December 10, 2010 — Contents

FRIDAY DECEMBER 10 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Obama the Traitor

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Putin the Bastard

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Medvedev the Cipher

(4)  Crime unabated under Putin

(5)  Medvedev means Failure for Russia

(6)  Litvinovich Speaks

(7)  The Misery that is Russian Womanhood

NOTE:  LR publisher and founder Kim Zigfeld’s latest installment on the mighty Pajamas Media mega blog details the horror of a reignited Chechnya conflagration and the shameful silence of the Obama regime.

NOTE:  Yet another utterly humiliating failure for Russia in space.

NOTE:  Russians and winter produce rather unusual behavior.

EDITORIAL: Barack Obama, Traitor and Coward!

EDITORIAL

Barack Obama, Traitor and Coward!

Recently, two Russians have boldly and directly challenged the treacherous cowardice of U.S. President Barack Obama in regard to his foreign policy towards Russia.  We invite all Americans to do likewise.

EDITORIAL: Putin the Rat Bastard

EDITORIAL

Putin the Rat Bastard

Vladimir Putin appeared on American TV last week, specifically on CNN’s Larry King show, and openly threatened the people of the United States.  If they dare to try to protect the people of Europe with defensive missile technology, Putin said, then Russia “will be simply obliged to protect its own safety by different means.”

EDITORIAL: Medvedevy the No-Man

EDITORIAL

Medvedevy the No-Man

The speech is so linguistically tentative, it’s like listening to an excruciatingly polite adjunct professor who is unsure of his material and scared his students don’t like him.

Ouch.

That was Moscow Times linguistic expert Michele Berdy on the most recent state-of-the-union speech by Russian “president” Dima Medvedev, the man the Wikileaks diplomatic leak documents refer to as “Robin” to Vladimir Putin’s “Batman.”

Nikolai Petrov of the Carnegie Center was even more brutal in his condemnation of the speech.

Under Putin, Crime and Corruption Unabated

A brilliant editorial from Vedemosti, translated by the Moscow Times:

The phrase “the wild ’90s” was coined by then-President Vladimir Putin in 2007, on the eve of parliamentary and presidential elections. At the time, the Kremlin’s political strategists were trying to distance the administration from the turbulent period under former President Boris Yeltsin. But will the 2000s also be remembered as wild? And if so, who will be distancing themselves from whom?

Medvedev means only Endless Failure for Russia

Hero journalist Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

It must be nice to be president. Could you imagine if every half hour Ekho Moskvy radio announced, instead of the news: “Tomorrow at this time you’ll be able to hear the news on this station. We’ve set a goal and a plan: to provide you the news. It’ll be incredible. Amazing. Fantastic. The world’s best. And, don’t forget, tomorrow. We promise.” How long could that continue before everyone stopped listening to Ekho Moskvy?

But President Dmitry Medvedev continually promises to start working and never does. Not only does everybody listen to him, they even deem his statements worth discussing.

Maria Litvinovich Speaks

The heroic Russian activist Marina Litvinovich

One of our favorite Russia blogs, Global Voices, interviews one of our favorite bloggers, the epic Russian patriot Marina Litvinovich:

Marina Litvinovich is a blogger, civic rights and human rights activist. After a career in political consulting, an investigation of the Beslan hostage crisis, and participation in the liberal opposition movement, Marina has become one of the most influential activist bloggers in Russia. In this interview Marina shares her thoughts on her own blogging, as well as how the internet might affect deeper social and political changes in Russia.

Her blog has played a significant role in launching independent investigations, in cases such as the “Lukoil” car crash case as well as the “Live Barrier” case. Recently, Litvinovich launched “Best Today”, a web-aggregator that monitors the Russian blogosphere. You can read more about her background here and here.

The Misery that is Russian Womanhood

Julia Ioffe, writing on Slate:

One evening in Moscow, Tanya (not her real name) found herself at a dinner table with a group of friends, most of them married couples. One of the men started to tell a story about the coda to a recent guys’ night out. He’d stumbled home the next morning to his wife and two children—a 2-year-old and an infant—to find that he’d forgotten his underwear. Everyone at the dinner table, including the man’s wife, laughed at the story: the hijinks!

Wandering spouses have become a common trope for the women of Moscow. “Men’s environment here pushes them towards cheating,” Tanya told me, adding that, these days, a boys’ night out in Russia often involves prostitutes. Tanya and her friends are young, educated, upper-middle-class Muscovites, but talk to any woman in Moscow, and, regardless of age, education, or income level, she’ll have a story of anything from petty infidelity to a parallel family that has existed for decades. Infidelity in Moscow has become “a way of life,” as another friend of mine put it—accepted and even expected.