Democratic Party, Putin-Style

The more I learn about the American voting system -- and it takes several election cycles to cut through the murk -- the less "democratic" it seems.

Get this, forty-percent of the delegates currently at stake for Democratic presidential contenders are "super-delegates." The voters don't vote for these 842 people; they're high-ranking Democratic Party members: governors, leaders of the Democratic National Committee, former Presidents, like Bill Clinton. And they all go to the National Convention, just like the delegates the voters send, and pledge their vote to a candidate during the nominating stage.

This came as a surprise this morning, when I went to go check the delegate count, and, instead of seeing a field just now getting started, discovered Clinton way out ahead.

She has 159 "super-delegates," dwarfing the number she's received in Iowa and New Hampshire so far, and more than 100 more than the next candidate, Barack Obama.

Apparently, this isn't a centuries-old tradition in the Party either. As this MSNBC report states, it just a generation ago, when grass-roots movements, including those calling for women's rights, began to shake up the old Guard. The Democratic Party needed something to keep it stabilized through this volatile time, so the system was born.

“There was a belief that they would not want candidates who were dramatically out of sync with the rest of the party — particularly if these were people who were going to have to run on the same ticket with them,” says Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer, who has written extensively on the nomination process.

There were, Mayer says, two motives in giving elected officials a big voice in the nomination.

“One was not to get (ideologically) extreme candidates; the other was to avoid the Jimmy Carter phenomenon — where you had a guy who was not very experienced and not very well regarded by most of his fellow governors, but nevertheless managed to win the party’s nomination,” Mayer said.

Now, one of my favorite hobbies is questioning the American press' demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is not because I'm a Putin man. It's because I don't know why the American Press refuses to question anything in its own country, from the faulty intelligence and fear-mongering of the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the war in Iraq to the very things the press sees as problematic abroad. Such as President Putin's decision, in 2004, to directly name his country's regional governors, rather than leave this to the voting public.

Now, if it's undemocratic for him to do this -- something I constantly am told in the slicks and dailies -- isn't it also undemocratic for the Democratic party to give itself 4 out of every ten votes in the nominating process for its candidate for the President of the United States? The Republican Party doesn't do it. And the blessed Greens would sooner cut down a tree.

But I suppose Putin, Time Magazine's Man of the Year, would be proud.


A Tsar is Born indeed.

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Geography of the Heart

The Geography of the Heart
How US immigration law divides families
By Stephan Clark

One Sunday almost four years ago, Thomas Carson, a 50-year old electrical engineer with corporate commendations from Nabisco and General Electric, parked his KIA Sportsman near the US-Mexico border and waited.

It was after dark in Las Milpas, once the largest colonia – or border settlement – in South Texas. Since being absorbed by the City of Pharr to the north in the late-eighties, this community of low- and very low-income Hispanics had almost doubled in size, reaching a population of 17,000. It had also received the type of things most Americans believe lacking in only the third world: running water and electricity, sewer service and paved roads. With such improvements, the community no longer laid claim to the state’s highest incidence of tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and leprosy, and it had even attracted the development of a Jack in the Box.

But one thing about Las Milpas remained unchanged in July 2003: its close proximity to the border. It was that which brought people like Carson here, just as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) had brought business to the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, then not quite ten years old.

Carson parked near the intersection of Highway 281 and East Dicker Road. Beside him in his SUV was his son, 11-month-old Thomas Alexander, secure in his baby-seat. Further south was the boy’s mother, Carson’s girlfriend of five years, one Lucia Ramirez Hernandez. This night, she wouldn’t be traveling over Pharr’s celebrated bridge.

Hernandez had attempted that crossing in Jan. 1999, just a few months before a fire at a maquiladora in Reynosa would send Carson south of the border on work. Her crime that day was simple: after being stopped in a car with Texas plates, she made a false claim of U.S. citizenship.

Since 1996, when Congress last overhauled immigration law, this act has drawn a punishment as severe – a lifetime ban on entering the United States – as it is permanent. Hernandez cannot appeal or seek a waiver. She is no different than the terrorists, communists and practicing polygamists also singled out by law. She has no means of appeal.

“It wouldn’t matter if someone had a pistol to your side and you drove up to the border crossing and said, ‘I’m a US citizen,’” said Carson. “That’s it. You’re inadmissible. You don’t have a case.”

And so that night four years ago, while Carson and Thomas Alexander waited in the dark, Hernandez stepped into the river that runs along the Texas border between the Gulf of Mexico and El Paso. It is a tributary President Bush knows well. Going back to his days as Governor of Texas, he has frequently said family values do not end at the Rio Grande.

After emerging on the other side, Hernandez got into a car and continued toward her family. Carson spotted her passing the little strip plaza where they’d agreed to meet. He followed her to an area home, where Hernandez changed clothes and got into Carson’s SUV. The three then drove north – father, son and mother – toward the secondary inspection point at Falfurrias.

Eight months previous, Carson, a US Navy veteran, had imagined a reunion of another sort, petitioning for an immigrant’s visa on behalf of Hernandez and her two children from a previous relationship. But the false claim of U.S. citizenship derailed that effort, and so the descendant of five American veterans of five different foreign wars had been left with only what he’d been taught in the military: if you are captured, you must try to escape.

“We were desperate,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.“

Parts 2-8 of this story can be purchased at Amazon.

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The Cost of the War in Afghanistan

For the Soviet Union, it was Exit, Stage Left.

For America, the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq) now costs $8 billion a month, including $70 billion in the newly approved $448 billion Pentagon budget.

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Ukraine to join NATO?

The Financial Times reports that Ukraine may be on the fast-track toward NATO membership:

The US would like Ukraine to join the membership action plan by September and certainly before a Nato summit in Riga in November. That would give the country the prospect of becoming a member before President George W. Bush leaves office in early 2009.

If Ukraine joined NATO, Ukraine's borders would be protected by NATO troops, meaning any dispute between Russia and Ukraine (in The Crimea, perhaps, a Russian-leaning region which was gifted to The Ukrainian Socialist Republic by Kruschev) would be a dispute between the Kremlin and The White House.

My Russian tutor is one of many people in this region of the country who are strongly opposed to NATO membership, in large part because of fears that travel back and forth between Ukraine and Russia would be made more difficult. Born in Kursk, just over the border, my tutor is like the majority of people in Kharkov -- an ethnic Russian.

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Fireworks

During the run-up to the New Year, I determined that Kharkov has more fireworks displays than any other city in the world. Entirely unscientific of course, but this is how I determine things. Just about every night, sometimes two or three times an evening, I'd hear loud booming crashes that'd send me scrambling to my window. Sometimes it'd just be a faint illumination over the tops of apartment buildings, a flash and then gone. Street to street fighting -- that's what it reminded me of, especially when the latest pwoo-pwoo-pwoo coincided with a car racing by beneath my window. But slowly I began to realize it was just fireworks. A splatter of light would spread across the sky, a red burst, a green one, maybe blue, and then it'd be gone. Sometimes full fireworks shows would be heard and seen in the periphery, coming from Svobody Square or Karl Marx -- something I'd see out my bedroom or living room window.

Last night, I caught one at Svobody Square, formerly Dzherzinsky Square, where Lenin still stands, of course, as I've shown in many photographs before. The show caught me and my friend off-guard. We were just walking through Schevchenko Park, thinking there really was quite a crowd. It was the first weekend of spring, we decided, so we figured everyone was just glad to have the opportunity to be out and about. There was light drizzle in the air, puddles on the ground, mud beneath the feet -- but all but a few dirt-blackened piles of snow were cleared, and the weather was plus 7 or plus 8.

This thinking began to change a little when we got to the square and saw a huge crowd of people standing around enjoying the music. I looked for some tents, some sign of a carnival or a bazaar, maybe a stage, but nothing. Just people standing, drinking, talking, everyone vaguely facing in the direction of Lenin and the music. A pony passed, a child in the saddle. I looked more closely for the source of the Russian pop songs: a small blue bus bearing the name of the state telephone monopoly, Ukretelecom. It had four old-style speakers mounted on top. On the side of the bus, a neat painted message: Zbukova Reklama. Essentially, radio commercials.

A few minutes later, the fireworks filled the sky, majestic burst of every color you could mate with a pile of gunpowders. Reds, yellows, blues, greens. The crowd ooh'd and ah'd as the fireworks shot up, spread out, seems to come raining down right on top of us like the special effects for warp speed in some science-fiction movie. I began to revert to US-thinking, insurance hazards, municipal codes, because these fireworks were shooting up into the air from right behind Lenin and going off low in the skies. Some fireworks sent a line of five or six glowing dots floating through the air on the hold of a little parachute. They drifted toward the Kharkov Hotel, the old Military University. They came down in trees and onto buildings, these and other fireworks, the lights streaming down still afire as they hit the ground.

It seemed to go on forever, one percussive boom after another. The woman with the pony calmed her animal, stroking its face, and then all eyes went to a hanging display of sparkling fireworks that were drawn out against a wire background and kept aloft by a crane. It lit up in front of Lenin, while a voice from the old propaganda bus announced the name of the political party now sparkling lit up in the sky for all to see, spelled out in sparkling yellow and blue: Party of Regions. And then lighting up above, Victory, as the bus announced the same, and the crowd continued to ooh and ahh.

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Ukraine Elections: Who Kharkov Voted For

During last weekend's parliamentary election, Victor Yanukovich's Party of Regions won the majority of votes in Kharkiv -- a little more than 51 percent, according to The Central Election Commission (the website offers English or Ukrainian webpages, but not those in Russian, which earlier this month was made the official second language in Kharkov Oblast).

Overall, Yanukovich got 32 percent of the vote, including roughly three-quarters of the vote in Lugansk and Donetsk, the two most eastern of Ukraine's regions. Yanukovich's party was followed by the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc (22 percent, 12 in Kharkov) and Victor Yushennko's Our Ukraine party (14, 5 percent in Kharkov).

The Communists, fifth nationwide, came in fourth in Kharkov, with 4.56 percent of the vote. The Socialists, who sell themselves as Swedish socialists, placed fourth nationwide with almost six percent of the vote, but were only the seventh most popular party in Kharkov. Suppose this is no town for Swedes.

The Green Party didn't even get one percent of the vote north of Kiev, in the region that includes Chornobyl. But maybe that speaks more for the need for coalition than anything else. There were 45 parties on the ballot, including three other environmental parties and The Party of Putin's Politics, the last of which got .12 percent of the vote (those voters, I suspect, who don't think Yanukovich leans toward Moscow quite enough -- voters who'd rather just jump right into President Putin's lap).

Almost two percent of voters took advantage of a box that allows people to "vote against all."

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Cold War, Take Two?

The New York Times today says Russia may have shared plans of the US invasion of Iraq with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad.

The information came from Iraqi documents captured by American forces after the invasion. Those documents, Pentagon officials said Friday, indicated that information obtained by a Russian source from the United States Central Command had been passed to Baghdad.

While some of the information proved accurate — including that American ground forces coming from Kuwait would pass through the Karbala area — a key fact was wrong. The incursion from Kuwait was not a diversionary force but the main focus of the attack.

It's possible this was a part of a disinformation campaign, but I fail to understand why US officials would allow this story to remain a subject of uncertainty, when, if proven false, it could only embarass and infuriate the Russians. Senator Edward Kennedy, for one, has already suggested a possible boycott of the upcoming G8 summit in St. Petersburg.

A Russian spokesmen rejected reports of the leak as "absolutely nonsense," saying the Pentagon only wants to get Russia "to press Iran more actively to curb its nuclear program."

In other news, 30 beheaded bodies were found in Iraq this weekend, and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News viewers that it was "entirely possible" that the US could bring home a significant number of troops within the year. She then pointed to the window and said, "Oh look, a bluebird! And right behind it? A pretty rainbow!"

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Election Day

Others are better equipped to report on today's parliamentary elections. As of this writing, though, it appears Victor Yanukovitch's Party of Regions is in the lead, with roughly the same amount of the vote given to the leaders of the Orange Revolution, President Victor Yushenko and Yulia Timoshenko. Timoshenko had served as Yushenko's Prime Minister until late last summer, when Yushenko fired her. Politics being what it is, her support -- and more importantly the support of her voters -- then went elsewhere.

~

While walking down Sumskaya Street this afternoon, I had intended to point out a building to a friend. About two weeks ago, I'd noticed that pictures of Yanukovitch had gone up in the many panes of its many windows -- maybe forty or fifty smiling pictures of the Donbass-based politician, the same smiling face looking down on Kharkov's main shopping district. But today they were gone. All election ads have to be removed two days before the polling begins. That, without a doubt, is the best election law I've ever heard of.

~

During the run-up to the election, Yanukovitch's Party of Regions was by far the most visible group in the city, but somehow Yulia Tymoshenko's white tents and banners, though the last to appear, were somehow more conspicuous. She preached her message in Ukrainian. Yanukovitch and the others did not, though as the lady selling piroshky across from Yanukovitch's tent makes change in Rubles, it's Ukrainian that seems less the national language around here than Russian.

Me, I've tried to stay out of the fray since Day One, when I realized the political ramifications of the reusable shopping bag I'd brought with me from the states: a small, orange mesh bag. I used it once, feeling uncomfortable carrying it out on the street. I imagined people staring. Looking. Feared someone would come up behind me and knock me and all my mayonnaise to the ground.

But then three nights before the election, when I go into the big supermarket, I can't avoid the color. There at the check-stand, along with free copies of Yushenko's Our Ukraine Party newspaper, were orange plastic bags bearing his revolutionary slogan: Tak! The bagger used them without even asking. And if that had happened in America, if on the eve of election the bagger had said, "Bush or Kerry?" instead of "Paper or Plastic?" ... oh, as Bellow's Herzog might have said, someone would've been getting a letter.

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The WBC & The Evil Empire

They're playing a World Cup-style tournament over in the Americas and Asia, the World Baseball Classic. With only sixteen teams, it's not yet worldly (the Italians are comprised almost entirely of Italian-Americans) and it's certainly not yet a classic, but all the same it's the first thing that's made me really miss ESPN.

What do I miss? Comments like this from Team Canada Coach Ernie Whitt, describing his club's feelings after almost losing to South Africa, the weakest team in the tournament, on Monday:

"We felt we were kicked in the stomach last night playing South Africa," Whitt said.

Why do I miss something so banal? Because in the same NY Times article detailing Canada's 8-6 victory over the US on Tuesday -- a big upset -- Team USA Coach Buck Martinez describes his club's reaction by saying:

"It's a very quiet clubhouse," Martinez said after the game. "Guys feel like they got kicked in the stomach."

It reminds me of the Presidential debates, circa 2000, when the only guy with anything different to say wasn't invited on stage.

This is why I went back to baseball after the strike. I need something simple and warm, an intellectual cup of cocoa. "How you feeling?" "Like I just got kicked in the stomach." "Boy howdy, you and me both."

I'm so pleased with the NY Times' reporting, I might even starting going there regularly for my sports news (or my sport news as the BBC World would have it). ESPN only had one kicked-in-the-stomach reference, showing it cares nothing for words and the deeper meaning of things. Though their story on the game did include this reference:

The World Baseball Classic -- (Commissioner Bud) Selig's baby -- could lead to some wonderful marketing opportunities and global talent development down the road. But before Beijing produces a shortstop with Yao Ming-caliber appeal or Yankees T-shirts become the rage in Moscow, life goes on as usual here in the states.

Thing is, I see so much Yankees merchandise over here it makes me sick. You go to Barabashova Market, where you can get anything and everything at one of the hundreds of little stalls and stands, and there are all sorts of NY Yankee caps for sale -- the pull-down kind you wear in the winter. I wouldn't invoke President Reagan's rhetoric and call this The Evil Empire, but you can't find any other baseball merchandise over here. No Sox caps, no Giants shirts. Just Yankees gear.

I miss baseball.

(An excerpt from Reagan's Evil Empire Speech before going: "Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root." For those who remember.)

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Pancake Week

When I went to visit my language tutor on Wednesday (see below), I made my usual left from the front door, toward the sitting room, only to be turned back around and shown to a seat in the kitchen. Here, I was served two thick bliny, one of which I ate with sour cream, the other with homemade jam. It was the first day of spring and, I learned, time to celebrate maslenitsa -- the week-long Orthodox version of the Roman Catholic Carnival.

Raisa Dmitrievna told me the holiday dates back to pre-Christian times, when people cooked bliny, or pancakes, as a way to celebrate the end of winter and the approach of spring. The round, gold pancake is the same shape and color of the sun, she said. I looked out the window, where a wall of white was coming down. It had been snowing for a day and wasn't scheduled to let up any through the writing of this on Sunday. Some first day of spring, I thought. My tutor must've seen this on my face. She said the weather followed the old calendar. It'd start warming up on the fourteenth, she said.

This weekend, someone else told me that Maslenitsa is the last chance for people to have much fun, because it represents the last week before the onset of the Great Lent -- or fast.

From the wikipedia:

During the Lent itself meat, fish, dairy products and eggs will be forbidden. Furthermore, the Lent also excludes parties, secular music, dancing and other distractions from the spiritual life. Thus, Maslenitsa represents the last chance to meet with the worldly delights.

Today on Svobody Square, President Victor Yushenko's Our Ukraine party was on display, handing out free bliny to all comers (picture above). I think political parties must rent out the square -- the Greens were there on Friday night (less expensive, I'm sure, than the last day of Maslenitsa Week).

After seeing plenty of people eating a complimentary bliny, and then kids getting pony rides and walking around with free balloons, I was reminded of that great American political tradition, the parking lot hot-dog give-away. "My name's Jim Williams and I'm running for mayor. Can I get you a hot dog? How you take that? Extra mustard? Yeah, that's what I like to hear. Have you a Pepsi. Vote for me. I'm pro-jobs and anti-crime."

The political rhetoric is really heating up around here -- or at least the visibility of the approaching parliamentary elections, which are at the end of the month. Billboards, TV spots, the rallies on Svobody Square -- it should be quite a spectacle, though sadly one I won't be able to watch backstage. I had meant to monitor the elections (an offer was made to people connected in some way with the Department of State, the monitoring to be done by a European NGO) but I forgot to get my request in by Friday. I've been writing a lot. Maybe I'll just stumble around town looking for flash riots or protests, the first hint of revolution, men arguing or drunk, women selling potatoes and carrots and panty-hose, because life doesn't stop just for this -- I don't know, I'll think of something.

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Belarus to restrict marriage agencies

In Belarus, where the state controls 80 percent of all business and the country is led by "Europe's last dictator," a new law has been passed requiring models -- or clothing demonstrators, as they're known by their government labor records -- to be citizens of Belarus. If they're not, they can't appear on a billboard, tv commercial or in a newspaper or magazine ad inside the country.

The law requiring a model to prove her citizenship was passed in April, after President Aleksander Lukashenko fretted over the mushrooming presence of Cindy Crawfords and Kate Mosses last year.

I always imagined Belarus would be the next major source of internet-arranged marriages, if its borders ever became more open. But in the immediate future at least, it looks like less marriages will be brokered out of Ukraine's northern neighbor.

A new law passed by the lower house of Parliament last week, for example, would impose restrictions on Internet dating and marriage agencies, especially those catering to foreigners. It would also restrict college students from studying abroad without permission from the Education Ministry.

The rest of this article can be found in the New York Times.

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Seems I missed the party

Confronting allegations of corruption, Ukraine's President Victor Yuschenko "has sacked his government in a move that may mark the end of the coalition that won the Orange Revolution," according to this BBC Report found at Blog de Connard.

Oh well, I'm better suited to dysfunction anyway. And it's not like I didn't entirely expect it, what with recent reports about rampant corruption and stories of Yushchenko's 19-year-old son living large with fat bank rolls, a BMW, and a bling-bling cell-phone worth more than $5,000.

The director of the Kyiv Fulbright Office sent an email to all the incoming Fulbright scholars and students this morning, welcoming us (even those, like me, not in-country yet) to "what seems to be another interesting year in Ukraine." I'm sure all this is what she meant.

As for me, I leave tomorrow morning to run some final errands in Davis and Sacramento. From there I'll take a rental car to San Francisco and stay over night in an airport hotel. My father's flying to Norway Saturday afternoon, so he's with me, though his flight is less convoluted than mine. I catch an 8:30 a.m. plane to Chicago, and then connect through Munich and Kyiv, before finally arriving at Borispol International Airport (after three or four hour lay-overs in each city along the way) at 3:30 local time Sunday afternoon.

Don't know when my next post will be. Maybe a couple of days, maybe a week. If you want to know for sure, subscribe to Everybody I Love You by scrolling to the bottom of this page and entering your email address in the box. If you're worried about me doing something nefarious with the information you provide, don't worry: I wouldn't even know how. I'm simple that way.

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New Thoughts on an Old Post

It's just one more example of how the neoconservatives have borrowed from the Bolsheviks and hijacked the Republican Party.

If you're feeling political, follow that breadcrumb to the new thoughts added to the end of an old post; otherwise, look for less incendiary posts below and expect an excerpt from The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade later today.

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Brogden attempts suicide after "mail-order bride" slur

John Brogden, the John Ashcroft (and Murray Dunlap) look-a-like in the photo to the right, has apparently attempted suicide, this only 36 hours after the Australian politician quit his post as opposition party leader and apologized for saying Labour Premier Bob Carr could "ship his mail-order bride back to where she came from, for all I care." The slur against Carr's Malaysian wife (whom Carr married without the help of a marriage agency) was made after Brogden drank six beers at a Hotel Associates function in Sydney on July 29, according to published reports in the New Zealand Herald. Brogden also apparently sexually harassed three women at the Hotel Associates function, including two -- brace yourself -- reporters.

Brogden "slipped one arm around the small of my back, leant down and said, 'Are you available?'

To go on the record? Well, sad story really. We all make mistakes. His just happen to be on the front page. It's not like he started a war. I think an apology and a little bed rest would've worked just fine. All the same, Australia's Herald-Sun says Brodgen's fall was overdue.

Allegations have now emerged that Mr Brogden suggested two women have sex with him during a boozy Christmas party at his parliamentary office in 2003.

It is claimed the disgraced former opposition leader propositioned the young women on the couch of his parliamentary office.

It is also claimed he began by complimenting the women -- one a radio reporter and the other a television journalist -- and told them they were so attractive they should be kept in a nunnery.

Mr Brogden then allegedly went on to suggest the three should have sex together, but was instantly rebuffed.

"He jokingly made this suggestion about threesomes," one of the women claimed yesterday.

At a Christmas party in his office the previous year, Mr Brogden allegedly held a drinking competition with journalists to see who could drink the most liqueur cocktails known as "Quick F---s".

More analysis of this to come. For now I'll say, seems Brogden's biggest problem is his drinking, not his boorish behavior. To say nothing of his social circle. Don't they teach that in Poly Sci 101 anymore? Do not drink with journalists -- and certainly don't proposition them.

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell starring ... Vladimir Putin?

Yulia, everyone's favorite geo-political porno, has wrapped, according to the Moscow News.

Тurns out Ukraine's Elena Berkova didn't accept the title role, owing to the numerous threats that were leveled against her family following the news that she had been cast to play the woman in braids. No such threats were placed against the ethnic Armenian who was cast for his resemblance to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.

Meanwhile, back at the Duma, Alexsei Mitrofanov, the Russian Parlimentarian behind the work of "political erotics," is apparently undaunted by rumors that there is a now a gay porno in the works with lookalikes of Vladimir Putin and Victor Yanukovich to play the lead roles. Finally, reports that Presdient Bush will soon be cast in a comic book movie are forecast, but no word yet on the start date.

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Who are the Communists again?

Th
Before reading the following excerpt from Wedded Strangers, I'd thought marriages between Soviet and American citizens unlikely, but I hadn't realized that Joseph Stalin had prohibited them altogether.

In February 1947 an edict of the Supreme Soviet forbade marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners. Though in general the ban was strictly enforced, a few marriages were permitted ... primarily between American men and Russian women, since relatively few American women were then working or living in Russia. By making the law retroactive, the Soviet government exerted pressure both on planned future marriages and on Russians already married to Americans, urging them to divorce their spouses and threatening sanctions if they did not. Measures aimed at preventing and breaking up these marriages included bugging telephones, tailing individuals on the street, threats of job loss and arrest and jail sentences on trumped-up charges. A Russian wife could be forced to write a letter to Pravda repudiating her husband, denouncing the U.S., and stating her wish to remain in the motherland. Some women who refused to sign statements renouncing their husbands were sent to labor camps. The wife of an American Foreign Service officer who had been forced to leave when his term was up went out for a walk one day, and was never heard from again" (12-13).

The law was rescinded following Uncle Joe's death in 1953.

As for the US, we've prohibited mixed-marriages, and we continue to outlaw same-sex marriages. But could we ever keep liberal from marrying conservative? Considering Senator Rick Santorum 's views on personal privacy, and his recent comments about liberalism leading to the sex scandal in the Catholic Church, I wouldn't rule anything out, even the absurd. Consider what the senator recently told the Associated Press:

SANTORUM: I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it's not the person, it's the person's actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: OK, without being too gory or graphic, so if somebody is homosexual, you would argue that they should not have sex?

SANTORUM: ... If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, well, it's my individual freedom. Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, whether it's sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Now consider this excerpt from editor Adele Marie Baker's Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society Since Gorbachev:

From the time Lenin declared the private life dead shortly after the revolution, people's attempts to garner some sort of personal privacy have been fraught with emotional ambiguity and even political risk ... Further, the party under Stalin exerted every effort to make the public and the private virtually indistinguishable. Under Stalin, for example, motherhood became a public act, and countless faces of mother-heroines beamed out from the cover of magazines such as Ogonek, Krest'ianka, and Sovetskaia zhenshchina, exhorting Soviet women to produce more Soviet citizens (read 'sons') for the motherland (33).

Okay, so who are the Communists again? I keep forgetting. Because if you listen to Santorum (who goes on to talk about man-on-dog sex in his AP interview) and his fellow Lapel Flags (as di rigeur as yesterday's arm band), it's okay to demonize Lenin and the Reds one minute -- to say they took away all the freedoms we hold so dear -- and then turn around the next and do the same thing, merge the public with the private, so long as you do it under the banner of Family Values and not while hoisting the red flag of the hammer and sickle.

It's just one more example of how the neoconservatives have borrowed from the Bolsheviks and hijacked the Republican Party. Let corporate consolidation continue unchecked, and you'll have the sort of central planning and media control the Politburo once achieved. Wal-mart, which grows by the day and already accounts for more than 2.5 percent of the Gross National Product, will produce our Mao Jacket, while the last two mega-media companies left standing at the end of the ongoing merger frenzy will give us plenty of choice at the record store and multi-plex (Britney or Cristina? Bewitched or The Dukes of Hazzard?) while publishing the city's one remaining newspaper to feed stories to a TV station in the same town, thereby ensuring that the truth goes reported, and then reported again, until it can only be true because I read it here and saw it there and heard it just now on the radio. Because yes, there will be radio, hundreds of stations, thousands in fact, a multitude of choice, a dialful of freedom, though sadly all this will be programmed about a thousand miles away from those pesky little disasters local listeners need to hear about. To top it all off, these stations will express their free speech over our public airwaves by blacklisting artists that speak out against the President, while promoting war over peace.

What do you say they call them? The Red States? Well, of course. Why would would Clear Channel and the RNC fly a flag of any other color?

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