March 2008 Archives

Putin's Critics Used to Drop Dead -- Now, they Vanish

Filed under: Russia

On March 23rd, Britain's Daily Mail reported that "jet-setting billionaire Leonid Rozhetskin [shown above with his wife and another model on the French Riviera two years ago], an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, vanished from his $2 million home just outside the Latvian capital Riga a week ago."

Well, you may say, so what? Who cares about a rich guy. And besides, some people say it might be a hoax (his mother begs to differ, as might one Khodorkovsky).

OK, but tell that to the family of artist Anna Mikhalchuk (pictured, left). The New York Times reported on March 28th that "she left her apartment in the West Berlin district of Charlottenburg on Good Friday at 3:30 p.m. and has not been heard from since. Ms. Mikhalchuk, who exhibits under the name Alchuk, took part in 'Caution! Religion,' a 2003 exhibition at Moscow's Andrei Sakharov Museum that opponents called 'blasphemous.' Shortly after the show opened, six men from an Orthodox church in Moscow ransacked the museum, damaging or destroying many of the works on display." The Guardian calls her "a public critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin."

Hmmmm . . .

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Barack Obama: Lower than Low, How Low can you Go?

Filed under: US Elections

You may think it's inappropriate for Barack Obama to say on his website that "endorsements from religious leaders are extended in their personal capacity, and not on behalf of any house of worship, organization or denomination" and then to show not one, not two, not three, not four but five different priests wearing their religious garb. After all, it almost makes it look like he knows what he's doing is wrong, but doing it anyway.

But that is nothing.

Because, as Michelle Malkin points out, one of those five puts the rest to shame:

Pastor Pfleger, you probably will not be surprised but may be outraged to learn, is the "white Jerimiah Wright." You might be even more appalled to find out that, though Obama has tried to distance himself from Wright in recent days, Pfleger hosted Wright at his Roman-Catholic church last Friday.

But that is nothing.

Because it turned out this wasn't any autocratic excess imposed by Pfleger on the helpless victims of his congregation. When introduced, Wright received a "raucous standing ovation" from those assembled. He then sang "Happy Birthday" to Maya Angelou.

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Russia Destroys Its Children

Filed under: Russia

Of all the criticisms that can be made of Vladimir Putin's Russia, by far the most damning is its failure to carry out the basic biological function of population replacement.

Far more Russians pass from the earth each year than are born (for this reason, Russia has a horrifying net loss of population each year, in the hundreds of thousands, even though it has a huge amount of immigration as unwelcome Russians return home from far-flung parts of the former USSR). Only 21 countries in the whole world have a higher mortality rate than Russia, and its rate of 16/1,000 is double that of the United States. The mortality rate has risen steadily through Putin's years in power (it is up nearly 15% since 2003), and the only thing Putin has been able to think of to deal with that reality is to bribe Russian parents to have more children. This classic Russian "solution" is actually worse than the existing problem. People don't want children, but they do want money. So they take the money, have the child -- and then what happens? That child will be lucky to live to see his 18th birthday, and if he does he'll certainly be impacted by the fact that the only reason he exists is because his parents got paid. Meanwhile, nothing is done about Russia's alarming mortality rate, which sees the average Russian man fail to reach his sixtieth year of life. From AIDS to smoking to house fires, Russia's population is being wiped out by every scourge and disease imaginable, while the Kremlin ignores the problem and spends its cash buzzing America and Britain with strategic bombers and sending weaponry to the likes of Venezuela, Syria and Iran.

Here are just a few of the horrifying details:

2 out of every 5 Russian children are victims of family violence
50,000 Russian children flee their homes each year
11,000 Russian children are currently imprisoned
last year alone, 2,000 Russian children were murdered by their parents
4.5 million Russian children live in single-parent homes without child support
One Russian woman is murdered by her husband every 40 minutes
Russia and Belarus lead the world in divorces
One Russian commits suicide every ten minutes
Russia has the fifth-highest murder rate on the planet

Russia's divorce rate is one-third greater than the U.S. Its suicide rate is four times higher than that of the America's, and its child and spousal murder rates are ten times higher.

In a recent op-ed column in the Moscow Times, the brilliant Russian commentator Georgy Bovt, who hosts a program on Moscow's City-FM radio station, told the paper's readers more about this ongoing atrocity against Russia's children.

Bovt noticed that while incidents of violence against Russian children by American adoptive parents, which are the rare exception to the general rule, get massive airtime on anti-American, state-owned Russian television whenever they occur, the Kremlin totally ignores the outrageous conduct of Russians themselves. And this doesn't apply only to state-controlled media. When has "president" Putin ever given a speech demanding that Russians take better care of their children?

Bovt writes:

If we are so concerned about the fate of Russian children adopted by foreigners, why do we remain silent about the children adopted by Russians? There are no statistics available on domestic abuse cases of adopted children. We know only that 2,500 Russian children die at their parents' hands every year, according to Interior Ministry statistics. We don't know how many of those children were adopted because the country has no system for monitoring the progress of adopted children. But we do know that 1 million adoptive parents were deprived of their adoption rights because of child abuse. Another 2,500 families changed their minds and sent the children they had adopted back to the orphanages.

The answer to the question he asks, of course, is simple: Russian's aren't "so concerned." In fact, they're not concerned at all. What motivates them is not love for their children, but hatred for America. Bovt writes:

Russian laws governing adoptions by foreigners have gotten stricter in recent years. Even accredited adoption agencies are finding it difficult to manage -- primarily because of the pervasive corruption among bureaucrats. Only in the last two years has the number of Russians adopting children -- 7,000 -- exceeded that of foreigners adopting Russian children -- 6,000.

So foreigners care more about Russia's children, and adopt more of them, than Russians themselves. And now, by imposing restrictions on that process, Russia is actually choking off that care, condemning its parentless children to lives of brutal isolation. In Russians' view these children are garbage, but still too good to give to filth-ridden Americans.

That's barbarism, pure and simple. Only such an attitude could explain why Russia loses up to one million people from its population every year as all manner of disease and pestilence ravage the nation. The average Russian man doesn't live to see his sixtieth year, placing Russia outside the world's top 100 nations in that category. Russia is, indeed, barbaric as a matter of statistics.

And it doesn't care. As Bovt points out, it doesn't even try to keep -- much less publish -- basic records regarding its performance, and even if it was doing so such data could not be taken seriously. Russians have chosen to be ruled by a proud KGB spy whose words are no more trustworthy than astrology. Bovt's column itself is victimized by a failure to fully recognize this lack of reliability: When he states "we do know that 1 million adoptive parents were deprived of their adoption rights because of child abuse" he forgets to insert they key phrase "at least" to signal that this Russian data cannot be considered reliable and could well be a gross understatement -- owing not merely to Kremlin dishonesty but also to Russia's general tradition of bureaucratic corruption and incompetence.

Russia scholar Paul Goble has more details about the horror of Russian atrocities against children and the pathetic efforts of the government to protect them. His post is the source for the first five of the bullet points above.

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Russia: Guilty as Charged

Filed under: Russia

Over the course of the past few years, Vladimir Putin's Russia has suffered an stunning series of devastating defeats in European courts.

First, in October 2006, the European Court for Human Rights found Russia guilty of state-sponsored murder in Chechnya. Numerous subsequent rulings of the ECHR have confirmed the Kremlin is responsible for the most egregious human rights atrocities throughout the breakaway republic.

Then, in August 2007, a Swiss court held that Russia's judicial system was so fundamentally corrupt that it would not cooperate with a Russian state investigation in the YUKOS prosecution.

Two months later, the ECHR ruled that the Kremlin's prosecution of Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Khodorkovskys' right-hand man, violated international law.

Finally, in January of this year, a court in the Netherlands ordered a new auction of the assets of Yukos Finance, a Dutch subsidiary YUKOS, after having declared last year that an earlier sale of the assets was illegal because a Russian bankruptcy declaration against Yukos was invalid under Dutch law. And now, that same court has "rejected claims by Rosneft, the state-controlled Russian oil group, against . . . assets" sought by a group of 50,000 shareholders of Yukos "on the basis that its claims had been paid in full during the forced Russian bankruptcy process of Yukos that began in 2006." It ruled instead for the ownership group, dispensing $850 million to them, a decision that "could open the way for the remainder of an estimated $2bn-worth of Yukos assets in the Netherlands to be used to compensate shareholders."

More is coming. Khodorkovsky himself is pursuing the same relief sought by Lebedev in the ECHR, and will likely win as well. Georgia also has a suit pending in the ECHR alleging mass persecution of Georgians in Russia after Georgia claimed to have discovered a Russian-sponsored coup plot against Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and arrested four Russian military officers In November, an arbitration proceeding will commence in The Hague, Netherlands, before a panel of three respected international jurists. At issue are claims against the Russian government for illegal nationalization of corporate assets, bilking foreign investors in the now-defunct YUKOS oil company to the tune of $100 billion.

Slowly, right before our eyes, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is unraveling the web spun by the insidious Kremlin spiders who jailed him. In court after court, in nation after nation, he is proving beyond question that the actions taken against him by Russia's malignant dictatorship were illegal. He has placed the Kremlin in an utterly untenable position: It must either release him to stop the humiliating court proceedings, thereby freeing him to launch a massive civil opposition action, or it must keep him in prison indefinitely on additional trumped-up charges and face a watershed event in Europe where its basic legal legitimacy is obliterated and its international credibility reduced to the level of Zimbabwe and Zaire.

If Khodorkovsky can accomplish all this from behind bars, it's little wonder that the Kremlin had him jailed. Indeed, one must wonder whether the Kremlin is not already contemplating the Politkovskaya solution.

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Et Tu, Financial Times?

Filed under: Russia

There is a strong chance that Moscow will become one of the world's top financial centres in the next 10 to 15 years. This would see it overtake both Frankfurt and Paris, and see the Russian capital as second only to London in Europe.

If I showed you the above statement, clever reader that you are, you'd probably begin immediately to pick holes in it. What does "strong chance" mean, exactly, you'd no doubt ask. What's the source of this bold prediction? Reflecting upon the matter, you might well decide it sounds like some propaganda belched out by Russia's neo-Soviet Kremlin.

But what if I told you it wasn't, that it came from Andrew Hayes, head of Mergers and Acquisitions at Renaissance Capital, a brokerage firm, and appeared in the Financial Times newspaper.

"Oh I see," I bet you'd say -- it's an advertisement for his company's services. He must make money by getting foreigners to plonk down their money on Russia, so he's puffing his market. That's why he feels no need to give any source backing up his "10-15 years" prediction, or to define the term "strong chance" in any way.

Close, but no cigar. It's actually an article that appeared in the paper itself, and it isn't marked as an editorial -- nor is there a single word in its text to directly warn readers about the author's conflict of interest and resulting bias.

Mr. Hayes is a totally shameless propagandist, though, so most sophisticated people would certainly realize his admonitions are highly dubious to say the least. He claims that investors will not only make money on Russia, but in the process they will be promoting reform by helping to "transfer international best practices to the Russian market." Like any good stock broker, he asserts his belief that the effect of international financial turmoil will be "relatively modest" in Russia, suggesting it as some type of safe haven, while totally ignoring the horrifying risks.

He doesn't mention, for instance, the Kremlin's recent aggressive move to oust British Petroleum from its Russian stakes (much less does he discuss the arrest and Siberian imprisonment of oil executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Nor does he tell FT readers that the Russian stock market has lost nearly 20% of its value in the first three months of this year.

Our current editorial over at La Russophobe highlights how the FT is contributing to a gross misreading of the intentions of Russian "president-elect" Dmitri Medvedev, a wolf in sheep's clothing if ever there was one. But that's simply due to a lack of sophistication about Russia, not an uncommon problem.

The Hayes article is something else entirely. To me, it's deeply disturbing and represents a gross lapse of journalistic ethics, permitting someone with a personal financial stake in the outcome to give advice in what purports to be a professional piece of analysis but is in fact nothing more than an advertisement. If he wants an ad, he should buy one.

This is the sort of thing that allowed the USSR to get out of control in the first place, it's part and parcel of appeasement. If we're not careful, history will surely repeat itself.

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See, Told you So!

Filed under: US Elections

As shown above, Gallup reports that one-third more Hillary voters will support McCain in the general election if their gal does not get the nod compared to Obama voters who will do likewise if they're out in the cold.

I told you long before it was fashionable to say so that it would be far better for the Republicans to face Obama than Clinton, and this seems to be the final nail in that coffin.

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Kozlovsky on Russian Radio

Filed under: Russia

The latest entry to our sidebar is an original translation of the transcript of a broadcast from Echo of Moscow Radio in which a pair of hosts interview Oleg Kozlovsky just before the Kremlin's forces raided his Moscow headquarters in an effort to evict him. For Russian speakers, an audio link is available on the the station's web page, linked in the translation.

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It's Raining McCain!

Filed under: US Elections

Click here if you are having trouble seeing the YouTube image. May take a while to load.

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The Democrats and their Old Nemesis, Democracy

Filed under: US Elections

You may recall, if you are an ardent political junkie, a furor that arose in the American loopy left just as the primary election cycle was getting serious involving the apportionment of electoral votes in California. They decried as a "dirty tricks campaign" a Republican initiative to apportion the nation's most-populous state's presidential electoral votes proportional to the popular vote -- in other words, it wouldn't be winner-take-all. Each candidate would get the same share of the state's electoral votes (it has the most of any state) as he or she had won of the state's popular vote. This would guarantee Republicans a chunk of the state's electoral votes even if they lost, and could have created a major obstacle to the Democrats winning the presidency. Naturally, the Democrats wailed to high heaven that it was unfair.

And yet, as Democrat (and Hillary Clinton backer) Evan Bayh (Senator of Indiana) points out, the Democrats conduct their own primary nominating process in exactly this manner. Moreover, if they did in their primaries what they demanded Republicans do in the general election in California, and awarded primary electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, then Hillary Clinton would now have a significant lead over Barack Obama even without considering Michigan and Florida. Other than those, the states Clinton has won carry 219 electoral votes, while the states in Obama's column have only 202. You need 268 electoral votes to win the Oval Office. The only reason Obama is leading in the actual primary is because it isn't winner-take-all, and he's been able to scoop up considerable support in states he has lost (including almost every "major" state in the country -- Texas, New York and California, for instance).

It probably will not surprise you to learn that the Daily Kos called the California proposal "steal this election" and opposed it vehemently. If you know Kos, then neither will it surprise you that it didn't mention a single word about that position when it also vehemently attacked Bayh for noticing Clinton's electoral position (since the Kos is feverishly and predictably supporting the wacko extremist Obama -- when a splinter group dared to support Hillary, they were savaged and driven into exile). Their old standby scatology makes its appearance in this attack, so you know that Bayh truly got under their scaly skin.

This, dear reader, in a nutrootshell, is why the Democrats haven't reelected an elected president with a majority of the popular vote since World War II, while since then the Republicans have done so four different times. The fact is that, though named after "democracy," this is the last thing Democrats actually support. See, the people of the country simply don't support the left-wing initiative, which means that by definition to enact it Democrats must be prepared (as dictators of the left always have been) to ram it down the public's throat "for its own good." This is how FDR handled the "new deal" and how LBJ handled the "great society." It's how Lenin and Mau operated, and it seems it will be so until the end of time.

NOTE: Three devastating critiques of the Obamillusion, one by William Kristol in the NYT, one by Christopher Hitchens in Slate, and one -- the most crippling -- by Lionel Chetwynd in Pajamas Media. Chetwynd references "that . . . teaching opportunity I hoped you would evoke: not explaining Wright's outrage to me, but explaining his outrageousness to him."

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Another Democrat Bites the Dust

Filed under:

First New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigns in disgrace, and now the Mayor of Detroit, the nation's 11th largest city, is going down in flames. Kwame M. Kilpatrick was indicted yesterday on "eight felony counts, including perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice and misconduct in office."

In an amazing outrage even by its own standards, reporting the story the New York Times forgot to mention Kilpatrick was a Democrat in the first paragraph. Then again in the second, third and fourth paragraphs. They finally tell you in the fifth paragraph, and guess how? They do it indirectly, by stating that Kilpatrick has been praised by the party as one of its rising stars.

Is that totally disgusting, or what?

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One Picture is Worth a Thousand Screams

Filed under: Russia

Source: Ellustrator.

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Earth to Cheney: You're Part of the Problem, Dude

Filed under:

Vice President Dick Cheney has announced that he thinks Hamas and Syria are trying to "torpedo" the peace talks between Israel and Palestine.

Stunning news, to be sure -- in the sense that the Veep has only just figured this out.

And worse, he still doesn't realize that he, and most especially his President, are part of the problem, not the solution. Apparently he has yet to realize that even as he spoke, the Russians were meeting with Hamas and supporting them, attacking Israel's Gaza blockade and West Bank settlements. No wonder Hamas is feeling so bold! Russia is providing them with massive financial support, and going even further with Syria -- providing dangerous weapons systems that threaten to alter the military balance.

And why is Russia, in turn, feeling it's possible to flout the U.S. in this way? Simply because of the benighted Bush Administration's bankrupt policy towards Russia, which began with Bush looking into Putin's eyes, seeing his soul and declaring him trustworthy -- a policy Cheney has done nothing to alter.

Earth to Cheney: Please sir, get a freakin' clue.

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More on Russian Elections Fraud

Filed under: Russia

Last month, we reported on an effort by two bloggers to document the extent of the Kremlin's manipulation of Russia's "elections" using statistical evidence.

Now, noted Russian scholar Andrei Illarionov has provided more such evidence, and given a lengthy interview to Echo of Moscow radio detailing his findings, which he has published as part of a PowerPoint presentation (in Russian language) that also deals with economic issues and asks whether Russia is headed for an "economic catastrophe." We've already published an original translation of the executive summary of Illarionov's analysis, and after the jump provide some further details from his findings.

The following series of three graphs prove beyond any reasonable doubt that massive electoral fraud took place in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in Russia, to the exclusive benefit of Putin an Medvedev. The source of the data in all cases was the Russian Central Election Commission itself.

Title: "Distribution of Voter Turnout for Presidential Elections in the Russian Federation in 1991-2008, All Regions (85)."
Vertical axis: Number of Regions (reporting this percentage turnout)
Horizontal axis: Voter Turnout (%)

From the graph above we see that the turnout rates for elections from 1991-2000 were distributed in essentially normal, bell-shaped curves - as one would expect if there was little/no/very uniform manipulation of "voter turnout" (which may include stuffing of ballot boxes and/or forcing/bribing people to vote). Very mild distortions are visible on the right side of the curves (high turnout rates) in second round in 1996 and the only round in 2000, but in 2004 and 2008, we suddenly see enormous distortions from the normal bell shape, becoming utterly ludicrous in 2008, when an actual bi-modal distribution appears, with one hump at the 95% turnout rate! This shows that manipulation of "turnout" became at the very least much less uniform in those years.

So the natural next question is: Who's responsible? Was the manipulation of voter turnout something that all parties engaged in, benefiting all the candidates equally, or did some benefit more than others? Two other sets of data presented by Illarionov answer that question definitively.

distribution%20-%20turnout%20vs%20regions%202008.jpg

Title: "Voter Turnout and Support for the Candidates in the 2008 Presidential Election"
Vertical (y) axis: Percentage of Votes From All Voters

Horizontal (x) axis: Voter Turnout (%)
Candidates (top to bottom): Medvedev, Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky, Bogdanov

distribution%20-%20turnout%20vs%20regions.jpg

Title: "Voter Turnout and Support for the Candidates in the 2004 Presidential Election"
Vertical (y) axis: Percentage of Votes From All Voters

Horizontal (x) axis: Voter Turnout (%)
Candidates (top to bottom): Putin, Kharitonov, Glazev, Khakamada

As the above tables indicate, his data shows that in regions where voter turnout exceeded 50%, the extra turnout overwhelmingly benefited Medvedev (in 2008) and Putin (in 2004); and, most critically, the higher the "turnout," the greater the percentage of the total vote that went to these two candidates. To what degree did this "rule" hold? The statistical figure "R-squared" is a measure of this - the "goodness of fit" for the rule: a value of 1.0 indicates the rule holds absolutely (that is, the higher the "turnout," the more/less the candidate's total vote); a figure of 0 indicates there is no correlation. For both Medvedev and Putin, the "goodness of fit" for this rule was very high, about 90% - which any statistician will tell you makes the correlation "highly significant." For the other candidates, there was a slight downward trend (meaning the higher the “turnout”, the lower the total percentage of votes for them), and no statistically significant fit (that is, the percentage of the vote they tended to lose as turnout increased was not related to the amount by which turnout increased). This means that almost all the ballot box stuffing and/or other means of artificially increasing the turnout was done to the benefit Putin/Medvedev.

Title: "Index of Falsification of Elections in Russia, 1991-2008"
Vertical Axis: "Falsification Index" (apparently the highest R-squared observed in regression analyses like those shown in the previous two graphs)
Horizontal Axis: Elections analyzed, starting with the Communist Party elections in the USSR in 1991, followed by all the Presidential and Parliamentary elections that followed, as well as the two Constitutional Referenda of April and December 1993.

Illarionov also presents a third data set, graphed above, which shows an enormous increase in the degree of falsification of elections beginning with the parliamentary elections of 1999. In recent years, the degree of falsification has exceeded even that seen in the final days of the Soviet Union. In July 1998, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as head of the FSB, successor agency to the KGB, and in August 1999 appointed him Acting Prime Minister. Also in 1999, according to Wikipedia, Putin, "while not formally associated with any party, pledged his support to the newly formed Unity Party, which won the second largest percentage of the popular vote (23.32%) in the December 1999 Duma elections, and in turn he was supported by it. Putin appeared to be ideally positioned to win the presidency in elections due the following summer."

r-squared%20analysis%20on%202007%20duma%20elections.jpg

Finally, Illarionov includes a great regression ("R-squared") analysis (shown above) of the Duma elections of December. He shows that falsification in those elections might actually have made a difference, since it gave Putin a constitutional majority, and it was even more blatant than in the presidential elections, with over 30% of the vote falsified in places where turnout exceeded 50%.

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Exposing Vladimir Putin's Potemkin Nation

Filed under: Russia

On March 18th the Refugee Agency of United Nations' High Commissioner on Refugees issued a report entitled "Asylum Levels and Trends in Industrialized Countries."

According to this report (see page 7), the United States leads the world in receiving refugees from other countries -- and Russia is #2 in the world in generating them (see page 10). Russia generated nearly 20% more refugees in 2007 than it had in 2006, and moved up from #4 in the world in the prior year as the result. Russia generates more refugees than China, which reduced its refugee count in 2007 compared to 2006, and is exceeded only by war-torn Iraq in causing people to flee for their lives.

So much for the idea that things are going wonderfully well in Vladimir Putin's Russia! Combine this with the net loss of hundreds of thousands from the population every year due to ill-health and short lifespans and, if things were going any better, the whole country would be completely deserted!

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And Obama said, "Let there be light . . ."

Filed under:

Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where [Barack Obama] wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother "a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, well there's a reaction that's in our experiences that won't go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way."

It's amazing what Obama has to teach us about race. Hear him now. Who would have thought that it is only "white people" who have a "reaction" to seeing unknown people of other races "on the street"? But apparently, it is. Apparently, Obama is able to have miraculously looked into the souls of a majority of the world's white people and found that when they see a black, they have a "reaction" that blacks just don't have when they see a white, Asian or Hispanic person.

We haven't heard yet about the faults of "typical black people," but surely that is coming soon. Surely, Obama doesn't think white people have race-based flaws but not black people, just perhaps different race-based genetic flaws, and we're going to learn all about those as well. Then he'll move on to the Asians, the Hispanics and, invariably, the Jews.

What a wonderful world it will be!

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Russian Protest Babes: Speaking Truth to Power, and Looking Fierce Doing it!

Filed under: Russia

She's Natalya Morar. She's beautiful, glamorous, and identified as a public enemy by Vladimir Putin's craven Kremlin, because she's a journalist who, like Anna Politkovskaya before her, writes critically about Russia's government. Therefore, the Kremlin is terrified of her, and recently has barred her from entering the country, a classic neo-Soviet move.

Read her interview with Grigori Pasko on Robert Amsterdam's blog, as well as Amsterdam's own analysis of her case. Check out her amazing pics after the jump.

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I am Russian Protest Babe, Hear me Roar!

Filed under: Russia

Elizabeta Klepikova, shown above, a member of the Oborona ("Defense") youth political action organization, wrote the following on a Russian blog on March 20th (her screen name is Whitecup and she has her own blog as well, with pink petals for her avatar):

Today I stood alone in front of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russian Federation, holding high my picket banner, calling for the release of jailed Yabloko party leader Maxim Reznick. Hardly had I take my place before I was approached by police officers who demanded my identification. It seems that the sight a lone protester greatly antagonized them.

The name "Yabloko" sounds like the Russian word "apple," which is why Elizabeta is holding the fruit in the photograph.

You probably can guess what happened next, though perhaps the manner in which it occurred you will not suspect. The officers told Elisabeta that she should be careful about standing around alone in that neighborhood as there were all sorts of dangerous characters about. And no sooner had they departed than a crew of young thugs appeared, approached the young lady and tried to rip the sign out of her hands. She fought back, they knocked her to the ground and fled. Meanwhile, not a single member of the "law enforcement agency" she was standing in front of lifted a finger to help her. She approached the nearest policeman and asked to register a complaint, but he refused to take it. She called the police by phone, nobody responded. When she called back, she was accused of illegal picketing, so she walked herself to a nearby hospital to have her injuries treated. The nurse who attended her said: "Nothing will ever be accomplished in this country, certainly not justice."

That is why Oborona exists. That is why I write about them. She is me and I am her. We struggle for Russia's soul as it teeters on the brink of a flaming abyss.

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The Kremlin vs. The Blogosphere

Filed under: Russia

The Kremlin has declared total war on Russia's blogosphere, and right now a blogger is facing criminal prosecution and bankruptcy -- and, get this -- not even for blogging per se, but just for leaving a comment on another person's blog. My latest installment on Pajamas Media has the details of the Kremlin's final assault on the last vestiges of civil society in Russia. Check it out, and please consider leaving a comment in support of this besieged blogger and others like him who are struggling for survival in Russia. Any one of you who has left a comment on this blog, but for the grace of God, could be him.

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As Horror in Tibet Rises, so do Calls for Olympic Boycott

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The atrocities in Tibet are rising by the hour, even to the extent of influencing the elections in Taiwan. So are calls for a boycott of the China Olympic games. Our readers have spoken loud and clear on this issue.

Who needs China? Shall we hold a shadow games for the civilized world to attend, maybe call them the "Tibet Games"?

The Tibet government's official website is here.

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OhmyfreakinbamaGOD! What next?

Filed under: US Elections

This is a real Soviet-style campaign poster for Barack Obama (with the addition of a satirical animated button supplied by a clever Michelle Malkin reader). Scary, isn't it? That is nothing. He's been endorsed by the Black Panther Party. That is nothing. He's bragging about it. That is nothing. He is scheduled to appear on Larry King tonight to discuss . . . his crazy ideas about . . . the war in Iraq. First a speech, then Olberman, then King. Really hard-hitting challenges you're ready to face there, Mr. Obama. Very impressive indeed. Michelle Malkin says what when Obama mentions "change," he means . . change the subject. Stalin was also a big change from Lenin, you know.

Oh . . . my . . . freakin' . . . God.

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George Bush: America's Chamberlain

Filed under: Russia

For those who had been hoping that George Bush would end his seemingly limitless capacity for hideous missteps on Russia policy before his term in office ended and history condemned him to its ashcan, Wednesday's issue of the Moscow Times newspaper came as a blood-curdling wakeup call.

An op-ed column by Leon Aron of the prestigious American Enterprise Institute think tank in Washington DC discussed an event the group held on March 10th at which AEI "hosted a panel discussion with leading members of the opposition in Russia -- Boris Nemtsov; Vladimir Ryzhkov; Oleg Buklemishev, the deputy manager of Mikhail Kasyanov's presidential campaign; and Vladimir Kara-Murza, the manager of Vladimir Bukovsky's presidential bid." Why did AEI do it? Aron writes:

This event was unusual for the AEI, and we decided to hold it because it is becoming increasingly difficult to hear their voices. They are banished from state-controlled television and have been pushed out of national and local politics. In addition, their rallies and demonstrations are routinely prohibited, and when they do protest on the street, they are attacked by riot police and Nashi thugs, who are paid from government funds. Their colleagues are harassed in their homes and on the streets. They are detained on bogus criminal charges, sometimes beaten unconscious and in a few cases thrown into psychiatric wards. Owners of halls and conference centers are afraid of giving them space for meetings and debates, and many advertising agencies refuse to produce their campaign materials. The police break into their headquarters and take away their computers, leaflets and posters, and the Kremlin-friendly courts never rule in their favor. In short, Nemtsov, Ryzhkov, Kasyanov and Bukovsky are becoming more like dissidents in the Soviet sense than a normal opposition force that you would find in Western democracies.

That's to say nothing of other dissident leaders, like Oleg Kozlovsky, who didn't even try to run for president and therefore didn't receive an AEI invitation.

And who is responsible for this outrage of neglect? The Bush administration, and specifically President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was in Moscow this week to meet with Russian counterparts over various policy differences, and the Times reports that she "met some leading liberals on Tuesday but did not see the Kremlin's most strident critics." Apparently, attempting to send a message of openness to negotiation, Rice decided to sacrifice morality and common sense -- just as President Bush has repeatedly done throughout his presidency where Russia is concerned. The Times explains:

Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates met for about an hour at the U.S. ambassador's Spaso House residence with six public figures: Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky; former State Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov; Vladimir Milovidov, a former deputy energy minister turned Kremlin critic; Carnegie Moscow Center deputy head Dmitry Trenin; Olga Dergunova, VTB board member and former head of Microsoft Russia; and Newsweek Russia columnist Mikhail Fishman. Noticeably absent were former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, former chess champion Garry Kasparov and Union of Right Forces leader Nikita Belykh.

It's one thing (but, make no mistake, it's outrageous) for Rice to neglect Kasparov, AEI didn't include him either (he probably deserves a wakeup call for the disgraceful manner in which he folded his tent at the first sign of Kremlin opposition to his presidential campaign), and Belykh is largely unknown in the West. But for Rice to exclude anyone from Kasyanov's campaign while the former prime minister cools his heels facing a criminal indictment launched by the Kremlin to block his presidential candidacy is the final nail in the Bush administration's Russia coffin. And what about Kozlovsky? Ms. Rice, how dare you exclude this brilliant and courageous young leader who has just fought his way out of illegal military internment? How can America expect Russia to meet it halfway on democracy if you don't even have the courage to stand up for those who are risking all to do so?

In the lead-up to the Rice visit, Bush apparently send some kind of letter to his good pal Pooty-Poot, a letter whose contents the White House has not seen fit to release. The Times reports that upon reading it, Putin was suddenly in a "good mood" and announcing: "It's a serious document and we analyzed it carefully. If we manage to agree on its main provisions, we will be able to say that our dialogue is progressing successfully."

Hitler probably said the same thing about secret love notes he received from Chamberlain.

And in the end, what came of all this back-stabbing? Russia still spurned the U.S. defensive missile system for Europe, and Rice left Moscow empty-handed. Nice job, Mr. President & Madam Secretary. A nation turns its lonely eyes away in shame.

What the world needs from America is leadership in the new cold war, and what it gets is betrayal. What the world needs from America is Bush out, McCain in, and it can't happen soon enough for me.

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Pasko Reveals the Horror of Medvedev's Russia

Filed under: Russia

I've been saying all along that new Russian "president" Dimitri Medvedev is the perfect cover (and fall guy) for a massive crackdown on human rights. It'll be harder for the West to sink its teeth into him since he's not KGB like Putin, and Putin can stay all nice and "clean" while Medvedev does the dirty work of finally wiping out the last traces of civil society in Russia, the ones that won't go down without a fight.

Now, heroic Russian journalist Grigori Pasko reports the horrifying details, on Robert Amsterdam's blog. Check it out!

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Sergei Lavrov: Card-Carrying Lunatic

Filed under: Russia

I'm willing to bet a lot of green money that many of you will not believe this.

Even though I link to it, and even though RIA Novosti is basically a Russian government-controlled wire service, you'll still say this must be some kind of early April Fool's joke.

But it isn't. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (that's him scowling above) declared on Tuesday to state-owned official Kremlin newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper that independence for Kosovo had "already reverberated in many regions" and concluded "you can see what is happening in China's autonomous region of Tibet, how the separatists there are acting, there are grounds to presume that this is not occurring by chance."

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Lavrov is blaming the bloody massacre in Tibet by the Chinese maniacs on the Western decision to recognize Kosovo (which decision Russia just happened to vehemently oppose, but that's just coincidence of course) rather than to force it to remain under the Serbian jackboot, facing mass murder (Serbia being Russia's "little Slavic brother"). How does he know? He has secret reasons, he can't tell you what they are but, trust him, they're pretty convincing.

If only the West hadn't recognized Kosovo, people wouldn't now be losing their lives in Tibet. Sound psychedelic? Sound familiar? Sound like the kind of "thinking" that motivated the USSR right into an early grave? Wonder what they might be smoking in the Kremlin, and how you might get yourself some?

Chinese political scientist Liu Junnin didn't blame Kosovo (it would be quite interesting to conduct a little survey in Tibet and find out how many locals have ever heard of the place). Instead he told the New York Times: "Why did the unrest take off? I think it has something to do with the long-term policy failure of the central authorities. They failed to earn the respect of the people there."

If anyone told rabid Russian nationalist Lavrov that the only reason the Bolshevik revolution occurred was that Russians were watching America, he'd probably bite off that person's head and drink his blood. Yet, when another country is at issue, they are all mindless sheep with no minds or hearts of their own, and their own history means nothing. This is neo-Soviet Russia at its very lowest ebb.

The dominoes Lavrov really should be talking about are the Olympic dominoes. Why shouldn't China think it has a free hand in Tibet to wreck mass murder on the population, if the world has been duped into allowing China to host the Olympic games as if it were a civilized state? And why shouldn't Russia think the same, since it too has been granted an Olympics? In our current poll, our readers are voting overwhelmingly to boycott the China games. The world still has time to back out of the games to be held in 2014 in Sochi. Otherwise, it will allow these cruel and dangerous regimes to use the Olympics as Hitler did, to erect a Potemkin shield of legitimacy and the cost of endless domestic suffering, to the permanent disgrace of the games.

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