday evening.

The implications of this denial are catastrophic for the Democratic strategy.

The Hawaii Attorney General’s office has the duty to prosecute the laws of the State. Mark J. Bennett, the current Attorney General, was appointed to the office by Governor Lingle on Jan. 3, 2003. He is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Honolulu, and a graduate of Cornell’s Law School. Bennett is the first Republican to hold the office in 40 years.

According to published reports, Dr. Fukino has admitted that her July 27th statement received the verbal approval of the HI Attorney General, who “o.k.’d it.”

In an attempt to corroborate the contents of Dr. Fukino’s statement and understand better the value of that testimony, I put the following two questions to Nagamine, as a member of the press.

I am seeking some information in response to 2 questions I have. Please understand that your response(s) or non-response will be quoted by our paper.

Q. 1: Does the Director of the Hawaii Department of Health have any statutory duty or authority to define the citizenship status of anyone whose vital record(s) are kept by that department?

Q.2: According to the legal references employed by your office, what is the defition of a “natural-born citizen” of the United States of America?

I put my question to the Deputy Attorney General to avoid putting the Attorney General in a situation of a conflict of interest, if he in fact, did, as Dr. Fukino claims, advise her regarding her July statement.

Nagamine, in response, asserted that any answer to such questions given by her office would represent a conflict of interest for her office. And that is an explicit admission that Dr. Fukino had no statutory authority nor duty to make such a statement, and that the Attorney General’s office will not stand behind Fukino’s claim that Obama is a “natural-born American citizen.”

It is such, because if Fukino’s declaration had legal weight of any kind, surely a response to my questions would have corroborated that without such a conflict-of-interest scenario. You only have a conflict if the Fukino claim would not be supported by a Nagamine response.

In December, the Department of Health for the State of Hawaii issued its own dossier of excuses as to why they are also refusing to confirm, by documentation, the July Statement to Dr. Fukino.

Ironically, and quite oblivious to these developments, the Democratic Party in Tennessee issued a missive berating that state’s Republican Lt. Governor, Ron Ramsey, who yesterday publicly denied that he was certain of Obama’s birth-story claims:

Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey today questioned the president’s citizenship, offering further proof that the Republican leadership in the General Assembly is out of touch with real Tennesseans.

“I don’t know whether President Obama is a citizen of the United States or not,” Ramsey reportedly told the Nashville Republican’s first Tuesday Club after it was suggested that no one running for president be put on a Tennessee ballot unless proof of natural born citizenship is provided.

Mr. Ramsey would rather pander to a far-right wing group of conspiracy theorists than govern in a pragmatic approach that most Tennesseans expect from their political leaders.

Quite irrationally, the Democratic Party is now asserting an undocumented claim as political “truth” and doubt concerning the veracity of such an unsupported claim as a “conspiracy theory,” which indeed is more evidence of the Party’s withdrawal from a Main Street notion of reality.

The Post & Email recently published a report explaining why the electronic image promoted by the Obama campaign of a Hawaiian Certification of Live Birth is in fact a crude forgery and has been recognized as such for nearly two years.

In October, the Hawaii Attorney General’s office also refused to take a public stand on what the term “natural born citizen” means, raising further doubt about the value of any counsel offered by the Attorney General to the Fukino statement.

The Post & Email notes, furthermore, that the term “natural-born” is more commonly the medical term for a natural birth; whereas “natural born” is the constitutional term meaning born on U.S. Soil of two U.S. citizen parents.

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RUSSIA "DISSES" (disrespects) OBA-HUSSEIN

By Robert Coalson

When Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama met in Moscow last July, their primary aim was to push negotiations on a replacement for the expiring START nuclear-arms treaty.

The two leaders promised to deliver an agreement before the end of 2009 -- a deadline that has since lapsed amid talks that are reportedly growing ever more contentious.

Still, the presidents were able to smile and shake hands over one key "deliverable": an agreement that would allow the United States to transit lethal military cargo via Russian airspace to Afghanistan. That deal was said to mark an important uptick in bilateral cooperation on stabilizing Afghanistan, a goal that both sides emphasize is in their strategic interests.

Speaking a few days after the summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov emphasized the grand scale of the accord, saying, "the U.S. military plans to carry out a significant number of flights, up to 4,000-and-something per year."

But six months later, that agreement has produced no significant results, despite the growing insecurity of U.S. supply lines to Afghanistan through Pakistan and the dramatic increase in the number of coalition forces deployed in the region.

The inability of the two sides to implement this seemingly straightforward agreement may illustrate the difficulty that Moscow and Washington have in separating out areas of common interest from the complex of contentious disputes that characterize bilateral relations generally.

One Flight Or Two?

U.S. Pentagon spokeswoman Almarah Belk told RFE/RL there have been just two test flights into Afghanistan under the agreement, the first of which landed at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in October.


One flight or two makes little difference.Andrew Kuchins, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the co-director of the institute's research project on the so-called Northern Distribution Network to supply Afghanistan [LINK: http://csis.org/publication/northern-distribution-network-and-afghanistan], says there were test flights in October and November.

Russian sources, including Viktor Ozerov, the chairman of the Federation Council's Defense and Security Committee, say there has only been one flight.

Whether there has been one flight or two in half a year, the figure is far below the 12 daily flights originally envisioned.

Officially, the Pentagon asserts that all needed supplies are reaching coalition troops and that Russia has never denied a request for a transit flight. The Pentagon and independent analysts emphasize that the ground transit of nonlethal cargo across Russia to Afghanistan is generally proceeding smoothly.

At The Mercy Of Kremlin Policy?

But there is more to the story of the nonimplementation of the July agreement. For one thing, the original accord was overplayed in the context of a summit where expectations had been raised by weeks of talk of "resetting" relations, but where there was actually precious little agreement, says Daniel Korski, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations:

"There was a clear desire by both parties to come out of the Moscow summit between Presidents Medvedev and Obama with some tangible, deliverable agreements," Korski says.

"Most of the agreements were incredibly contentious and complex -- such as what to do with the different military treaties, what to do with the missile-defense shield, and so on. And this agreement to provide the facility for transportation of supplies across Russian territory, in a sense, was the simplest one of all the different agreements that were discussed."

"And so it is obvious that both parties wanted it to be highlighted as a success," Korski adds, "even though it may actually take longer to figure out what goes on, and even though there may still be some reticence across the Russian military establishment."

The CSIS's Kuchins also emphasizes the political origins of the agreement, saying air transit over Russia was "not something high on [the Pentagon's] want-list," although the U.S. military is happy to have alternative supply routes. Pentagon spokeswoman Belk described the July agreement as "a redundancy system."

Julian Lindley-French, a professor of strategic studies at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, says no Western military "would ever wish to put its forces entirely at the mercy of Kremlin policy."

"We all know from past experience that the Kremlin can use whatever lever it can to try to influence Western policy and Western forces," he says, "and I cannot imagine for the life of me that Washington would want to be that vulnerable to a Kremlin veto."

A Complex Calculus

But there are increasing indications that even on the political level, this agreement was not as straightforward as Washington and Moscow indicated during the summer.

While both countries have a strategic interest in stabilizing Afghanistan, Russia seems to be treating the issue as merely part of a larger political calculus. Analyst Korski argues that Moscow sees the air-transit agreement as more beneficial to the United States than to Russia, and therefore may be seeking additional advantages.


Does Russia expect the United States to fail in Afghanistan?"I think it is in both Russia's and America's interests that Afghanistan stabilizes. And I think the Russians, to some extent, are playing a bit of a parochial game, in that they would prefer that America does not fail, but they are not doing everything they can to [help America] succeed," Korski says.

"And in some respects, this agreement is not something the Russians seem to be approaching as useful to them as well, because it will help America and the international coalition to succeed in Afghanistan. But rather, it's something they are approaching from a narrow perspective of scoring immediate points for Russia."

Russian Federation Council member Ozerov conceded in comments to RFE/RL's Russian Service that Moscow has tied implementation of the transit agreement to the broader range of contentious issues that bedeviled the July summit.

"It is big politics. And in politics, games can be played," Ozerov said. "We tell the U.S. that we'll give you military transit, and they say to us, 'give us the telemetry of your new missiles.' How can we reach an agreement with such brazenness? It's laughable.

"We say to them, since you have occupied Afghanistan, you should also fight against opium. And they say, no, this has to be done with special police forces. And we say, we're giving you military transit, but then what?"

In addition to such explicit linkages, Ozerov emphasizes Russia's pragmatic approach to the Afghanistan problem. "Today we must have a foreign policy that meets Russia's interests" he said. "Yes, at various stages we can bring our policy in line with the interests of the international community, but doing so, we must be careful that we are not deceived."

Moscow's New Consensus

Korski says Moscow is becoming "uncomfortable" with the prospect of a NATO victory in Afghanistan and, as a result, is "half-hearted" in its commitment to assisting the effort there.

Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer goes further, arguing that a "consensus" has formed in Moscow that NATO will fail in Afghanistan.

"There is, of course, undoubtedly a political subtext in what is happening. A consensus has developed in Moscow among specialists, the military, diplomats, and the political class generally that the U.S.-led coalition is losing in Afghanistan and that the current situation there is similar to what happened with the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s," Felgenhauer says.

"And if the Soviet Union collapsed, now NATO will collapse -- or it will lose, certainly. If we lost there, then the Americans will lose there. So no one is in any particular hurry to support a hopeless and losing operation."

Throughout the first year of the Obama administration, officials in both Moscow and Washington have asserted it is possible for the two countries to cooperate in areas of mutual interest, particularly nuclear arms control, combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, insuring that Iran does not acquire nuclear arms, fighting international terrorism, and so on.

But the failure over the last six months to implement the military transit agreement shows that the practice of isolating such areas of mutual interest is far from easy.

RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Danila Galperovich contributed to this report from Moscow