August 18, 2010 — Contents

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 18 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Putin’s Russia goes up in Flames

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Putin’s Failure in Georgia

(3)  EDITORIAL: The Lying Jackass blogging at “A Good Treaty”

(4)  Kiselyov on the Wildfires

(5)  Exposing Russia’s Fraudulent Inflation Data

NOTE: If you are in the New York City area, you can catch the Russian film “My Perestroika” at the IFC Center this week.

NOTE:  The latest WordPress innovation is a Twitter button at the bottom of each one of our posts. If you Twitter, you can click the button and help publicize our content across the blogosphere, and stand up for democracy and human rights in Russia.  Also note that now if you hover your cursor over one of our links, you’ll see a preview of the page you’ll visit if you click.

EDITORIAL: Putin’s Russia goes up in Flames

Love, Putin style. Courtesy of RIA Novosti.

EDITORIAL

Putin’s Russia goes up in Flames

We’ve been saying since April 2006 when we started publishing this blog that Putin’s Russia would go up in flames.

But we never thought it would happen this fast, or this literally or relentlessly.

Putin has been unmasked in a truly spectacular and emphatic manner, before the eyes of a slack-jawed world.

EDITORIAL: Russian Failure in Georgia

EDITORIAL

Russian Failure in Georgia

“The invasion proved the limits of Russian power. They couldn’t take over our country or remove our government. And . . . [t]hey’ve failed to drag us into their sphere of influence. Yes, they’ve occupied strategic terrain and purged our citizens but, soon, it’s the very people the Russians supposedly saved who will feel occupied by them. Many already do. Russian subsidies don’t reach the general population any more than they do in Russia.”

–Georgian cabinet minister Temuri Iakobashvili, to the Wall Street Journal, on the Russian invasion of his country

Georgia is coming back stronger and better than ever following Russia’s wanton invasion against it.  Russia failed to achieve regime change, failed to obtain international recognition, and was condemned for egregious violations of international law by both the European Union and the United Nations.  World leaders rushed to the side of besieged Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, snubbing Russia openly, and only weeks ago the U.S. Secretary of State referred openly to Russian “occupation” of South Ossetia (an artificial state created by Stalin) and Abkhazia (a state that received absolutely no hint of Georgian fire before it was brazenly invaded by Russian forces).  Even more recently, a report on terrorism praised Georgia and infuriated the Russians.    Russia is reminded of its total diplomatic failure in Georgia, in other words, on a daily basis.  And the heinous Russian aggression has even driven a wedge between Russia and its Slavic little brother, Belarus.

And that’s only the beginning of Russia’s troubles in the region.

EDITORIAL: An Idiotic, Lying Jackass is blogging at “A Good Treaty”

EDITORIAL

An Idiotic, Lying Jackass is blogging at “A Good Treaty“

A new Russia blog has appeared by the name of “A Good Treaty.” Its purpose is to offer one-sided propaganda in support of the notion that Barack Obama’s sham treaty on nuclear weapons with Russia is a good idea and should be ratified as the U.S. Senate considers the document.  Is the blogger on the Obama payroll? Or the Kremlin’s? Or both?  You be the judge.  Let us introduce you to it.

First of all, it’s beloved by the Russophile maggots, of course.  Interestingly, not one of them chooses to make the criticism of “A Good Treaty” that they level at us, namely that some of us are anonymous. It’s just fine with the Russophile scum that AGT is anonymous, because it’s only a bad thing to be anonymous if you criticize the Putin regime. If you work hard to justify it, and the Obama administration’s appeasement of it, then nothing else matters. Got that?

Second of all, the blogger who writes AGT is stunningly lazy, dishonest and stupid, even by Russophile standards.  In a post on the vast expansion of the KGB’s power to arrest and harass, the blogger claims the new law is no worse than America’s Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of 9/11.  It appears, based on this pseudo-scholarship, that the blogger got the degree he lauds on his blog (but that nobody, of course, can confirm) from a box of Cracker Jacks.

Needless to say, s/he ignores an avalanche of facts:

Kiselyov on the Wildfires

Dissident pundit-in-chief Yevgeny Kiselyov, writing in the Moscow Times:

Yevgeny Kiselyov

Despite the cheery promises of the authorities, it seems that the wildfires that have caused a real environmental catastrophe will not end for at least another three weeks — that is if you believe the U.S. State Department’s warning to Americans to think twice about traveling to Russia before Sept. 5. Perhaps the warning stems from the fact that the State Department — in contrast to senior Russian officials like chief public doctor Gennady Onishchenko and members of the state meteorological service — is accustomed to behaving more responsibly toward citizens.

Exposing Russia’s Fraudulent Inflation Data

Paul Goble reports:

As a result of fires and drought, this year’s grain harvest in the Russian Federation will be much smaller than normal, a development that has prompted Moscow to impose an embargo on grain exports, pushed prices for bread upwards even in the Russian capital, and sparked fears that the country faces hunger.

Such fears have no objective basis, President Dmitry Medvedev said, suggesting that recent rises in prices for bread – up 10 to 15 percent in some stores – reflected the fact that “the market sometimes behaves according to its own laws” and “psychopathic scenarios arise.”

In an interview published in Svobodnaya Pressa, Yevgeny Gontmakher, the deputy director of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, comments that “of course, there will not be hunger in Russia,” but he adds that does not mean the current situation will not have some serious negative consequences.