BBC is reporting the famed Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn passed away at the age of 89. This brought back the memories of long hours of entranced reading of The Gulag Archipelago, The Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich et al.

His son Stepan was quoted by one Russian news agency as saying his father died of heart failure, while another agency quoted literary sources as saying he had suffered a stroke.

He died in his home in the Moscow area, where he had lived with his wife Natalya, at 2345 local time (1945 GMT), Stepan told Itar-Tass.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to the writer's family, a Kremlin spokesperson said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th Century Russia".

"His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook figure, heir to Dostoyevsky," he said in a statement.

Alex Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Stalin's Gulag after he criticized Stalin. This experience when turned into the classic of The Gulag Archipelago made Solzhenitsyn the famous author he is. Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from Russia. He settled in Vermont in the mid seventies and continued a very active penmanship and opposition to Soviet Communist rule. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970. He finally returned to Russia in 1994.

He spent the next eight years in the Soviet prison system, or Gulag, before being internally exiled to Kazakhstan, where he was successfully treated for stomach cancer. Publication in 1962 of the novella Denisovich, an account of a day in a Gulag prisoner's life, made him a celebrity during the post-Stalin political thaw. However, within a decade, the writer awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature was out of favour again for his work, and was being harassed by the KGB secret police. In 1973, the first of the three volumes of Archipelago, a detailed account of the systematic Soviet abuses from 1918 to 1956 in the vast network of its prison and labour camps, was published in the West. Its publication sparked a furious backlash in the Soviet press, which denounced him as a traitor. Early in 1974, the Soviet authorities stripped him of his citizenship and expelled him from the country.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/754003 8.stm

Jerome Corsi was out in Hannity and Colmes peddling his Swiftboating book of lies namely "Obama Nation".
The book is peddling lies like Obama had used drugs and admitted doing so..more lies about his ties to supposedly radical extremists, rightwing frames about Black Liberation Theology..he was peddling some stories about Black Jesus et al...I simply don't have the mental power to write the odious lies being peddled..

http://fromtheleft.wordpress.com/2008/07 31/two-new-books-will-attempt-to-swiftb oat-obama

More on the state of SwiftBoaters..
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/ha yes

MediaMatters are already pushing back on the lies..

A July 30 WorldNetDaily.com article about author Jerome Corsi's forthcoming book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions), asserts that the book "points out" that "Barack Obama admitted using drugs in his autobiography but never revealed if or when he stopped." WND quotes Corsi, who is also a WND staff reporter, asking in the book: "Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? ... How about in the U.S. Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why questions George W. Bush successfully avoided." But Corsi's reported allegation that Obama "never revealed if or when he stopped" using drugs is false: Obama wrote in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father (Crown, 1995), that he "stopped getting high" shortly after moving to New York City to attend Columbia University as an undergraduate.

From Dreams From My Father (Page 120):

   When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into hitting a bar, I'd beg off with some tepid excuse, too much work or not enough cash.

As the WorldNetDaily article mentioned, Corsi is the co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, a book that contains false and baseless attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service. During and after the 2004 election, critics rebuked the media for having taken so long to challenge the smears against Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in Unfit for Command and in the news media, raising the question for the media: Will they have absorbed the lessons of their highly flawed Swift Boat coverage and give more immediate and more thorough scrutiny to Corsi's new book?

http://mediamatters.org/items/2008073100 03

More about Jerome Corsi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Cors i

Yeah you read it right..finally the truth is out..George W. Bush is Batman. Have you seen the insignia of BATMAN? It is a Giant 'W'. And that gave him away. George Bush alias BATMAN is flying around the World in his wellknown black cape, squashing the Islamic Terrorists like bugs, protecting folks in Salina, KS from the evils of liberals, gay marriage and abortion, extending his love and protection for kids in Cobb Country, GA from the evils of Evolution and Global Warming Science, you and me from dangers of reason and reality. And you thought, you had seen the end of rightwing dreaming?

Meet Andrew Klavan, the rightwing author in his commentary in the once vaunted newspaper WSJ, now owned by Rupert Murdoch, who wrote,

"A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell."

Klavan writes more about how the movie Dark Knight is actually a conservative movie on terror. It is making a fortune today because it depicts the "values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate..."

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB12 1694247343482821.html

So who is Andrew Klavan? According to the AP reviewer Bruce DeSilva while reviewing Klavan's recent novel "Empire of Lies" he is ...

Klavan occupies the portion of the political spectrum commonly known as right-wing crackpot.

Through Harrow he tells us, among other things, that the entire media is a left-wing conspiracy, that taxes steal from the rich to give to the poor, that America is in a holy war with Islam, that the truth about darned near everything in the United States is obscured by a blizzard of politically correct lies and that anyone who disagrees with him is deluded.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Today/Books/ 2008/07/19/6204261-sun.html

Supposedly Klavan had wrote crime novels namely Dynamite Road and True Crime. Klavan has a run of the mill rightwing blog where he fawns over Glenn Beck as a big fan..

http://www.andrewklavan.com

Well are you having nightmares by now of George W. Bush alias BATMAN chasing the progressive, liberal you down the streets of City of Gotham? Well, I'm..

But then if Klavan was sane, George W. Bush is BATMAN, I'm Einstein and I've a date with Giselle Bundchen...

Coming on the heels of the information that Gov. Kaine is being seriously considered by Obama for VP, another information is being reported. NYTimes is reporting that Clinton is not being seriously considered for that position by Obama campaign. Given the links of Clinton to 1990s and his position of bringing change to Washington, the campaign do not feel that Clinton is a plus.

When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton abandoned her bid for the presidency and endorsed Senator Barack Obama in June, she made clear that she was interested in becoming his running mate, and Mr. Obama and his associates signaled respectfully that she would get full consideration. Election GuideMore Politics NewsBut there is mounting evidence that Mr. Obama's interest in Mrs. Clinton for the post has faded considerably, if, in fact, she ever really was a strong contender to be on the ticket with him. In conversations, Mr. Obama's advisers discuss Mrs. Clinton's role at the Democratic convention next month in a way that suggests they are not thinking of her arriving in Denver as Mr. Obama's running mate.

.....
The arguments for picking Mrs. Clinton have always been highly pragmatic, based more on electoral politics than anything else, as Mr. McAuliffe suggested in pointing to the vote-getting power she had exhibited. (For what it is worth, some of Mr. McCain's advisers said they viewed Mrs. Clinton as the single strongest candidate Mr. Obama could pick for those same reasons.)

Those arguments have not held much sway with Mr. Obama or his inner circle. They have indicated that any political benefits gained by putting Mrs. Clinton on the ticket would be outweighed by the costs. Mr. Obama's advisers say that a central message of his campaign -- that he would represent a break from the way politics are conducted in Washington -- would be tarnished by the simple act of linking himself to the family that has dominated Democratic politics since Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992.

While it is Obama's solely choice for his pick, the unity of the party is also his campaign's responsibility. I'm surprised about folks from his campaign talking to the Press in the following terms about Hillary Clinton's supporters. Given the tight professional campaign that he runs, this seems contrary to common wisdom. It seems they can do a better job here.

Mr. Obama's aides are confident that the passions of the primary season have given way to a more pragmatic view among Mrs. Clinton's supporters and that Mr. Obama would not risk a major backlash from women or other constituencies associated with her if the vice presidential slot goes to someone else.

But the Obama camp has done little in public to prepare Clinton supporters for the increasing likelihood that she will not be on the ticket. There is no shortage of speculation among Mrs. Clinton's supporters that she is very much in the running as Mr. Obama begins closing in on a decision.

Meanwhile Hillary is fully committed to a Obama Presidency.

But Mrs. Clinton has made clear that she will do whatever Mr. Obama wants and has arranged a crowded schedule of appearances over the next two months on Mr. Obama's behalf -- some with him, but most on her own, an aide said

Read more here.

Adam Nagourney's NYTimes article

Dr. Randy Pausch, a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University breathed his last today.

News Release

Dr. Randy Pausch Homepage

He co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU. He is known for creating the innovative educational software tool known as "Alice" and for developing creative interdisciplinary courses. Alice is a computer programming interactive interface that allows end users to create 3-D computer animations using a drag-and-drop interface.

Alice Website

After diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer he earned Worldwide fame with his "Last Lecture". It was one of the most moving lectures of all times.

Youtube Last Lecture Video

A brief bio:

Dr. Pausch earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at Brown University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 1988. Before joining the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1997, he served on the computer science faculty at the University of Virginia from 1988 to 1997 and spent a 1995 sabbatical working at Walt Disney Imagineering's Virtual Reality Studio.

In the days you are feeling down and life is weighing on you, remember Dr. Pausch following words.

We can't change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I'm not as depressed as you think I should be, I'm sorry to disappoint you."

In the words of Edward R. Murrow: "Goodnight and Goodbye Dr. Randy Pausch".

Didn't see a open thread in the FP. Consider this an open thread. Anything you would like to discuss?

I saw Bill O'Reilly flipping tonight in FOX TV because Katy Perry kissed another girl..the dude is insufferable...

Watch Katy Perry

Wanted to bring back to your notice an Afghan Women Organization who had been doing yeomen service for the oppressed women in Afghanistan and former Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. It is called RAWA or Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan. RAWA was founded in Kabul in 1977 as an independent organization to fight for political, social and human rights of Afghan women. Unfortunately their leader Meena was assassinated in 1987 by Afghan KGB agents acting with help from Afghan Islamic fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Be it under the Soviet occupation, the era of mujaheddin/warlord continuous bombardment or under the repressive rule of medieval Taliban, RAWA had steadfastly worked to uphold the ideals that it was built upon by its founders.

RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, was established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice in Afghanistan. The founders were a number of Afghan woman intellectuals under the sagacious leadership of Meena who in 1987 was assassinated in Quetta, Pakistan, by Afghan agents of the then KGB in connivance with fundamentalist band of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar . RAWA's objective was to involve an increasing number of Afghan women in social and political activities aimed at acquiring women's human rights and contributing to the struggle for the establishment of a government based on democratic and secular values in Afghanistan. Despite the suffocating political atmosphere, RAWA very soon became involved in widespread activities in different socio-political arenas including education, health and income generation as well as political agitation.

Before the Moscow-directed coup d'état of April 1978 in Afghanistan, RAWA's activities were confined to agitation for women's rights and democracy, but after the coup and particularly after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in December 1979, RAWA became directly involved in the war of resistance. In contradistinction to the absolute majority of the vaunted Islamic fundamentalist "freedom fighters" of the anti-Soviet war of resistance, RAWA from the outset advocated democracy and secularism. Despite the horrors and the political oppression, RAWA's appeal and influence grew in the years of the Soviet occupation and a growing number of RAWA activists were sent to work among refugee women in Pakistan. For the purpose of addressing the immediate needs of refugee women and children, RAWA established schools with hostels for boys and girls, a hospital for refugee Afghan women and children in Quetta, Pakistan with mobile teams. In addition, it conducted nursing courses, literacy courses and vocational training courses for women.

Find more at http://www.rawa.org/rawa.html

One can see the brutalities of religious fundamentalism and oppression of women and children and suffering of Afghans in general. Please browse through the photo gallery and the mediaclips on the RAWA website.

http://www.rawa.org/gallery.html

http://www.rawa.org/women.php

RAWA is still working for establishment of a free democratic and secular Afghanistan. It is a rather uphill task.

Whenever fundamentalists exist as a military and political force in our injured land, the problem of Afghanistan will not be solved. Today RAWA's mission for women's rights is far from over and we have to work hard for establishment of an independent, free, democratic and secular Afghanistan. We need the solidarity and support of all people around the world.

Let us spare a moment of thought for a progressive organization working in a rather difficult part of the World. For more about RAWA

http://www.rawa.org

BBC is reporting that Senator Obama has arrived in Afghanistan. Other than Afghanistan he is planning to visit Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and Britain.

US Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has arrived in Afghanistan, at the start of a campaign-season international tour. The countries he is also expected to visit include Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and Britain.The Illinois senator flew to the Afghan capital, Kabul, as part of an official congressional delegation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7515 179.stm