Garry Kasparov said that Russia’s election were the "dirtiest" in the nation's history.

"There are no illusions that what is being called elections was the most unfair and dirtiest in the whole history of modern Russia," Kasparov said at a news conference, pointing at reports of massive vote violations.

"We fully realize that it's useless to seek the truth in Russian courts," he added.

Kasparov, who heads the Other Russia coalition of opposition groups, was arrested and jailed for five days for leading a protest rally in Moscow on Nov. 24. His group was not allowed to run for parliament.

Kasparov said that activists of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi, which means Ours, attacked his group's office Monday.

Earlier Monday, Nashi held a rally in Moscow, mobilizing its supporters to thwart what it described as a possible attempt by U.S.-backed "thieves and traitors" to mount protests and seize public buildings and squares. A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman called the claim "ridiculous."

Kasparov calls Russian elections 'dirtiest' in nation's history.

Decius wrote:
I think you are focused on the wrong stuff.

noteworthy wrote:
Amar has taken justice into his own hands, vowing to avenge Jafaar's death 100 times over....

Decius wrote:
Its a war. This is going to happen. If this sort of story were an impediment to peace no war would ever have ended.

noteworthy wrote:
Still, the returnees are not "a good problem to have", because many of their homes are now occupied (illegally) by people from opposing sects.

Decius wrote:
Yes it is, because previously no one wanted to return because it was too dangerous. When you're in hell, a day when only your feet get burned is a blessing. The fact that you'd prefer to spend the day in Iowa is beside the point.

noteworthy wrote:
Mrs. Aasan's family fully expected to get attacked when traveling after dark. She was "thrilled and relieved" that they managed to cheat death that night.

Decius wrote:
This is meant as an example of progress. Previously this would have simply been impossible.

noteworthy wrote:
The people in charge are warlords, not police. Presently, the violence is suppressed, but the underlying forces are unresolved. With an eye on the clock, the Americans have resigned themselves to arming and training their former enemies, so that at least someone is in charge, knowing all the while that no one can be trusted. Increasingly, America's only leverage is its impending departure. In the vacuum that follows, power will accrue to the two-gun-toting maniacal warlords, not to the technocrats, whose most notable recent accomplishment is a restaurant opening, apparently.

Decius wrote:
The restaurant is the point, which is why it is ridiculous to pin an assessment of the success of this stategy on phoney political benchmarks, many of which will never be reached precisely because the people of Iraq do not want to reach them, and why there is absolutely no way that this situation will be resolved in the few months the Democrats wish to give it.

It doesn't matter what these technocrats agree to on paper because fuel is the only thing paper is good for in hell. They have some security. The thing they need to do with it is build an economy. Restaurants. Retail stores. Industry. Start employing people.

When its easier to put food on ones table by serving sandwiches than by rolling around with the local thugs, people will serve sandwiches instead. It isn't going to be pretty and it isn't going to be quick, but eventually people will have better things to do than shoot eachother.

I vote with Decius on this one

RE: Must Read: Iraq Round-Up

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

[skipping to the juicy bits]

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.

“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

Fmr aide McCellan feels like he got a raw deal. With his new publisher and these firebombs I'm sure he'll get a different deal. Book comes out April 21st.

--timball

McClellan points finger at Bush, Rove - Mike Allen and Michael Calderone - Politico.com

What should be done if one can-not accept the Byzantine system of power? Retreat into the catacombs? Wait until enough energy for another revolt has been accumulated? Try to hurry along revolt, thereby posing another "orange threat," which Putin and his allies have used, since the 2004 Ukrainian elections, to frighten the people and themselves? Attempt to focus on the demand for honest elections? Carry on painstaking educational work, in order to gradually change citizens' views?

Each person will have to decide in his or her own way. I imagine -- with both sorrow and certainty -- that the Byzantine system of power has triumphed for the foreseeable future in Russia. It's too late to remove it from power by a normal democratic process, for democratic mechanisms have been liquidated, transformed into pure imitation. I am afraid that few of us will live to see the reinstatement of freedom and democracy in Russia. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that "the mole of history burrows away unnoticed."

Why Putin Wins

2. The London Brew-nami of 1814

The Industrial Revolution wasn't all steam engines and textile mills. Beer production increased exponentially, as well. Fortunately, the good people of England were up to the challenge and drained kegs as fast as they were made. Brewery owners became known as "beer barons," and they spent their newfound wealth in an age-old manner -- by trying to party more than the next guy.

Case in point: In 1814, Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery in London constructed a brewing vat that was 22 feet tall and 60 feet in diameter, with an interior big enough to seat 200 for dinner -- which is exactly how its completion was celebrated. (Why 200? Because a rival had built a vat that seated 100, of course.)

After the dinner, the vat was filled to its 4,000-barrel capacity. Pretty impressive, given the grand scale of the project, but pretty unfortunate given that they overlooked a faulty supporting hoop. Yup, the vat ruptured, causing other vats to break, and the resulting commotion was heard up to 5 miles away.

A wall of 1.3 million gallons of dark beer washed down the street, caving in two buildings and killing nine people by means of "drowning, injury, poisoning by the porter fumes, or drunkenness."

The story gets even more unbelievable, though. Rescue attempts were blocked and delayed by the thousands who flocked to the area to drink directly off the road. And when survivors were finally brought to the hospital, the other patients became convinced from the smell that the hospital was serving beer to every ward except theirs. A riot broke out, and even more people were left injured.

Sadly, this incident was not deemed tragic enough at the time to merit an annual memorial service and/or reenactment.

Drinking Stories That Put Yours To Shame

Just 10 years ago, the proposed merger of SABMiller and Molson Coors into MillerCoors would have worried craft brewers. Back then, "American beer" was thought of as a cheap product with very little beer flavor.

Today the United States has by far the most exciting beer culture in the world, and America's 1,500 craft brewers are undaunted by the prospect of a juggernaut that would have more than 30 percent of the domestic market. The age of American industrial brewing is over.
...
Now Americans are moving away from spongy industrial bread, watery coffee, plasticized "cheese" and other wonders of modern food science. The top maker of white supermarket bread went bankrupt a few years ago.

just as France turns more American
let's celebrate something French
quality of life

Don't fear Big Beer - International Herald Tribune

“Blaming white people,” they write, “can be a way for some black people to feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t pay the electric bills. There are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before in the history of America.”

I couldn’t agree more. Racism disgusts me, and I think it should be fought with much greater ferocity than we see today. But that’s no reason to drop out of school, or take drugs, or refuse to care for one’s children, or shoot somebody.

The most important step toward ending the tragic cycles of violence and poverty among African-Americans also happens to be the heaviest lift — reconnecting black fathers to their children.

Tough, Sad and Smart - New York Times

For their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

funny
Bush "wins" the Presidency but dubiously, starts a pointless war and everybody hates him
Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize

no writer could ever get away with it -- the shear chutzpah of reality

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize 2007

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

nice
although i'm an odd beast a center-left democratic socialist/liberal who exhibits a certain dispositional conservatism

The Republican Collapse - New York Times

It’s that month again, and when the New York skies are clear, as they have been and were then, you gaze at the proud prow of Manhattan and still feel the absence, and perhaps you see once more those papers from the crumpled towers fluttering out across the East River to strange landings in Brooklyn.
...
That was a breaking point, dividing our lives into before and after, and the world into pre- and post-, and we’ve all had to succumb to the awful 9/11 shorthand that compresses the loss of almost 3,000 lives into a couple of digits, and the wider loss of America-as-sanctuary into a date.
...
The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.

That refrain, for Americans, but not only them, has a pursed-lipped face called Bush-Cheney, and the braggadocio-smirk of the bring-it-on duo has come to form yet another shorthand for a certain grimness, one as relentless as the U.S. national debt clock.

a nice essay
you can feel the humanity

The Breaking Point - New York Times