Russia's Secret New Weapon: The Inflatable Tank

I suppose the idea is to make any potential enemy die of laughter.

THEY may look like real tanks and missiles, but some of the weapons in Russia's arsenal may not all be what they seem.

The army is making increasing use of inflatable replicas — decoys deployed in a cunning attempt to deceive potential enemies.

In a workshop in Moscow's suburb Khotkovo, employees of inflatable equipment company Rusbal sew the fabric used to create fake weapons for their main customer — the Russian army.

Established in 1993, Rusbal replicates military equipment, such as T-80 tanks, S-300 missiles or fighter jets, for an undisclosed price, but also manufactures inflatable castles and other toys for children.

"These machines are effective in deceiving the enemy, and they protect the real equipment," the Rusbal plant director, Victor Talanov, said.

"This kind of technology has existed in the army for a long time, since World War II."

Can't wait to see Putie driving one of these things.

Not that it'll happen, but someone in Russia might want to do an inventory of their real equipment. I suspect a whole lot of money isn't going where the public might think it is.

The Kremlin has vowed repeatedly to modernise its dilapidated military, equipped with aging and obsolete equipment.

In February Russia launched a $650 billion rearmament plan to counter the West's military dominance by adding eight nuclear submarines and hundreds of warplanes to its creaking armed forces.

Last year Russia announced plans to triple its defence spending to 19 trillion rubles ($669 billion) over the next decade.

Speaking of Putie, the man buying fake tanks is calling action in Libya medieval. An interesting retort from Dmitry Medvedev.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev dismissed as “unacceptable” Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s description of Western-led attacks on Libya as a “crusade,” marking their first public foreign-policy dispute.

Putin, who spoke amid a visit to Russia by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said the UN resolution and resulting allied offensive amounts to a “medieval call for a crusade.”

“It’s unacceptable to use terms that effectively lead to a clash of civilizations like the crusades,” Medvedev said at his residence outside Moscow. “Otherwise things could end far worse than what’s happening now.”

Heh: Russian Pols Claim Spy Arrests are Right-Wing Plot to Embarrass Obama

As if the "right-wingers" in this country could conspire to meet privately for lunch, let alone clandestinely operate a spy trap for over a decade knowing that years later they could use the arrests to make an inept president look even weaker than he already is.

And here we thought such delusions were only left to liberal Democrats.

So it was that the most rabid anti-American Kremlin stooges on state TV were muzzled and state TV portrayed President Medvedev’s trip to the United States last week as a sign that Russia is once again, if not exactly an equal partner, a great power whose opinion matters. Backed by generally high oil prices, the third largest international reserves in the world, and an economy that appears to be coming out of the global recession faster than Western rivals, the Kremlin is once again feeling confident.

Yet the spy row has left it in a bind. President Medvedev has invested too much political capital and too much propaganda in better relations with the United States to suddenly perform a U-turn now. The only way is forward. Russian politicians are therefore already punting a convenient conspiracy theory. The spies are not spies and the “plot” was announced just after President Medvedev’s trip to the US by American Right-wingers intent on embarrassing President Obama and killing of better relations between the two countries.

It is a theory that allows the Russians to publicly save face: it is not our new friends that have stabbed us in the back but the enemies of our new friends. Yet the real victim of the dispute may not be Mr Obama but Mr Medvedev or, more accurately, the policy vector he represents. He is the one who has publicly gambled on embracing the West, while Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and former president, has kept notably quiet on the subject and is known for his tough anti-Western rhetoric.

It shouldn't be long until some in our own media run with this theory. I figure the crack staff at MSNBC is feverishly pursuing this insane line of logic.

Putie, meanwhile, claims Russia is the real victim.

Russia is the real victim of the spy scandal, Moscow angrily said yesterday -- while the Obama administration acted embarrassed at carrying off the biggest counterespionage coup in years.

Kremlin officials acknowledged that at least 10 of the 11 suspects caught in the US spy dragnet were Russian citizens. But in a bizarre role reversal, they said this showed America was acting irresponsibly.

"Back at your home, the police went out of control," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told a visiting Bill Clinton in Moscow. "Throwing people in jail."

Clinton appeared to chuckle but made no comment.

Other Kremlin leaders demanded an explanation for reviving what the Foreign Ministry labeled "Cold War-era spy stories" and making "groundless" accusations.

In contrast, President Obama dodged the issue.

While talking to reporters about the economy, Obama was asked about the arrests. "Thank you," he replied. He declined comment when asked a second time.

Speaking of Clinton, it appears an ally of his wife was a target of one of the alleged spies.

A close political ally of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believes he was the target of one of the ten alleged Russian spies arrested in the U.S.

Alan Patricof, the former finance chairman of Clinton’s Senate campaign, confirmed that the woman known as Cynthia Murphy had worked on his account at a New York finance firm.

According to the FBI complaint filed in New York on the arrests, which were the result of a ten-year investigation, Murphy had been told to get close to a New York-based financier described as a fundraiser “for a major political party” who is “a personal friend” of a Cabinet member.

Seems the one spy receiving much of the attention isn't exactly the brightest bulb.

Those who knew Chapman from the social and club scenes described her as "sweet," "flirtatious" and "friendly" -- sometimes too friendly.

At parties, she "would be very flirtatious," said one moneyman, who encountered her at a couple of Wall Street cocktail soirees. "She was very sexually aggressive [and] wore revealing clothing . . . I thought she was a call girl because she dressed that way," said the man, who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity.

She also had problems keeping her cover stories straight.

"She made up a different story every time," he said.

"The first time, she said she ran a real-estate Web site. Then the next time, she was working on an oil deal."

"[Then] she told me she was a derivatives trader. I asked her one thing any derivatives trader would know and she didn't know what I was talking about," he said. "She was just dumb, quite frankly."

That, of course, may well be an act by the woman whose real name is Kuschenko.

If it is proven she is a spy, Chapman is one of a new breed of young attractive female agents trained in the era of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, himself a former Soviet agent, for a new age of espionage to undermine the West.

Documents in Russia reveal that Chapman’s real surname is Kuschenko. She was born in Ukraine and raised in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, southern Russia. As a teenager she studied at the Economics Department of the University of People’s Friendship in Moscow – an institution with long-standing links to the old feared KGB.

But this could all be a decoy by Russian intelligence to mask her real identity. She is widely travelled, fun-loving and a fashionably dressed Russian entrepreneur who sends her photographs to friends about her glittering, cosmopolitan lifestyle in New York, London and Moscow.

Her CV also suggests she is involved in a dizzying array of businesses, including interests in London up to 2006. In the UK she is listed as the marketing manager of a company called Navigator and also worked in the City as an investment banker. In the US she runs an online real estate business.

It was also reported last night that it was in London that she acquired her English surname after she married an Englishman and moved with him to America. But it is unclear when she married. An online friend said: “Anna loves to exchange experiences with successful entrepreneurs around the world.”

Looking at her it's easy to see how she could lure the men in.

Ex-KGB Agent: There Could Be 60 Russian Spy Couples

My question is how many of them are employed by the federal government and/or the Obama administration?

One of the Cold War's most famous defectors says Russia probably has about 50 deep-cover couples — and maybe even up to 60 of them — spying inside the United States.

Oleg Gordievsky, a former deputy head of the KGB in London who defected in 1985, said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev would know the number of illegal operatives in each target country.

The 71-year-old ex-double agent told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday that, based on his experience in Russian intelligence, "there's usually 40 to 50 couples, all illegal."

"The president will know the number, and in each country how many — but not their names," said Gordievsky, who said he spent nine years working in the KGB directorate in charge of illegal spy teams.

The FBI announced Monday the arrests of 10 alleged deep-cover Russian agents after tracking the suspects for years. They are accused of attempting to infiltrate U.S. policymaking circles while posing as ordinary citizens. All 10 are charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general — an offense that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

An 11th person allegedly involved in the Russian spy ring was arrested Tuesday in Cyprus.

Countries often have a number of intelligence officials whose identities are declared to their host nation, usually working in embassies, trade delegations and other official posts.

Gordievsky said he estimates there are 400 declared Russian intelligence officers in the U.S., as well as up to 50 couples charged with covertly cultivating military and diplomat officials as sources of information. He said the complexity involved in training and running undercover teams means Russia is unlikely to have significantly more operatives now than during his career.

"I understand the resources they have, and how many people they can train and send to other countries," Gordievsky said. "It is possible there may be more now, but not many more, and no more than 60 (couples)."

Keep Your Eyes on the Road and Ignore That Porn Video Playing on the Billboard

Sometimes you've got to admit hackers have a twisted sense of humor. It's a shame we don't have some traffic-cam video to see the reaction of motorists.

Traffic jerked to a standstill as rubbernecking motorists ogled a pornographic clip posted by hackers on big-screen video billboards in Moscow, Russian news agencies reported on Friday.

The company that operates the billboards, Panno.ru, said hackers were behind a graphic sex video broadcast late Thursday night on two roadside screens along Moscow's Garden Ring Road, one of the city's busiest arteries.

"This was an attack by hackers on the computers, as a result of which one of the commercial video clips was swapped for an indecent video," Panno.ru commercial director Viktor Laptev told RIA-Novosti.

He speculated the attack could have been linked to competition on the advertising market, or simply "hooliganism."

Witnesses said traffic crawled to a halt as unbelieving motorists craned their necks to stare at the X-rated clip which ran for about 20 minutes on the oversized screens.

They say within three minutes they discovered they'd been hacked yet it took another 12 minutes to shut it down. Guess they wanted to watch the video as well.

Ukraine May Fall Back Into Russia's Orbit

The Ukraine was once a member of the Warsaw Pact, also known as the Soviet Union, those countries over which the central government in Russia exerted control.

Since the demise of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union they have pursued a more westernized democratic form of government. With elections just three weeks away, however, the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, is leading in the polls. He wishes a return to good old days where the central government exerted more control and he is very friendly with Vladimir Putin's puppet Dmitry Medvedev.

He's advocating a tighter clamp on free speech, rejection of membership in NATO and instead joining a European Security Group championed by Russia and opposed by the rest of western Europe.

His main talking point is about corruption in the government. I don't know where he was when the Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, but if you wanted a model of corruption, there it was.

"So what did this Orange Revolution give us?," Yanukovych asked in an interview with The Associated Press. "Freedom of speech? That's very good. But what price did the Ukrainian people pay for this? For the development of this democratic principle in our country, the price was too great."

The Ukraine has the main pipeline for gas flowing from Russia to the rest of Europe. Earlier conventional wisdom said that Obama's attempt to normalize relations with Russia may imperil the pipeline because Russia would take military action to ensure that it stayed under their control. Now with their candidate leading in the polls, this scenario seems to be moot.

What will it mean for Europe's gas supply if Russia does indeed get an ally in Ukraine is anybody's guess at this time.

What is disturbing is that these emerging democracies from the former Soviet Union seem to slowly be drifting back into Russia's sphere of influence, trading stability for freedom.

I would hope that for all of its warts, the people of the Ukraine would rather live free than to once again live under the iron rule of a central government, but sometimes when a way of life is all you have known, experiencing something new which does not blossom as quickly as you would like leads you to head back to your comfort zone.

I hope this isn't the case, but only time will tell.

What Happened To That Whole War For Oil?

Remember back in the heyday of the antiwar protests after our decision to invade Iraq? One of the biggest talking points from the loony left was that this was all about oil. They constantly chanted "No more war of oil" while parading around in their god awful ugly uniforms or, in the case of Code Pink when they were smearing fake blood on then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Well if this whole thing was about oil, the US certainly got screwed in the bidding for the rights to Iraqi oil fields that was held recently.

A consortium led by Russia's private oil giant won the biggest prize of Iraq's second oil auction this year, nabbing a field initially promised them a decade ago by Saddam Hussein while other companies Saturday showed little interest in offerings outside the secure southern part of the country.

Lukoil and Norway's Statoil ASA won rights to develop the 12.88 billion barrel West Qurna Phase 2 field in the Basra region, beating out three other consortiums led by France's Total SA, Malaysia's state-run Petronas and British giant BP PLC.

In the opening round of the two-day auction Friday, an alliance grouping European giant Shell and Petronas was awarded the 12.5 billion barrel Majnoon field, also in the south.

In fact in this latest round of contracts that was awarded not a single American company was awarded a contract.

I think that is more the result of our domestic policy here at home then it is our oil companies not wanting to get in on the process. They could have still tried to get some since there is no doubt there will continue to be a world wide demand for oil products, regardless of much our current progressive inhabitants of congress and the White House wish to continue to push their cave man energy policy.

Pelosi: Selling Out Eastern Europe a 'Brilliant' Move

Just imagine what this dunce might say if if we treated our allies like friends rather than throwing them under the bus and selling out to Vladimir Putin.

President Obama's decision to scrap a controversial Bush-era missile shield for Europe yesterday calmed Russian fears of a new Cold War -- but outraged critics, who said it weakened the West.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev praised Obama's "responsible approach."

But critics said Obama was needlessly kowtowing to the Kremlin on the eve of his meeting with Medvedev next week at the United Nations.

"It's just, unambiguously, a bad decision," said John Bolton, former UN ambassador in George W. Bush's administration.

"Russia and Iran are the big winners. I just think it's a bad day for American national security."

Sen. John McCain, Obama's Republican rival in the presidential race, called the reversal "seriously misguided."

On the other hand, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was a "brilliant" move and described it as a "giant step forward."

Obama opted for what he said was a cheaper, more flexible strategy to meet the challenge of Iran's ballistic missiles. He said new intelligence data showed the greatest danger came from Tehran's shorter-range missiles, not the long-range ones anticipated in Bush's multibillion-dollar plan.

Of course now that the Iranians are ready to roll with their own nukes, does Obama have any plan to stop them?

Of course not.

Once the Bush administration committed to the deployment, I grudgingly supported it: We couldn't hang the East Europeans out to dry after strong-arming them for commitments.

Now the Obama administration's made the mess immeasurably worse. It's a lose-lose situation for us -- and for our allies.

Moscow believes we just signed over a new lease on Eastern Europe. And we didn't even get a tin of caviar. Will the Obama-Putin Act go down in history as the post-modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

Probably more like Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper saying we had peace in our time, but we'll see.

If anything, Obama has impeccable timing.

Ironically, Obama's announcement came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland at the start of World War II -- an event that underscores Warsaw's longstanding fear of aggression from the east.

Moreover, Obama's cave-in to Putin & Co. might make sense if it were part of a quid pro quo -- namely, a firm Russian commitment to take a harder line against Iran's nuclear ambitions. But Moscow has signaled that fresh sanctions against Iran would be "a serious mistake."

Another big winner in this? Why, Obama's pals at GE and MSNBC. Somehow I doubt his flakcs there will utter a single word of criticism.

A Shameful Abandonment

Few seemed to notice the other day when we noted Barack Obama was about to sell out Eastern Europe. Well, now it's offical.

This is bad news for all who care about the US commitment to the transatlantic alliance and the defence of Europe as well as the United States. It represents the appalling appeasement of Russian aggression and a willingness to sacrifice American allies on the altar of political expediency. A deal with the Russians to cancel missile defence installations sends a clear message that even Washington can be intimidated by the Russian bear.

What signal does this send to Ukraine, Georgia and a host of other former Soviet satellites who look to America and NATO for protection from their powerful neighbour? The impending cancellation of Third Site is a shameful abandonment of America’s friends in eastern and central Europe, and a slap in the face for those who actually believed a key agreement with Washington was worth the paper it was written on.

When Poland and the Czech Republic are overrun by the Russians, you'll know who to blame. Just sickening.

Great News! Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast

Ah, I'm sure it's nothing serious. After all, our Supreme Dear Leader has been busy flexing his mad diplomatic skills by having his Secretary of State's husband go begging to release Al Gore's employees, so it's not as if the Russians don't know who's in charge.

One of the submarines is the newer Akula II, officials said, which is quieter than the older variant and the most advanced submarine in the Russian fleet. The Akula is capable of carrying torpedoes for attacking other submarines and surface vessels as well as missiles for striking targets on land and at sea.

Defense Department officials declined to speculate on what weapons might be aboard the two submarines.

While the submarines had not taken any provocative action beyond their presence outside territorial waters of the United States, officials expressed wariness over the Kremlin’s motivation for ordering such an unusual mission.

“Any time the Russian Navy does something so out of the ordinary it is cause for worry,” said a senior Defense Department official who has been monitoring reports on the submarines’ activities.

The official said the Navy was able to track the submarines as they made their way through international waters off the American coastline. This can be done from aircraft, ships, underwater sensors or other submarines.

“We’ve known where they were, and we’re not concerned about our ability to track the subs,” the official added. “We’re concerned just because they are there.”

Besides, it's not as if our sworn enemies actually present any threat to us, especially since the White House and their minions are sending a clear message as to who the real bad guys are.

So just go back to sleep and wish only happy thoughts.

There Are Rubes; Then There Are Rubes

Six months into the era of Hopenchange and Barack Obama is making Jimmy Carter look competent.

Obama Rewrites the Cold War
The President has a duty to stand up to the lies of our enemies.

There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week.

Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful."

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics." It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

It is irresponsible for an American president to go to Moscow and tell a room full of young Russians less than the truth about how the Cold War ended. One wonders whether this was just an attempt to push "reset" -- or maybe to curry favor. Perhaps, most concerning of all, Mr. Obama believes what he said.

Mr. Obama's method for pushing reset around the world is becoming clearer with each foreign trip. He proclaims moral equivalence between the U.S. and our adversaries, he readily accepts a false historical narrative, and he refuses to stand up against anti-American lies.

The approach was evident in his speech in Moscow and in his speech in Cairo last month. In Cairo, he asserted there was some sort of equivalence between American support for the 1953 coup in Iran and the evil that the Iranian mullahs have done in the world since 1979. On an earlier trip to Mexico City, the president listened to an extended anti-American screed by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and then let the lies stand by responding only with, "I'm grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for the things that occurred when I was 3 months old."

Asked at a NATO meeting in France in April whether he believed in American exceptionalism, the president said, "I believe in American Exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In other words, not so much.

The Obama administration does seem to believe in another kind of exceptionalism -- Obama exceptionalism. "We have the best brand on Earth: the Obama brand," one Obama handler has said. What they don't seem to realize is that once you're president, your brand is America, and the American people expect you to defend us against lies, not embrace or ignore them. We also expect you to know your history.

Mr. Obama has become fond of saying, as he did in Russia again last week, that American nuclear disarmament will encourage the North Koreans and the Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions. Does he really believe that the North Koreans and the Iranians are simply waiting for America to cut funds for missile defense and reduce our strategic nuclear stockpile before they halt their weapons programs?

The White House ought to take a lesson from President Harry Truman. In April, 1950, Truman signed National Security Council report 68 (NSC-68). One of the foundational documents of America's Cold War strategy, NSC-68 explains the danger of disarming America in the hope of appeasing our enemies. "No people in history," it reads, "have preserved their freedom who thought that by not being strong enough to protect themselves they might prove inoffensive to their enemies."

Perhaps Mr. Obama thinks he is making America inoffensive to our enemies. In reality, he is emboldening them and weakening us. America can be disarmed literally -- by cutting our weapons systems and our defensive capabilities -- as Mr. Obama has agreed to do. We can also be disarmed morally by a president who spreads false narratives about our history or who accepts, even if by his silence, our enemies' lies about us.

Liz Cheney

Ms. Cheney served as deputy assistant secretary of state and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs from 2002-2004 and 2005-2006.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was too busy laughing his ass off to comment.


Via The Wall Street Journal

King Obama Wants to Bypass Senate Ratification of U.S.-Russia Arms Treaty

Yeah, why bother with pesky little things like the Constitution? You're King Obama, you can do as you please.

I guess the Senate is too busy helping you wreck our economy to be bother with such trivial matters as arms treaties with one of our enemies.

With the clock running out on a new US-Russian arms treaty before the previous Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, expires on December 5, a senior White House official said Sunday said that the difficulty of the task might mean temporarily bypassing the Senate’s constitutional role in ratifying treaties by enforcing certain aspects of a new deal on an executive levels and a “provisional basis” until the Senate ratifies the treaty.

"The most ideal situation would be to finish it in time that it could be submitted to the Senate so that it can be ratified," said White House Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Security and Arms Control Gary Samore. "If we're not able to do that, we'll have to look at arrangements to continue some of the inspection provisions, keep them enforced in a provisional basis, while the Senate considers the treaty."

Samore said administration lawyers are exploring the "different options that are available. One option is that both sides could agree to continue the inspections by executive agreement; that would work on our side. On the Russian side, as I understand it, that would require Duma approval."

The fact that the administration is preparing for such an extraordinary measure shows just how much pressure the two administrations are under to arrive at an agreement before the 18-year-old treaty expires. While resident Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are expected to announce progress tomorrow on a nuclear arms reduction treaty – nicknamed “New START” -- to take effect in just five short months, many sticking points that remain unresolved.

The Senate is able to write legislation in the middle of the night and vote on it without anyone reading it. Apparently, however, they can't work on this given five months notice.

So let's just ignore the Constitution!

Change!

'I Only Wish She Hadn't Used the Clonidine On Me'

It's not often you read about female serial rapists.

A YOUNG Russian woman, a devoted collector of horror films and spiders, is on trial for sedating and raping 10 men.

The police were shocked that 32-year-old Valeria K., a quiet good-looking woman from the city of Tambov, was the mysterious rapist who abused 10 local men after poisoning them with clonidine, Life.ru reports.

Valeria, who has already been nicknamed the Black Widow for her love of spiders, would get acquainted with men and invite them to her place.

She gave them drinks with clonidine, which almost immediately sent them to sleep for almost 24 hours.

After that, she undressed her victims and raped them, tightening a rope on their male organs to keep them erect.

Waking up in hospital with clonidine poisoning and penis trauma, all the victims could remember was a friendly brunette who gave them drinks.

Not all of her victims her victims were left traumatized.

At present, the police know about ten of Valeria’s victims, although one of them refused to file a complaint against her.

“It was great,” the unnamed man said.

“I like hot women. I only wish she hadn't use the clonidine on me.”

Great News! Cyber-Spies Penetrate Our Electrical Grid

If you're able to read this you'll know we're still up and running. But maybe not for long.

This is very comforting news, isn't it?

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

"The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official. "So have the Russians."

Back in Washington from his triumphant world groveling tour, President Obama apologized to the rest of the world for us having electricity.

Humiliation: Russia Rejects Obama's Missile Shield Pandering, Smashes Him With Clenched Fist

The President-in-Training gets another clenched fist upside the head.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on Tuesday showed willingness to discuss the US-planned missile defence system opposed by Moscow, but without "haggling" linking it to Iran. Medvedev was commenting during a visit to Spain on an alleged offer by US President Barack Obama to halt the defence system if Iran could be convinced to give up nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

The New York Times earlier reported that Obama had sent a secret letter to Medvedev.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Madrid, Medvedev welcomed the "positive signals" coming from the Obama administration with which he hoped to reach "agreements."

"Haggling," however, was not "productive," Medvedev said.

If the Obama administration showed "common sense" in proposing a "common shield against all types of threats" and reconsidered its plans of a missile defence system which could target Russia, Moscow would be prepared to negotiate, Medvedev said.

The New York Times reported earlier on its website that Obama last month offered a halt to the US-planned missile defence system opposed by Moscow if Iran could be convinced to relinquish nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

So let's review the checklist. Obama throws Eastern Europe under the bus, Russia laughs at him and Iran will still have their nukes.

Maybe if Obama can locate a spine we can still proceed with the missile defense, but who in Eastern Europe would even trust this lightweight at this point? The guy is a laughingstock.

Discontent In Putie's Paradise

You can be sure that the availability of this video is causing Vlad Paranoid to be as happy as a pig in shit. LOL

Weakling Obama to Eastern Europe: You're On Your Own

Forget protecting and aiding our allies. Obama is ready to throw Poland and the Czech Republic under the bus with the delusional notion Russia will be able to keep Iran from getting nukes, when Russia is the one helping them get there.

Are these people nuts or what?

Note how McClatchy calls weakness and appeasement a softer stance.

The Obama administration has begun to indicate that it's willing to reconsider the Bush administration's push to deploy a ballistic missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland — if Russia helps curb Iran's push to develop nuclear weapons.

Echoing Vice President Joe Biden, who said the new administration wants to push a "reset button" on U.S.- Russia relations, Undersecretary of State William Burns told the Interfax news agency in Moscow last week that, " The United States is quite open to the possibility of new forms of cooperation" with Moscow on missile defense, Iran and "the whole range of security issues with Russia ." His remarks are posted on the Interfax Web site.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to meet her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva, Switzerland next month, paving the way for the first meeting between President Obama and Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev at the Group of Eight economic summit in London in early April.

The meetings come as concerns continue to mount about Iran's ballistic missile and nuclear enrichment programs, as Israeli hard-liners who consider Iran an existential threat gain ground and as Moscow grows more vocal about what it charges are U.S. encroachments on its spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They also come, however, as falling oil prices and bad investments hammer the once high-flying Russian economy.

Normally, most sane people would call that having leverage. But no, we wouldnt want to embarrass anyone.

For years we've heard the mantra that the world hates us while we were beloved in Eastern Europe. Now indeed that pocket of the world will hate us.

For selling them out to the Communists again.

Excellent News! Russia Offers to Help Obama In Afghanistan

Seems like President-in-Training Obama's plans are working seamlessly. In just two weeks Venezuela and Cuba have professed undying love, North Korea has sent a love note, Iran has offered Hope, Kyrgyzstan has reminded us everyone loves us, and now, shockingly, Russia is offering to help us in Afghanistan.

Thank goodness everyone loves us now.

President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Russia and its ex-Soviet allies want to help the United States stabilize Afghanistan, saying Moscow wanted "full-fledged" cooperation with Washington.

He spoke a day after the ex-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan announced it would evict the U.S. from an air base key to the Afghan war. Kyrgyzstan made the move after getting a promise for $2 billion in loans from Russia — which resents the American presence in a region Moscow regards as part of its traditional sphere of influence.

The possibility of the base closure poses a serious challenge to the new U.S. administration and President Barack Obama's plan to send up to 30,000 more American forces into Afghanistan this year.

Passengers Rebel Against Drunken Aeroflot Pilot

You see what fine pilots we have such as Chesley Sullengerger, who bravely landed a powerless jet in the Hudson River.

Then you see a story like this, where a suspected drunk is about to fly a plane from Moscow to New York and Aeroflot officials apparently had no problem with it.

It is normally a moment of cheery reassurance when an airline pilot greets passengers during preparations for take-off. But Alexander Cheplevsky sparked panic on flight Aeroflot 315 when he began to speak.

His slurred and garbled comments ahead of a flight from Moscow to New York convinced passengers that he was drunk. When he apparently switched from Russian into unintelligible English, fear turned to revolt.

Flight attendants initially ignored passengers' complaints and threatened to expel them from the Boeing 767 jet unless they stopped "making trouble". As the rebellion spread, Aeroflot representatives boarded the aircraft to try to calm down the 300 passengers.

One sought to reassure them by announcing that it was "not such a big deal" if the pilot was drunk because the aircraft practically flew itself.

Mr Cheplevsky did little to ease passengers' fears by refusing to leave the cockpit to show that he was sober. When he was finally persuaded to face them, witnesses said that he appeared unsteady on his feet and had bloodshot eyes.

"I don't think there's anyone in Russia who doesn't know what a drunk person looks like," Katya Kushner, one of the passengers, told the Moscow Times, which had a reporter travelling on the flight.

"At first, he was looking at us like we were crazy. Then, when we wouldn't back down, he said 'I'll sit here quietly in a corner. We have three more pilots. I won't even touch the controls, I promise'."

Aeroflot's bad day got worse when it emerged that the socialite and television host Ksenia Sobchak was on board. Ms Sobchak, one of Russia's best-known personalities, demanded that all four pilots be replaced.

The airline finally relented and summoned new pilots to fly the jet to New York three hours late. More than 100 passengers passed the time as they waited by signing a petition declaring that they believed Mr Cheplevsky had been drunk.

Thanks to Hot Air for the link!

The European Union: Russia's Enabler?

Has the EU allowed Russia to get away with breaching international law?

After The Georgian Crisis, The Breaking Of Europe
The European Union is in danger of becoming the greatest long-term casualty of the Russian-Georgian conflict.

The EU's foreign policy apparatus has been exposed as ineffectual, its minor diplomatic victories as nothing more than window-dressing covering up major strategic reverses. The bloc's vision of peaceful integration through democratic and economic reforms, which enabled it to transform the eastern half of the continent over the past decade, now has a serious question mark hanging over it. August 8 -- the day Russian troops entered Georgia -- was in a sense Europe's 9/11, regardless of parallel claims for Russia made by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Alternatively, as Timothy Garton Ash predicts in "The Guardian" of September 11, 8/8 may become shorthand for a very low point in the history of the "liberal international order." Garton Ash's liberal world order has, of course, been inextricably intertwined with the rise of the EU as a global actor. Little changed in Russia itself on 8/8, but for Europe, "reality changed," as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner put it on September 6 after crisis talks in Avignon with his EU counterparts.

In the wake of 8/8, the EU's illusions of emancipation have been rudely shattered and the bloc's capabilities found desperately wanting. U.S. security guarantees remain a "vital national interest" for all European countries, one of the EU's preeminent foreign-policy strategists, Robert Cooper, concluded in a recent interview with RFE/RL.

Quite plainly, the EU lacks adequate mechanisms for coping with this kind of crisis. In its efforts to be taken seriously by Russia, it has failed to come up with a realistic strategy to counter Moscow's aggression.

The EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy has turned out to be a institutional fiction. Instead, the EU has had to resort to emergency meetings and ad hoc diplomacy. There was no place, for example, for the bloc's foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana, at the side of French President Nicolas Sarkozy when the latter traveled to Moscow on August 12 as the head of the country that currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.

Worse, the EU is nearly paralyzed by a fragmentation of the will, a condition which was in ample evidence at the EU-Ukraine summit in Paris on September 9. On that occasion, in a feat of extreme verbal contortionism, the EU promised Ukraine everything but a guaranteed prospect of membership. Most EU member states fear Ukraine may already face a real threat from Russia, yet the bloc's strategic interests were nowhere in sight at the ambassadorial meetings in Brussels preceding the summit, where the Netherlands and other member states [Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg blocked any suggestions of future EU expansion into post-Soviet territory. Ed.] skeptical of enlargement argued that giving Ukraine a binding pledge of membership would be too unpopular back home.

Of course it would be unpopular. The defense of strategic interests would require increasing the percentage of GDP to their respective defense budgets. And that might have to come at the expense of the ever-precious social benefits.

Neither has the EU done anything to match the U.S. diplomatic "surge" in which top State Department officials have visited Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, not to mention Georgia. Again, the bloc's 27 member states have conspicuously failed to marshal the requisite collective resolve.

True, the EU has had some success in mediating an end to the conflict itself. On September 8, Sarkozy returned from a second foray to Moscow with a promise of a phased withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia following the deployment of 200 EU civilian monitors.

The EU has, in fact, been the only outside mediator. Its successes, however, remain questionable. Thus, it is arguable that the EU has in effect allowed Russia to get away with a gross breach of international law and cement its de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The price of Russian withdrawal for Georgia has been the increasing Russian entrenchment in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. EU officials admit privately that Russia is using its checkpoints in Georgia as a disposable bargaining chip in exchange for more permanent gains in the breakaway provinces.

The EU has also allowed itself to become entangled in seemingly endless disputes with Russia over the small print in the terms it has managed to extract, enabling Moscow to play for time and sow confusion. In the latest installment, Russia now says it never promised to pull its troops out of "independent" South Ossetia or Abkhazia, or to allow EU observers into those provinces.

Nicolas Sarkozy went on record on September 8 as saying all Russian troops must withdraw by October 15 to where they were stationed prior to August 8. As this is unlikely to happen, the EU has simply prepared the ground for another standoff next month -- something for which Russia appears to have an insatiable appetite.

And to which the EU will respond with a demand . . . for more dialogue.

Meanwhile, South Ossetia's and Abkhazia's secession has become a fait accompli and a dangerous precedent for Russia's other neighbors, some of them EU member states who take that threat very seriously. Even though Finland has traditionally been difficult to alarm, its president, Tarja Halonen, went on record as telling the French daily "Le Monde" of September 11 that "we cannot rule out a military conflict in our region." She also pointedly observed to "Helsingin Sanomat" on August 27 that "Finland is one of the few countries in Europe capable of defending itself militarily."

The scheduled talks in Geneva on October 15 on security and stability in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are likely to become a further bone of contention. Moscow insists that representatives from both republics should attend those talks as equal participants, while the EU has said that cannot be allowed.

The EU is quite simply out of its depth in this crisis and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. There can be little better demonstration of this than the fact -- as an EU diplomat told RFE/RL -- that the delegation led by Sarkozy felt compelled to ask Medvedev on September 8 whether Russia is planning to unilaterally redraw the borders of any other neighboring countries. The Russian response was to deny any such intention and to affirm that "Russia is not the Soviet Union."

Édouard Daladier was unavailable for comment.

Via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Stoking Putin's Paranoia

Heh. This should cause some lefty pointy-heads to explode.

U.S. warship in Russian-patrolled Georgian port
POTI, Georgia (Reuters) - The flagship of the U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet dropped anchor off Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti on Friday, where Russian troops have been patrolling since last month's war with Georgia.

The USS Mount Whitney, a sophisticated command warship based in Italy, is the third U.S. vessel to arrive on the Georgian coast with humanitarian aid for tens of thousands displaced by the conflict over Georgia's breakaway South Ossetia.

The oil and dry grain shipment port of Poti is patrolled by Russian troops, who Moscow says are carrying out peacekeeping duties. Georgia and its Western allies say their presence is part of an illegal occupation.

The USS McFaul and a U.S. Coast Guard vessel delivered aid last month at Batumi, Georgia's largest port south of Poti, prompting Russian accusations of a military buildup.

Russian forces say they will carry out regular checks of cargo coming in and out of Poti. They man at least two positions close to access roads on the outskirts of the town.

The delivery of humanitarian aid by a U.S. warship has angered Russia, which has its own Black Sea fleet based in the Ukrainain port of Sevastapol.

A U.S. Navy statement said Mount Whitney would deliver more than 17 tons of aid, including blankets, juice, powdered milk and hygiene products.

Given the vast amount of cargo that can be transported, it would be ironic - and quite fitting - if the Pentagon dispatched the USS Ronald Reagan to assist in the humanitarian mission in Georgia.

Via Reuters