Monthly Archives: June 2007

I’m going out of town for a few days. Posts will resume on Tuesday. A message to my merry cohort of frequent commentators: Play amongst yourselves. Just try to play nice.

Presidents Bush and Putin are set to meet this Sunday at the former’s family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush’s camp has already announced that it has low expectations for the meeting especially on such issues as cooperation on missile defense and Kosovo independence. “I would caution against expecting grand new announcements,” cautioned White House press secretary Tony Snow. “This is, in fact, an opportunity for two leaders to talk honestly and candidly with one another.”

It appears that the global public feels the same. In anticipation for the summit, Pew Research Center did an extensive poll on global attitudes toward each president and other global powers. As the report states:

A 47-nation survey finds global public opinion increasingly wary of the world’s dominant nations and disapproving of their leaders. Anti-Americanism is extensive, as it has been for the past five years. ..read more

If Victims of Communism Museums, nuclear bomb shelter tours, and talk of a “New Cold War” isn’t enough to satisfy your nostalgia for a bi-polar world, try Cold War Unicorns. Yes! Cold War Unicorns are bound to fully recreate that pitched battle between Communism and Capitalism that only ideological warfare and proxy wars could produce, albeit this time with a magical mythical flare. As the Archie McPhee Toy Company website promises:

The Cold War Unicorns Play Set allows you to play out the intense struggle between two global superpowers in the majestic fantasy world of the Unicorn! Can the Communist Unicorn’s horn of classless social structure hold up against the Freedom Unicorn’s hooves of capitalist opportunity? Each hard vinyl unicorn is 3-3/4″ tall with articulated joints for all sorts of dramatic poses.

And to think I thought a gas mask with a Geiger counter was cool.

A friend passed ..read more

Some old habits die hard. Eighty years after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Bolshevik Party, the KPRF is still afraid of Trotskyists. The Moscow Times reports that Anatoly Baranov, the KPRF’s webmaster, has been hauled in front of the Party’s Central Control Commission and charged with stubbornly pushing “the Communist Party from the victorious Leninist path onto the false Trotskyist path of a rapid revolution, effectively carried out in the interests of the pro-Western bourgeoisie, rather than in the interests of the Russian people, and leading to the total occupation of Russia by NATO forces.” Baranov called the charges “schizophrenic raving.”

To quote Kyle’s mom, “What! What! What!?” Trotskyism? You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Yes, Trotskyism is alive and well in the KPRF. Now dubbed “neo-Trotskyism,” the followers of the shunned revolutionary appear to continue ..read more

You know Russia has hit the mainstream when CNN decides to devote a entire week of programming to it. All week CNN is running a daily half hour series called “Eye on Russia: The New Dawn.” Presumably the series is connected to Putin’s upcoming trip to the US. The topics include Russia’s “resurgence,” Russian youth, business, “the future,” and arts and culture. The first topic ran yesterday and you can view segments of it online here.

I must say that I think that former Gorbachev scribe Alexei Pushkov did an excellent job addressing CNN’s Jim Clancy’s loaded, and rather simpleton, questions. You could hear the disappointment in Clancy’s voice when Pushkov had to inform him that Russia isn’t going to be just like the West. “It’s not,” Clancy muttered with disappointment. What a boob.

What I really wonder is who Pushkov and Clancy meant ..read more

A street brawl broke out near Slavyanskaya Ploshchad in Moscow on Friday night when Russian nationalist youth “armed with metal poles and broken bottles” attacked Caucasians reports the Moscow Times. One Armenian youth was hospitalized with stab wounds and 42 persons were arrested. Estimates suggest that 50 Russian nationalists, some of which are members of Alexandr Belov’s Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) participated in the fight. In a statement Belov denied that DPNI did not have any kind of relations with organizers of the brawl. Further, Belov was quoted in the Moscow Times that DPNI members were there “peacefully guarding Moscow from gay prostitutes when groups of people from the Caucasus approached and provoked a reaction.”

The DPNI TV (which I must say is disturbing in and of itself) has posted footage of the incident on its website. Click here to view: Part 1, ..read more