At the (Beginning) of the Day

Yeah, I slacked off, there were no "At the End of the Day" posts the past two evenings. Strannix has a new girlfriend. This was Valentine's Weekend. If I must say more, then Strannix weeps for you.

• Florida: still America's wang.

There's a new option (maybe a compromise?) in the works when it comes to Florida's controversial science standards.

The Florida Department of Education is working up a second option for the State Board of Education to consider that would insert the phrase "the scientific theory of" before the word evolution and in other "appropriate places throughout the standards," according to Tom Butler, department spokesman.

The phrase would also appear in front of Big Bang and and plate tectonics, for example.

This is in response to "the input we've received from the public," he said.

(Calm down, Sunshine Staters: I reserve the right that rag on all states, at any given moment; I just hadn't had the chance to use the word "wang" in a post for much too long).

• Vlad, the Name-Caller.

"At a minimum, a head of state should have a head," Putin said.

Snap! Whaddaya call "the dozens" in Russian?

• Some days, it just ain't worth chewing through the restraints.

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

• I'm spending most of mine on hookers & beer; I'll probably just waste the rest.

President Bush on Wednesday signed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, calling it a "booster shot" for the American economy.

The government hopes the measure, which will send most Americans tax rebate checks by May, will either prevent a recession or make one relatively brief.

My last booster shot gave me a hella rash. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the hookers. I'm out.

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Russia moves to consolidate power in Europe

Map of the North Stream Gas Pipeline
With the $5.7 Billion, 1200-kilometer North Stream Gas Pipeline which will connect Russia and Germany virtually a done deal, and construction underway, Vladimir Putin has turned his attention to consolidating Russian power and influence, and snaking Russian tentacles farther into Europe. As you can see from the broken line on the map, there are designs on extending the North Stream pipeline all the way to Britain.

But what is an autocrat to do?

[Keep reading to find out...]

Simple, really. First, you just ignore the fact that Europe is trying to reduce dependence on Russian energy commodities and build another pipeline! Call it South Stream, and have it snake throughout Europe from it's European point of origin in Bulgaria. In the Bulgarian capitol Sofia for a two-day state visit, Putin was unable to resist turning the screws just a bit, and writing in an editorial "Projects like South Stream are in the long-term national interests of Russia and those of our European partners."

Putin has again thrown a wrench in the system. In Sofia on Friday and Saturday, he secured Bulgarian agreement for a new pipeline to cross the country on its way further into Europe. The project is called South Stream, and it's in direct competition with the EU joint project known as Nabucco. The pipeline named after a Giuseppe Verdi's opera connects Europe directly to the sources of gas in the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia -- and the idea was to circumvent Russia altogether.

Europeans, though, have had problems realizing their $5 billion project. So far, Nabucco exists only on paper. And it's still unclear where the gas for the pipeline would come from. There is an agreement with Azerbaijan, but experts doubt that sources there are sufficient to supply the massive project.

Other Central Asian countries rich in natural-gas, like Turkmenistan, have been traditionally within the sphere of Russian influence. Iran could jump in with its gas reserves to fill the gap, but cooperation with the Mullah's regime has run into political obstacles.

Russia, on the other hand, doesn't have any of those shortcomings to deal with. They have plenty of money, and hydrocarbon resources out the wazoo. And they have pulled out all the stops to advance their self-interest - and influence - in Europe. last June, Gazprom and the Italian energy concern Eni inked a deal for the construction of a 900-kilometer pipeline that would go under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. But that is just for starters. The next step of the project stipulates that the South Stream project shall continue through Italy, Austria and Hungary.

"I think Russia will succeed in securely anchoring South Stream in the European Union. We're dealing with a type of energy foreign policy here and the West has been dozing. But the Russians have a plan and they have the gas and plenty of money," said Alexander Rahr of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

Nabucco and South Stream are in a race, and time is of the essence. Unfortunately for Nabucco, the Russians are a step ahead. If South Stream comes on line, it will deliver about 30 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe.

Putin also wants the project to advance because it affords a way for him to circumvent traditional transit countries like Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. "The Ukrainian corridor is not secure," says Victor Gavrilov of Russia's Gubkin Academy of Oil and Gas. A conflict with Ukraine in early 2006, in which Russia turned off the taps and cut off the gas to the Ukraine because the countries could not agree on a higher natural gas price underscored the instability. Kiev responded by tapping into Russian transit pipes crossing its territory, illegally siphoning off gas intended for Western Europe. "But our customers in the West blamed us," Gavrilov says, explaining the official Russian view.

Rahr, assessing the growing European need for natural gas, says, "I think that both pipelines can, and actually need, to coexist." In other words - the construction of South Stream wouldn't necessarily spell the inevitable doom of Nabucco.

But Europe could just forget about reducing their dependence on Russian gas.

There's more: "Russia moves to consolidate power in Europe" >>

TIME picks Putin

TIME managing editor Richard Stengel just couldn't bring himself to pick runner-up Al Gore -- "the kind of leader these times require" -- or TIME readers' No. 1 online poll favorite, J.K. Rowling. When it came down to the decision, TIME selected Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year 2007.

Part of TIME's reasoning:

It is ultimately about leadership—bold, earth-changing leadership. Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech. He stands, above all, for stability—stability before freedom, stability before choice...

I'm sure Stengel's final answer pleases Pootie Poot's psychic friends connection at the Bush WH.

[That's all. No more after the break.]

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I wonder if George saw a hint of this when he looked into Pootie-Poot's soul?

The Bush administration lost a big one on Monday when Russia announced that it had delivered a shipment of nuclear fuel rods to Iran to be used in a reactor that is to be used for power generation. Russia stressed that the fuel rods are in Iran, but will be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , the United Nations agency that monitors nuclear material across the globe.

Back in Washington, aWol nearly strained something as he struggled mightily to construct a sentence and make a comment that wouldn't do any further damage to the fragile relationship the United States currently has with Russia. He managed to not only tamp down his urge to criticize, but also to offer something along the lines of praise...“If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich,” President Bush said Monday. “If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there’s no need for them to learn how to enrich.”

The timing could not have been worse. Just two weeks ago, the intelligence shops released their NIE that revealed that the Iranians stopped their weapons program in 2003. That NIE cut the legs from under aWol and Cheney, and has dampened the call for war with Iran.

Even thought the administration has moved to keep the pressure on the Iranian government, the release of the NIE has served to embolden Iran, and it has made it highly unlikely that China and Russia will be on board for the next round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council.

The delivery of the fuel rods to the Iranian facility will certainly embolden them further.

As for Bush administration officials, their public comments were one thing, and their private comments were another thing entirely. “There is no doubt that Russia and the rest of the world want to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” was the public comment made by White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe. “And today’s announcement provides one more avenue for the Iranians to make a strategic choice to suspend enrichment.”

In private, however, they lamented the fact that the Russians didn't stall on the delivery, and project an image of a united front that was hanging together and toeing a hard line. “We for many years tried to stop it, and for the last year we’ve known there was no way to stop it, and that it was coming, and we held our breath on the timing,” a senior administration official said.

All that breath-holding was for naught.

Two weeks ago, Russia alerted the Bush administration that the details had been worked out, including the placement of safeguards that would allow for greater international inspections at Bushehr, and that the shipment would proceed.

The U.S. had already agreed, in principle, that Russia could provide the fuel rods, so long as safeguards were in place to handle the spent fuel. With that position clarified, there was no choice for the U.S. to make - the Bush administration had to accept that they had no grounds to keep pressuring Russia to delay the shipment.

So the shipment went forward. Now the question remains - was it purely economics? Or was there a subtle, hidden message? Is this muscle flexing by Russia routine, or something that we should be concerned about?

I'm gonna hazard a guess, and say it's probably the latter.

Heckuva job, there, George. Heckuva job.

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Sure Would Be Nice to Have a State Department Right Now

--By Pale Rider

If you lived through the time when we faced the Soviet bear--and it seems like a lifetime ago, I know--then when you see stories like this, it should make your blood boil:

MOSCOW - Former chess champion Garry Kasparov was convicted of leading an opposition protest and sentenced to five days in jail by a Moscow court Saturday.

Kasparov and dozens of other demonstrators were detained hours earlier after riot police clashed with Kremlin opponents following a protest rally that drew several thousand people.
The former chess champion was forced to the ground and beaten, his assistant Marina Litvinovich said in a telephone interview from outside the police station where Kasparov was held."What you've heard is all lies," Kasparov said after the sentence was read. "The testimony is contradictory. There was not a single word of truth."

Two riot police testified in court that they had been given direct orders before the rally to arrest Kasparov, one of President Vladimir Putin's harshest critics. One of the policemen acknowledged that the two reports he had filed were contradictory.

Kasparov was charged with organizing an unsanctioned procession "of at least 1,500 people directed against President Vladimir Putin," of chanting anti-government slogans and of resisting arrest.

It sure would be nice to have a goddamned State Department right now, wouldn't it? Because we need a tough legion of diplomats to start going after the Putin regime on all fronts, in all areas, and in every way possible. We need to start squeezing them and engaging them and putting them in check, pun intended.

Unfortunately, we have a "Soviet" expert who has never gotten one thing right about Russia. We have Secretary Rice, shoe-shopping expert and blame shifting expert. Besides shoes and ducking responsibility for her inept management of the State Department, what is she good at? Piano? Sycophantic statements?

We have a serious problem brewing in Russia--who will succeed Putin? What will Russia continue to morph into?

Kasparov warned the world about Russia earlier this year when he told CBS News:

"We're facing a very dangerous regime that is threatening not only the future of my country but the stability of the whole world," Kasparov says.

And:

"I would probably say that Putin doesn't run the country, he runs a corporation. Call it KGB Incorporated," Kasparov says. "He is working on behalf of the ruling elite that wants to benefit from looting the country."

So--again. What the fuck? Why do we continue to see nothing but incompetence from our State Department? Why are they not seriously engaged on this issue? Why have we not recalled our ambassador or done something-anything-to respond to this type of incident?

People say that if a Democrat is elected next year, that Ambassador Holbrooke will be the next Secretary of State, and that, somehow, that's a bad thing. Well, Holbrooke's worst day as Secretary of State will be better by a mile than Rice's best day.

Crossposted from Blue Girl, Red State

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Losing the Cold War after the fact

Image courtesy McClatchy - click to enlarge

Not content with mismanaging a war and an occupation to the point that America stands to end up with not just one, but two hash-marks in the "L" column, the chump in charge has reached back into the recesses of time and managed to give it a go at reversing the outcome of the freakin’ Cold War, too.

Seriously – didn't anyone else cringe when the Connecticut cowboy was selected by the Supremes to parry with Putin? I sure as hell did. Panic at the prospect of the little idiot in negotiations with Russia was one of my first reactions.

C’mon – on the one hand you have a moronic, coke-addled, intellectually incurious, sociopathic, amoral, inept and hapless doofus who failed upwards his whole life…and on the other a former KGB case officer – decisive, derisive, stridently nationalistic, cold, calculating and competent. There was simply no way in hell this was going to work out well for United States interests, but not enough of us “got it” and of those of us who did, not enough were speaking up; so those of us who did voice our concerns were viewed askance, like we needed a shiny jacket to go with our pretty tinfoil hats.

When the affable moron met the spy in Slovenia in the summer of 2001, and claimed he had “looked into his soul” and saw a good guy, I guffawed, and the mockery in my household was overt and palpable. The entire family got weeks of mileage out of “looking into souls.” Our oldest was leaving for college that summer, and we looked into the soul of the laptop salesman, the residence hall coordinator, the university bookstore clerk, the financial aid officer that administered his scholarship…pretty much everyone we came in contact with for weeks got a good soul-peering.

We aren’t laughing any more, though, because the fallout of aWol’s inept foreign policy is no laughing matter.

[keep reading]

Bush and his circle of bubble-supporting yes-men, lackeys and corporate good-ole-boy cronies grossly misjudged the Russian leader, just blithely assuming he was “a good guy” and “one of us.” (In their jingoistic worldview, it is just assumed that everyone wants to be “like us” or they simply aren’t worth bothering with). The ethnocentric, swaggering, bloviating asshats just couldn’t see it coming, but our emic was bound to crash into theirs.

It did, and the results of this prolonged foreign policy train wreck have been painful to watch, especially for those with an awareness and understanding of the historical relationship between the two superpowers. In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, there was unprecedented cooperation between the two nations. The Russians shared intelligence, and the U.S. government turned a blind eye to the dirty war raging in Chechnya.

Now, there is not even a pretext of cooperation and common goals.

Secretary of State Rice and Secretary of Defense Gates (two so-called “experts” on the former Soviet Union, both of whom failed to read the handwriting on that crumbling wall) went to Moscow to meet with the Russian president last week.

First Putin kept them waiting for over a half hour. Then he openly mocked their mission in front of the press and the T.V. cameras.

On Saturday, Defense Secretary Gates said that he isn’t sure Russia is even interested in cooperating with the United States to defend Europe against Iranian missiles or whether Moscow “simply wants to stop the U.S. from building missile defenses in Eastern Europe.” (emphasis mine).

Gates, speaking with reporters on his trip home, showed us some of that prescience he is famous for (remember, he was the CIA’s expert who insisted the Soviet Union was reemerging as it was crumbling) saying he believes Russia is reasserting it’s presence on the world stage. "I think President Putin is coming back and saying you know you have to take us into account on all these things. In essence: 'We are back. We've got a lot of money. And we are a key player.' " Then he quickly added "I'm putting words into his mouth. He didn't say these things. This is my interpretation of perhaps his thinking: 'And you will need our help to solve problems. And if you won't seek our help, we can prevent problems from being solved,' " Gates said.

Of course Russia is reasserting dominance and flexing muscles, and has been for some time! I dunno about the SecDef, but I have been paying attention. In April, it went largely unnoticed when it became official Russian policy to refer to the United States in an adversarial manner in official reports and press releases. In May, they tested a new MRV-ICBM. In July, they laid claim to the North Pole, an International Zone. In August, their pilots started buzzing Guam for the first time since the cold war. In October, the Russian President mocked and humiliated two cabinet secretaries.

And I haven’t even brought up the energy issue. Not directly, anyway. But that is what it all boils down too. Russia has Energy, the west needs that energy, and Russia is not a country we can just invade, commence “kickin’ ass” and take it away from.

This administration has destroyed American credibility, negotiating power and economic stature. A solid victory in the Cold War, after a half-century of ideological brinksmanship and reams of hard-fought treaties, has been cast aside.

If there is one person on the face of the earth who is more pleased than Osama bin Laden to see the United States mired down in Iraq, bleeding away blood and treasure, and destroying the finest Army the world has even seen, it is Vladimir Putin.

What scares me even more than the damage that will be done to this country by another year of fighting in Iraq is the long-range damage being done to our foreign policy by another year of Bush incompetence. The destruction of the relationship with Russia is arguably the greatest threat to long-range security that the United States will face for the next 50-100 years.

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Ras-Putin outthinks Shrub on missile defense

Russian President Vladimir Putin, aka Vlad the Incarcerator (or Vlad the Polonium Poisoner, take your pick) today countered President Bush’s proposal to site a U.S. missile system in Eastern Europe with an almost grand-slam bridge play:

Russian President Vladimir Putin told President Bush Thursday that he would drop his objections to a U.S. missile defense system if Washington substantially altered current plans to base it entirely in Europe and instead involved Russia through a Soviet-era radar system in the central Asian nation of Azerbaijan.

....Putin said he spoke yesterday with the president of Azerbaijan, who agreed to host elements of a missile defense system there to protect all of Europe. If this is accepted, he said, he would have no need to carry out his threat to retarget Russian missiles or place offensive units along the country's European borders.

Why do I characterize this as “almost grand slam”?

Basically, because Putin shows he's got more smarts and mojo in working the internationalPR angles on this issue.

Bush has to either put up or shut up as to the actual targets of this system AND as to whether he really wants to be a multilateralist in the so-called “global war on terror.”

Plus, if Shrub WOULD bite on this, building it in Azerbaijan lets Ras-Putin outflank Chechnya, Georgia, et al on the southern flank and expand Russian hegemony.

Thank doorknobs Ras-Putin is not OUR president; he would run fricking circles around both parties in Congress.

Cross-posted at Socratic Gadfly.

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Chilling Relations With Russia

While everyone is focused on the Middle East, we have a much graver problem brewing, if you can get your head around that concept. The cold war may be over, and we may not be calling them Soviets anymore, but the Kremlin never really went away, it just morphed. The brief honeymoon is over and the adversarial relationship with Russia is back, and possibly more nefarious, as it is no longer encumbered by communism.

America’s stubborn insistence on pushing forward with the deployment of a missile defense system (that hasn’t really been successful in testing) has prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to announce a suspension of Russia's obligations under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty

The latest Russian press report, which ran last Sunday the New York Times was disturbing, but underappreciated. It is now official policy that news reports portray the United States as an enemy. The folks who perfected propaganda are cranking up their own Wurlitzer – and theirs is bigger than ours. Their noise machine puts anything we can come up with on either side of the political divide to shame.

Putin leaves office in just over ten months. He is casting the mold for US Russian relations for the next twenty years, and it is looking like we are in for a Big Chill. The dynamic isn’t there for a Cold War Redux, but there is a very real adversarial threat, and I fear we aren’t ready for it because the Mess in Mesopotamia has degraded our military to the point we aren’t able to respond.

Frankly, I am feeling like we have been had. I’m not mad at the Russians for taking advantage of a mendacious administration staffed by Mayberry Machiavellis. I’m mad at the Mayberry Machiavellis for being worthless to us, and useful idiots to our real adversaries.

Remember this – Gates and Rice were spectacularly wrong about the Soviet Union in its final days. They have a perfect track record of wrong where Soviets/Russians are concerned. And Condi is cocking it up again, in real-time.

The furor erupting is over a missile defense system that the US wants to place in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly to protect from a missile attack by Iran. Condi dismisses the Russian concerns out-of-hand, with "The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous and everybody knows it," Rice told a news conference in Oslo. (Pretty breezy comment from a diplomat, doncha think?)

To the Russians it isn’t a matter of being able to overwhelm the system, it is about a series of broken promises and violations of good-faith agreements. The deal was, NATO was not supposed to expand into former Soviet Republics or place bases in former Warsaw Pact countries. Both things happen. The Russians see NATO bases on their borders as a threat. (Kinda like we would if they put a bomber wing in Ontario.)

Funny, I don’t hear any chickenhawks saying we ought to be bombing the piss out of Moscow for not seeing things our way. Do you? (Note that there has been uttered not a peep from Kristol or Kagan here, where a real threat exists. Doesn't it make you wonder why?)

[Cross-posted from Blue Girl, Red State]

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