Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Russians Look Into Putin’s Soul and See a Thief
Voters Watch Polls in Russia, and Fraud Is What They See
MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: Monday, December 5, 2011 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 1:04 a.m.
MOSCOW — The shot opens at the top of a flight of stairs and zooms in shakily on a gray-haired man, who sits at a desk furtively checking off what appear to be ballots — a stack of them.
The video is shot with the grain and chop of an amateur. But it is apparently sharp enough.
“A big hello to you,” says the cameraman, Yegor Duda, a 33-year-old volunteer election observer. “This is a violation of the criminal code. The chairman of the electoral commission is filling out ballots. Everything has been captured on the video camera,” he said.
Mr. Duda raced home and uploaded the clip to YouTube. Though just three minutes long, it quickly became an election-day sensation that officials could not ignore.
On Monday, Valentin Gorbunov, the head of the Moscow City Elections Commission, confirmed the substance of the video and announced that Russian investigators had opened a case into ballot tampering by the head at Polling Place No. 2501, where the episode occurred, Russian news agencies reported.
Election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Monday that they, too, had observed blatant fraud, including the brazen stuffing of ballot boxes. While the monitors declined to draw firm conclusions, it was clear from their report that vote stealing and other alleged malfeasance might have spared the presumed beneficiary, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia, an even worse blow than it officially received.
More from gainesville.com
Monday, December 05, 2011
Iran Receives an Early Christmas Present from the US, a Stealthy RQ-170
The US Air Force lost a top secret RQ-170 SENTINEL over Iran, not that long after a secret stealth helicopter was lost. That should be very helpful to Iran, China and Russia. From previous reports, we learn that two of these same RQ-170s were used to get bin Laden.
Mission
The RQ-170 is a low observable unmanned aircraft system (UAS) being developed, tested and fielded by the Air Force. It will provide reconnaissance and surveillance in support of the joint forces commander.
Background
The Air Force's RQ-170 program leverages the Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs and government efforts to rapidly develop and produce a low observable UAS. The RQ-170 will directly support combatant commander needs for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to locate targets.
The RQ-170 is flown by Air Combat Command's 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nev., and the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range, Nev.
U.S. intelligence officials acknowledge that the stealthy RQ-170 Sentinel drone was used to provide ISR support for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.
The Sentinel did several key variety of tasks during the raid such as providing real-time imagery of the compound to the President and other authorities in DC to monitoring Pakistani military communications, all while orbiting overhead undetected, according to the Washington Post.
It could also have jammed Pakistani radars and beamed its footage of the compound to the SEALs in their inbound choppers.
Intelligence officials acknowledge that the CIA used the Air Force’s RQ-170 in Pakistan for months to monitor bin Laden’s house which lies within Pakistan’s air defense intercept zone that surrounds the capitol city of Islamabad.
The aircraft allowed the CIA to glide undetected beyond the boundaries that Pakistan has long imposed on other U.S. drones, including the Predators and Reapers that routinely carry out strikes against militants near the border with Afghanistan.
All this paints a picture of a raid that was indeed carried out without Pakistani knowledge (or, to give Islamabad plausible deniability with regard to the raid, for you skeptics). The remaining question is; were there really only two stealth helos used in the operation? Why use a stealth drone and two stealth helicopters and then send in two-to-three MH-47s that can be detected by radar deep into Pakistan to retrieve the SEALs and collect evidence? How did they do that without being detected?
Read more:
Sunday, December 04, 2011
“What on earth is the matter with Europe?”
Eurozone crisis: the US has to ride to the rescue once again
Meanwhile, the politicians of Europe seem determined to make themselves irrelevant.
So, once again, the United States has intervened to save Europe from itself. And there we were thinking that the old 20th-century pattern had been eradicated. The Federal Reserve Bank made floods of cheap dollars available last week, having come to the blood-curdling conclusion that the global banking system could only be saved from catastrophic collapse by sending in the American cavalry – Europe’s own governing class being apparently incapable of effective action.
“What on earth is the matter with Europe?” asks the rest of the world in exasperation. Is it inherently obtuse – unable to see the mess that it is in and the danger to which its incompetence is exposing everyone else? Or do its political leaders simply buckle in the face of popular pressure, too fearful of electoral retribution to confront their populations with the only real options that are available? Angela Merkel is now making seriously uncompromising noises about fiscal union: it is to go ahead, whatever anybody else says or thinks. No more messing. And Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be accepting this – for the moment. But watch this space. Rather belatedly, the European Parliament has woken up to the threat this represents to democratic principle: it has announced that if tax and spending policy is to be decided centrally by the EU, then it, being the only body elected by the people, should have co-responsibility for those decisions with the European Commission. In other words, since fiscal policy will be out of the hands of national governments, and therefore beyond the reach of a population’s own democratic process, it really ought to be accountable to some representative body. (The most extraordinary thing about this is that it was just an afterthought.)
Then of course, Mrs Merkel will never permit the European Central Bank to bail out all those feckless southern Europeans who mystifyingly refuse to behave like Germans. Or maybe she will, if the EU puppet regimes now in place in Greece and Italy actually enforce austerity measures that pauperise their peoples. But since she is opposed to the money-printing that would be required for such a bail-out (for what her country believes to be sound historical reasons), it is difficult to see how she could relent even if the Greeks and Italians were hammered into the economic Stone Age. Meanwhile, in the back rooms, unknown officials are working out what is actually going to be done if and when the euro collapses: while this charade of absolutely-last-chance summits runs its course, the contingency planners are outlining the mechanisms that will contain the damage. You may find this reassuring, but think what it really means: economic policy is now outside of the control of politics – which is to say, no longer accountable to voters. Do all those people in the rest of the world who just want Europe to (as George Osborne puts it) “sort itself out”, understand this?
In truth, it is almost impossible to understand the European dilemma because it is so arcane – so weighed down with historical accretions and ideological obscurantism – that it has become impenetrable even to the principal players in what is turning into a tragedy of monumental proportions. The original plan was designed out of remorse on the one hand – to heal Europe’s ancient hatreds – but also to ensure that the unified power of the new European bloc would be a check on the overweening might of the United States. Instead, the old enmities and suspicions have been energetically revived and the US has, with its usual reluctance and misgivings, been forced to come to the rescue. Isn’t this where we came in? The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said last week that war on the Continent could recur. It was unclear whether this was intended as a warning or a threat.
To Americans, an inability to escape from the past is incomprehensible: theirs is a country composed entirely of people who did exactly that. But Europe is populated by the people who did not leave, whose collective memory is imbued with either blood-and-soil national identity, or a proud sense of historical mission. It was a mistake to think that all this could be expunged as an act of political will by a single generation which saw itself as uniquely enlightened. Like most benign oligarchies, the EU built this new entity on what it thought to be morally unimpeachable, immutable principles: the provision of universal security which would prevent populations from descending into fractured, hostile factions. Civil unrest – and the terrible international crimes to which it gave rise – would be eradicated for ever by a system of social engineering and welfare that would provide permanent well-being (and so, permanent peace).
In fact, that generation was as much a product of its times – and its own collective memory – as any other. The welfare and security that the “new” Europe distributed to its masses was a function of inherited class guilt: as much a tribute to the past as what had preceded it. The extent to which the entitlement culture that it bred contained both moral and economic risk did not become fully clear until it was extended beyond the core countries that had created it. (But in truth, if you can remember this far back, Germany’s lavish pensions and welfare programmes were under intolerable strain long before the euro crisis exploded.) It is no coincidence that this was largely a western European problem: the eastern bloc, being Marxist, chose to venerate work. Therefore it did not tolerate idleness. Therefore it had no welfare system. What it had was “full employment”. People did phoney make-work jobs and got paid phoney money that was worthless outside the Soviet currency zone. (That is why the eastern Europeans who come here are so willing to take any employment on offer, and may turn out to be the saviours of western capitalism.)
What is to be done about Europe’s politicians who seem determined to make themselves irrelevant? Presumably it is much too late to persuade them that there is no such entity as “Europe” – no cohesive, homogenised conglomeration which will submit to the forcible erasure of its various historical experiences. The elected leaders will be displaced either openly or secretly by technocrats – faceless, unaccountable functionaries who really will “sort out” the shambles that is left behind without having to consult the people at all. The rest of the world will probably sigh with relief.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Leon Panetta Warns Israel About Growing Isolation
Panetta: Israel should ‘just get to the damn table’ with Palestine
Obama administration officials often seem to be walking on eggshells when they talk about issues involving Israel. So it was interesting Friday night to hear Defense Secretary Leon Panetta forcefully caution a U.S.-Israeli audience about the dangers of bombing Iran and tell Israel to “just get to the damn table” in peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Panetta was speaking to a gathering of the Saban Forum, an annual U.S.-Israeli dialogue about issues affecting the two countries. He made the comments in a unrehearsed question-and-answer session following what was a fairly cautious and predictable speech. He liked the “just get to the damn table” line so much that he repeated it, for good measure.
The most revealing answer came when Panetta was asked how long an Israel bombing attack on Iran would retard that country’s nuclear program. He argued that because targets are dispersed and hard to destroy, such an attack would likely delay Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon by only one to two years.
Against that meager potential gain, Panetta counterposed the danger of “unanticipated consequences,” including rallying support for a regime that is now isolated; the likelihood that the U.S. would be blamed and might be included in any retaliatory response; and the possibility of “escalation” that could broaden into a larger war in the region. For these reasons, he said, military action against Iran should be a “last resort.”
The audience included senior Israeli officials attending the forum. They gave Panetta a standing ovation at the end of his remarks, as they had at the beginning. He may also have earned an award for “chutzpah,” in voicing comments that are widely shared by U.S. officials but rarely expressed so bluntly in public.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Ron Paul Banned for Not Following His Israeli Minders in the Republican Jewish Coalition
Republican Jewish Coalition Bars Ron Paul From Presidential Debate, Saying He's Too "misguided and extreme"
On Wednesday, Dec. 7, the Republican Jewish Coalition will host a presidential-candidates forumfeaturing Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. Not invited is the GOP candidate currently polling around third in New Hampshire and second in Iowa: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). The explanation:
Paul was not invited to attend the RJC's candidates forum because the organization - as it has stated numerous times in the past - "rejects his misguided and extreme views," said [RJC Executive Director Matt] Brooks."He's just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization," Brooks said. Inviting Paul to attend would be "like inviting Barack Obama to speak."
Link via the Twitter feed of an approving Jamie Kirchick.
Brooks gave a more detailed critique of Ron Paul back in May:
"As Americans who are committed to a strong and vigorous foreign policy, we are deeply concerned about the prospective presidential campaign of Congressman Ron Paul. While Rep. Paul plans to run as a Republican, his views and past record place him far outside of the Republican mainstream. His candidacy, as we've seen in his past presidential campaigns, will appeal to a very narrow constituency in the U.S. electorate. Throughout his public service, Paul has espoused a dangerous isolationist vision for the U.S. and our role in the world. He has been a virulent and harsh critic of Israel during his tenure in Congress*. Most recently Paul gave an interview in which he voiced his objection to the recent killing of Osama Bin Laden.Brooks added, "We certainly respect Congressman Paul's right to run, but we strongly reject his misguided and extreme views, which are not representative of the Republican Party."
Weird punctuation in the original.
So what are these "extreme views"? Over at The Huffington Post, Dovid Efune, the director of The Algemeiner Journal and Gershon Jacobson Foundation, offers an explanation:
Paul's positions on Israel have been almost uniformly derided. Whilst claiming to be non-interventionist on the issue, he has routinely adopted Arab talking points on Israel, evencomparing Gaza to 'a concentration camp.' His Isolationist mantra may appeal to fiscal conservatives, but in the real world its implementation would create a global power vacuum that would likely be filled by supporters of Israel's enemies.
Anti Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman has a perhaps unintentionally interesting take about Paul, U.S. politics, and Israel:
with the exception of Ron Paul, there is not much difference between the parties
And no orthodoxy-definition would be complete without David Frum:
Of the 8 candidates competing for the Republican presidential nomination, 7 declared themselves intense supporters of the State of Israel, the sole exception being crank no-hoper Ron Paul.
I'm no expert on Ron Paul's Israel views, and I reserve the right to be outraged later by what I don't know now, but what I find interesting here is the namecalling-to-content ratio. Here, let's count it out:
Name-calling: 1) "misguided and extreme," 2) "so far outside of the mainstream," 3) "like...Barack Obama," 4) "will appeal to a very narrow constituency," 5) "dangerous isolationist vision," 6) "uniformly derided," 7) "claim[s] to be non-interventionist," 8) "Isolationist," 9) "differen[t]," 10) "crank."
Content: 1) "virulent and harsh critic of Israel," 2) "voiced his objection to the...killing of Osama Bin Laden," 3) "routinely adopted Arab talking points," 4) "compar[ed] Gaza to 'a concentration camp," 5) "would create a global power vacuum that would likely be filled by supporters of Israel's enemies."
Looking at the five content items, 1) is supported only by 4); 2) intentionally left out the phrase "legal method of," 3) is a general and largely contentless insult, 4) is a discrete piece of hyperbole that rubs my literalist heart the wrong way, too (though the full quote contains two qualifiers: "Palestinians are virtually in like a concentration camp"); and 5) is the Transitive Property run amok, though it does at least hint at the real-world question/critique of what, exactly, replaces hegemonic American responsibility for world affairs, and which bad actors are more likely to do badder things.
Does this, plus Paul's principled rejection of all foreign aid, his relentless espousal of the "blowback" theory of terrorism, and his negligence in allowing to appear under his name during the first Clinton administration some newsletter conspiracy theorizing about (among other things) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing being a "setup by the Israeli Mossad" enough to disqualify him for the grownups' table on foreign policy?
Well, I'm neither Republican nor Jewish nor a member of a Coalition, so the immediate event is not my call (though I do believe that dissonance is more illuminating than seven-part harmony). That said, this seems to me more of an attempt to draw boundaries around acceptable policy discourse than any active concern that President Dr. Ron Paul would be actively anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. The fact that he is a political outlier on an effectively bipartisan U.S. foreign policy that has become increasingly expensive and unpopular strikes me as a count in favor, not against. And nothing Paul said at last month's largely grotesque American Enterprise Institute foreign policy debate struck me as more objectionable than Mitt Romney's grovel that his first overseas trip as president would be to Israel.
Some other bullet-pointed observations and gratuitous commenter bait:
* The New York Sun editorial board, not known for its unfriendliness toward Israel, defended Paulboth from charges of anti-Semitism and foreign policy insanity last year.
* Here's how quickly Paul's anti-interventionist rhetoric can be turned into charges of "anti-Semitic arguments," courtesy of Ben Stein. (Slightly less inflammatory accusations from David Horowitzcirca March 2007. UPDATE: And, thanks to commenter Ken E., a considerably more inflammatory accusation from the Horo show this February: "Ron Paul Is A Vicious Anti-Semite and Anti-American and Conservatives Need To Wash Their Hands of Him.")
* Some Republicans tried to bar Paul from all debates back in May 2007 on grounds that his overall foreign policy views were "just so off the wall and out of whack."
* Here's Paul himself talking to then-Reasoner David Weigel in May 2007, in response to charges of old newsletter "anti-Semitism."
Thursday, December 01, 2011
As Predicted Here, The Fed Rescues the Europeans With Cheap US Dollars
Fed saves Europe's banks as ECB stands pat
Stripped to essentials, America is once again having to rescue Europe from itself.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
International business editor
9:01PM GMT 30 Nov 201
TELEGRAPH
The interwoven banking and sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone has become so dangerous for the world that the US Federal Reserve has been forced to take emergency action, acting as global lender of last resort to shore up Europe's banking system.
That it should have to do so as Germany and the European Central Bank hold back for legal reasons and refuse to commit decisive power adds a strange diplomatic twist.
The move came once it was clear that Europe's prostrate banks would struggle to roll over $2 trillion (£1.3 trillion) of debts denominated in dollars. Data from ratings agency Fitch shows that US money markets have slashed funding for French banks by 69pc and German banks by 50pc.
Strains have been ratcheting up over the past two weeks. European banks are mostly shut out of the dollar market, or only able to raise money for a week at a time.
The so-called "stress alarm" – the euro/dollar three-month cross currency basis swap – spiralled down to minus 166 points early on Wednesday, uncannily like the last days before the Lehman crisis metastasized in October 2008.
The stress has been rising in lockstep with Italian, Spanish, Belgian and French bond yields for two weeks, but became violent after eurozone finance ministers admitted on Tuesday night that they were unable to leverage Europe's bail-out fund much beyond €600bn (£514bn). "Conditions have changed, so it is likely to be less than €1 trillion," said Eurogroup chair Jean-Claude Juncker.
The joint offer of currency swap lines by the central banks of the US, Britain, Japan, Canada, Switzerland and the ECB preserves the polite fiction that this was to "ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit", but this was a Fed action to provide cheap dollar funding and head off a lethal crunch in Europe.
China took its own precautions – perhaps in concert – cutting its reserve ratio for the first time in three years to boost liquidity.
"Concerns have been building that Europe's banking system could go into meltdown," said Marc Ostwald from Monument Securities. "But the central banks may also have been worried that eurozone politicians will fail to deliver much at their December summit, so they need a mechanism in place to cope with the fall-out.”
Andrew Roberts, rates chief at RBS, said European bank stress was reaching extreme levels. "They couldn't allow a sudden stop to the system. This at least takes away the precipice risk for now, but Europe is not going to able to tackle this crisis properly until Germany agrees to cross the Rubicon and accept massive bond buying by the ECB," he said.
There is little evidence yet that Berlin is willing to lift its veto on eurobonds or an ECB blitz. Chancellor Angela Merkel said it was "not appropriate" for to Germany drop its objections as a quid pro quo for backing from other EU states for treaty changes to police budgets. German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble said mass bond purchases and eurobonds are both illegal under EU treaties and remain "out of the question”.
However, Germany is increasingly isolated, both in EU capitals and on the ECB's governing council. Austrian, Dutch and Finnish ministers have all opened the door over recent days for a bigger role for the ECB.
The Bank of France's governor Christian Noyer appeared to break ranks on Wednesday with the German-led bloc of ECB hawks, reflecting the political rift between Paris and Berlin on crisis strategy.
"It is essential to stabilise European bond markets. We have to recognise that the necessary degree of fiscal adjustment is heavily dependent on the level of market confidence," he said.
Jacques Cailloux from RBS said the ECB will cut interest rates to 1pc – perhaps 0.75pc – next week. It will take action to back-stop the financial system but will not yet open the floodgates to bond purchases or resort to quantitative easing.
"While the ECB is not the lender of last resort for sovereigns, it is for banks," he said. The measures are likely to include extending unlimited credit to lenders under its Long-Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO) to two or three years, with a broader range of collateral accepted, such as certificates of deposit and even dollar assets.
Whether such steps can bring Euroland back from the brink is unclear. Eurozone ministers appear to have little up their sleeves, hoping that the International Monetary Fund can do part of the heavy lifting. "We envisage a greater role for the IMF: that will be sufficient together with the EFSF," said Jan Kees de Jager, Holland's finance minister.
Yet the IMF is short of money. A US Treasury official said Washington is not willing to pay more into the IMF at this point, while Jim Flaherty, Canada's finance minister, said the Fund should not be used to bail out rich countries.
The drama always comes back to the ECB. Will it blink?
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