Putin elected again in Russia’s One Party “Democracy” but with smaller margin

Russia’s Putin and party suffer election blow

by  Timothy Heritage   and  Ralph Boulton

(Reuters) – Russian voters have dealt Vladimir Putin’s ruling party a heavy blow by cutting its parliamentary majority in an election that showed growing unease with his domination of the country as he prepares to reclaim the presidency.

Incomplete results showed Putin’s United Russia was struggling even to win 50 percent of the votes in Sunday’s election, compared with more than 64 percent four years ago. Opposition parties said even that outcome was inflated by fraud.

Although Putin is still likely to win a presidential election in March, Sunday’s result could dent the authority of the man who has ruled for almost 12 years with a mixture of hardline security policies, political acumen and showmanship but was booed and jeered after a martial arts bout last month.

United Russia had 49.94 percent of the votes after results were counted in 70 percent of voting districts for the election to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Exit polls had also put United Russia below 50 percent.

“These elections are unprecedented because they were carried out against the background of a collapse in trust in Putin, (President Dmitry) Medvedev and the ruling party,” said Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal opposition leader barred from running.

“I think that the March (presidential) election will turn into an even bigger political crisis; disappointment, frustration, with even more dirt and disenchantment, and an even bigger protest vote.”

Putin made his mark restoring order in a country suffering from a decade of chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He moved quickly to crush a separatist rebellion in the southern Muslim Chechen region, restored Kremlin control over wayward regions and presided over an economic revival.

He has maintained a tough man image with stunts such as riding a horse bare chested, tracking tigers and flying a fighter plane. But the public appears to have wearied of the antics and his popularity, while still high, has fallen.

Many voters, fed up with widespread corruption, refer to United Russia as the party of swindlers and thieves and resent the huge gap between the rich and poor. Some fear Putin’s return to the presidency may herald economic and political stagnation.

PUTIN SAYS OPTIMAL RESULT

Putin and Medvedev, who took up the presidency in 2008 when Putin was forced to step down after serving a maximum two consecutive terms, made a brief appearance at a subdued meeting at United Russia headquarters.

Medvedev said United Russia, which had previously held a two thirds majority allowing it to change the constitution without opposition support, was prepared to forge alliances on certain issues to secure backing for legislation.

“This is an optimal result which reflects the real situation in the country,” Putin, 59, said. “Based on this result we can guarantee stable development of our country.”

But there was little to cheer for the man who has dominated Russian politics since he became acting president when Boris Yeltsin quit at the end of 1999 and was elected head of state months later.

His path back to the presidency may now be a little more complicated, with signs growing that voters feel cheated by his decision to swap jobs with Medvedev next year and dismayed by the prospect of more than a decade more of one man at the helm.

“It’s the beginning of the end,” political analysts Andrei Piontkovsky said. “It (the result) shows a loss of prestige for the party and the country’s leaders.”

COMMUNIST GAINS

Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communists were the main beneficiaries, their vote almost doubling to around 20 percent, according to the partial results.

“Russia has a new political reality even if they rewrite everything,” said Sergei Obukhov, a communist parliamentarian.

Many of the votes were cast in protest against United Russia rather than in support of communist ideals because the Party is seen by some Russians as the only credible opposition force.

“With sadness I remember how I passionately vowed to my grandfather I would never vote for the Communists,” Yulia Serpikova, 27, a freelance location manager in the film industry, said. “It’s sad that with the ballot in hand I had to tick the box for them to vote against it all.”

Opposition parties complained of election irregularities in parts of the country spanning 9,000 km (5,600 miles) and a Western-financed electoral watchdog and two liberal media outlets said their sites had been shut down by hackers intent on silencing allegations of violations.

The sites of Ekho Moskvy radio station, online news portal Slon.ru and the watchdog Golos went down at around 8 a.m. even though Medvedev had dismissed talk of electoral fraud.

Police said 70 people were detained in the second city of St Petersburg and dozens were held in Moscow in a series of protests against alleged fraud.

Opposition parties say the election was unfair from the start because of authorities’ support for United Russia with cash and television air time.

Independent political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said a separate analysis showed that United Russia fell even further in cities — where it had between 30-35 percent of the votes and the Communist have 20-25 percent.

“This is a bad climate for Putin. He has got used to the fact that he controls everything, but now how can he go into a presidential campaign when United Russia has embittered people against their leader?” he asked.

Putin has as yet no serious personal rivals as Russia’s leader. He remains the ultimate arbiter between the clans which control the world’s biggest energy producer.

The result is a blow also for Medvedev, who led United Russia into the election. His legitimacy as the next prime minister could now be in question. ($1 = 30.8947 Russian roubles)

(Writing by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Ralph Boulton)

Mark Steyn on Egypt’s Retrogression toward the Primitive

Egypt’s Descent
Two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for sharia.

by Mark Steyn     at the National Review Online:

“I’ve been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they’re unnerving enough. It’s the polls from Egypt. Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we’re so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going to throw trillions of dollars down the toilet they’d rather it was an Al Gore–compliant Kohler model in Des Moines or Poughkeepsie than an outhouse in Waziristan. Alas, reality does not arrange its affairs quite so neatly, and the world that is arising in the second decade of the 21st century is increasingly inimical to American interests, and likely to prove even more expensive to boot.

In that sense, Egypt is instructive. Even in the giddy live–from–Tahrir Square heyday of the “Arab Spring” and “Facebook Revolution,” I was something of a skeptic. Back in February, I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly within an hour or so of Mubarak’s resignation. Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was interviewing telegenic youthful idealists cooing about the flowering of a new democratic Egypt. Back on Fox, sourpuss Steyn was telling Megyn that this was “the unraveling of the American Middle East” and the emergence of a post-Western order in the region. In those days, I was so much of a pessimist I thought that in any election the Muslim Brotherhood would get a third of the votes and be the largest party in parliament. By the time the actual first results came through last week, the Brothers had racked up 40 percent of the vote — in Cairo and Alexandria, the big cities wherein, insofar as they exist, the secular Facebooking Anderson Cooper types reside. In second place were their principal rivals, the Nour party, with up to 15 percent of the ballots. “Nour” translates into English as “the Even More Muslim Brotherhood.” As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, if that’s how the urban sophisticates vote, wait till you see the upcountry results. By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called Facebook Revolution, two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of sharia.

The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak’s Egypt was worse than King Farouk’s Egypt, and what follows from last week’s vote will be worse still. If you’re a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian, or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its finance minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a member of parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as finance minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly “unipolar” world. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem like that, does it? The term “Facebook Revolution” presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging. In London, young Muslim men used their cellphones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more disassimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents. To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women’s rights or gay rights is delusional.”

Comment:   Americans should not forget that our founders did not believe in a dictatorship of the majority, as seems to be popular among nearly all of our Leftists, and some aggressive conservatives.    As it was  explained for generations  in the American language, “Democracy is majority rule with minority rights”.      The university esteemed such as New York Times Leftist, Thomas Friedman, whose both legs were tingling in joy at the Cairo riots in the street  called  the “Arab, Spring”,   seemed  never to have been taught the point.    Lefties repeated this joy at the ‘uprisings’ of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.    Yet other American Marxists, the better organized  by Labor, rioted for months in an effort to stop governance at the  Wisconsin state capitol in Madison during Labor’s “Wisconsin Spring this past year.

Rioting is a way of political and governmental life with the Marxist Left and always has been.

National ‘Education’ Association Spent $133,000,000 to Buy Influence for Marxism in 2010-2011

The NEA’s Full Disclosure:  $133 Million to

Preserve Its Influence

Dropout Nation just got a hold of the National Education Associaton’s 2010-2011 LM-2 filing with the National Education Association. The numbers are spectacular. The nation’s largest teachers’ union spent $133 million in 2010-2011 on lobbying and contributions to groups whose agendas (in theory) dovetail with its own. This included $255,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, the progressive think tank cofounded by Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, whose education reports generally take a pro-NEA slant; $40,000 to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (a leading advocate for the charter schools the NEA opposes so virulently); and $5,000 to the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, whose board members includes Elsie Scott, CEO of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The NAACP also hit it big, collecting $25,000 from the union this past fiscal year. Center for American Progress also collected some NEA cash, receiving $25,000; so did Barnett Berry’s Center for Teaching Quality, which garnered $318,848 from the union last fiscal year.

Please read further by clicking below:

http://dropoutnation.net/2011/12/02/more-on-how-the-nea-spends-133-million-to-preserve-influence/

http://dropoutnation.net/2011/11/30/the-neas-full-disclosure-133-million-to-preserve-its-influence/

Roger Kimball: Explaining the Difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street

So, a crowd of  “occupy Wall Street” cry-babies surged past my office in New York late yesterday afternoon, shouting, banging on drums, blowing whistles, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The police, which had lined the sidewalks with parade gates, looked bored. My colleagues at The New Criterion  and Encounter, peering out of the windows as the menagerie passed, seem to regard the spectacle with a combination of bemusement and contempt.  One of my New Criterion  colleagues sent along this message:

“Guess it wasn’t a green crowd”: Occupy Los Angeles protestors leave tons of trash.

Yesterday’s tantrum was heavily, indeed ostentatiously, union-fed, which explains the odor of thuggishness which accompanied the crowd as it marched down Broadway. What do they want? More money. When do they want it? Now? Where will it come from? You!

Repeat as necessarily.

The funniest aspect of this macabre puppet show is the “anti-capitalist” trope that is so prominent a feature of the OWS rhetoric. Just where do these children think that money, and the astonishing affluence it has brought in its wake, comes from? I sometimes suspect they are innocent of the facts of life, that they think the stork brings money into the world. The fact that capitalism is far and away the mightiest engine for the production of wealth that the world has ever seen hasn’t penetrated the adipose folds of their ideology. The pleasures of preening self-righteousness all but guarantee that such home truths never will be taken on board.

For a vivid taste of the humor, savor this delicious tidbit from The New York Times‘s  daily report on OWS:

The composer Philip Glass will make a statement at a General Assembly at Lincoln Center Thursday evening, where his opera, Satyagraha, on the life of Gandhi, is closing.

Occupy Wall Street. Philip Glass. Gandhi.  It really is droll.  There is a reason that George Orwell began his devastating essay on that Indian fraud with the observation that saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent. (It cost a lot of money, the historian Paul Johnson observed in his tart assessment of Gandhi in Modern Times, to keep Gandhi living in poverty.)

In any event, for anyone who wishes to understand the inherent futility of the whole OWS movement, I’d like to recommend Richard Epstein’s new Encounter Broadside, “Why Progressive Institutions are Unsustainable” (Kindle edition here.)  And for a taste of what’s at stake, take a look at this short video summary of Epstein’s argument, “The Tea Party vs. occupy Wall Street”:

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2011/12/02/the-tea-party-vs-occupy-wall-street/

Obamawaste in Hollywood yields more Obamafraud from YOUR TAX MONEY

How Did Obama’s Stimulus End Up Paying

a Rich Hollywood Director to Produce

 a Web Video Show?

 by Bryan Preston   at  Pajamas Media

Drudge links a provocative Washington Times headline today, “Online soap cleans up with stimulus broadband cash.” Reading the story, we learn that Hollywood director Robert Townsend got nearly $1 million in taxpayer dollars to produce a web video series entitled “Diary of a Single Mom.” The series is a feature on a website called pic.tv, the “pic” being an acronym for “Public Internet Channel.” That implies a PBS-like status. Google “pic.tv” and you’ll see that Townsend’s “Diary” series is pic.tv’s marquee offering.

Townsend isn’t exactly a fringe, struggling artist. It’s probably fair to say that he’s among the 1%.

But the taxpayer money he received to produce “Diary” is just a tiny portion of the money that the various web sites the show lives on got, also in taxpayer money.

On pic.tv’s “About” page, we learn that while it claims to be a “network of free websites with videos and tools to help you live a better life,” it’s a production of something called One Economy. Follow the links on One Economy to discover, as the Washington Times noted, that One Economy is also feeding at the stimulus trough.

In 2010, One Economy received one of the largest federal grants through the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act to expand affordable access, digital literacy training and online tools and resources to low-income communities across the United States.

They’re not kidding; through the stimulus, One Economy received a nice chunk of your change. Townsend’s “Diary” money came from One Economy’s stimulus grant.

According to grant reports, One Economy so far has invoiced the government $18.9 million of the $28.5 million awarded under the grant, with 142.47 jobs created. The jobs include field supervisors, sales representatives and program managers, as well as numerous production-related positions, such as producers, cast members, casting director and an executive assistant to Mr. Townsend.

Aren’t you glad to be paying for an executive assistant to a Hollywood director who can surely pay for one out of his own ample pockets?

This story gets even better. Remember, the money for all this came from the stimulus bill. That bill was supposed to create jobs. But that’s not exactly how One Economy sees their grant money. From the Times story:

Officials at One Economy said the grant wasn’t primarily about creating jobs. Instead, they said, the primary purpose was to increase broadband access and adoption, as well as to increase the number of people interacting with content “local and relevant to their lives.”

Prager Fans: How Would You Rank the Key Issues for 2012?

What Are the Key Issues for 2012?

by John Hinderaker    at PowerLine

I got a call today from a man who wants to run against Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s Fifth District. He seems like a good candidate and I suspect that he will get the nomination and that we will have more to say about him here. What I liked even more than his background (African-American born in the South Bronx, retired Marine officer) was his focus on what I think are the key issues: jobs and economic growth. Those words, in my opinion, are the talisman for 2012.

Yahoo News is running a poll on what is the top issue for 2012. The results, I think, are revealing. Yahoo News is a left-leaning site and its survey, like any internet poll, is unscientific. Yet when more than a quarter of a million people vote, the results are not meaningless. Here is where the voting currently stands:

These results are striking. Jobs–my vote–win in a landslide. In second place is “role of government,” which I take to be shorthand for “Tea Party.” Everything else is way behind. Income inequality gets 10%; those are the hard core liberals, but they aren’t numerous enough to scare anyone. Taxes are right behind at 9%. Some people care about immigration and health care–8% each–but those are secondary concerns at best, and education (3%), foreign policy (3%) and environment (dead last at 2%) are footnotes.

So, the bottom line is: any Republican candidate who doesn’t talk 24/7 about jobs and economic growth, in the context of getting government out of the way, is crazy.