August 19, 2011 — Contents

FRIDAY AUGUST 19 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  Sacrilege at Seliger

(2)  EDITORIAL:  No to WTO

(3)  EDITORIAL:  Putin Spits on Russia

(4)  EDITORIAL:  Oops! Ouch!

(5)  Ostrich Putin

(6)  One Picture is Worth a Thousand Screams

NOTE:  LR founder and publisher Kim Zigfeld’s latest piece on the powerful and influential American Thinker blog examines the latest love fest between the American-hating dictator of Cuba and the equally America-loathing dictator of Russia. 

NOTE:   Leading opposition activist Vladimir Milov has married a hottie.

EDITORIAL: Sacrilege at Seliger

EDITORIAL

Sacrilege at Seliger

Vladmir Putin is no stranger to hypocrisy. For example, though calling the USA a “parasite” whose economy is not based on productivity and which therefore is unreliable and harmful, under Putin Russian investment in the US economy has increased by a stunning one thousand six hundred percent.

Putin deals with hypocrisy of this kind they way Soviet rulers like him always have: He lies to his people, seeking to cultivate a nation of thoughtless automatons who can do nothing but worship at his feet.  It all begin with the youngest, at summer camp, the way it always did in the USSR.

In the photo above, two participants in the Kremlin’s Hitler-Jugend variant, Camp Seliger (one with a bra with eyes drawn on the outside of her t-shirt) walk past a billboard showing the faces of Dmitri Medvedev and Vladimir Putin weirdly fused into a single person, with the explanation “they are interchangeable.”

Elsewhere at the installation, campers walk by a row of photographs of Garry Kasparov, Mikhail Kasyanov, Boris Nemtsov, Eduard Limonov and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, under the banner:  “Losers of the Year.”

EDITORIAL: Russia in the WTO? Just say NO!

EDITORIAL

Russia in the WTO? Just say NO!

Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was another of Yeltsin’s ideas – and with much the same purpose. If implemented, that idea would make Russia dependent on imports of foodstuffs and just about everything else the exporting countries would like to sell against their Russian rivals, after the latter were to give up their competitive price advantages, such as cheap energy, cheap land, cheap transportation, cheap fertilizer, etc. So, if Russia were a democracy, the WTO terms of accession for Russia – now 18 years in the negotiation – wouldn’t have a chance of acceptance.

We are not shy about saying that we want to see Vladimir Putin’s police state in Russia utterly destroyed.  Nor do we disagree with the brilliant John Helmer’s analysis, quoted above, which concludes that admission to the WTO would be extremely harmful, if not a fatal toxin, to the Putin regime.  But we still vehemently oppose Russian admission.

EDITORIAL: Putin Spits on Russia

EDITORIAL

Putin Spits on Russia

The most outrageous and repulsive feature of the USSR was its brazen, naked contempt for its own citizens. It tortured and murdered them with reckless abandon and it lied to them as if they were idiotic children.  Proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin, a decrepit relic of the USSR, is continuing that tradition with relish.

EDITORIAL: Oops!!! Ouch!!!

EDITORIAL

Oops!!!  Ouch!!!

Oops!!!  Oops II!!!

Ouch!!! 

Nuff said.

Putin Fails, then Sticks Head in Sand

Pavel Baev, writing on the Jamestown Foundation website:

The volatile turbulence that battered the world economy last week should have passed Russia by, but it did not. Indeed, Russia is not burdened by a massive debt, is spared political feuds about budget cuts and is not even exposed to the looming Greek default; nevertheless, its stock exchange fell deeper than most. The Dow Jones index, for that matter, opens this Monday on about the same level where it was a week ago, while the RTS slipped from the plateau of about 11,600 to a low of 9,600 and barely bounced to 9,900 on Friday (Kommersant, August 13). Certainly, the speculative games are only a symptom, and not necessarily a reliable one, of the real economic trends, but statistics suggest that Russia’s economic growth slowed down in the second quarter, and experts argue that the country is entering into the new phase of turmoil, for which it is not any better prepared than it was in mid-2008 (www.newsru.com, August 10; Nezavisimaya Gazeta, August 12).

One Photo is Worth a Thousand Screams

A Ukrainian Gestapo goon pulls down the pants of a helpless FEMEN protester for a little peek at her anatomy while dragging her down from the roof of a vehicle as she heroically protested the clearly illegal prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko in Kiev last week.