At last the appearance of the long-promised mystery blogger (or "You call this an election?")

Posting for the first time on this blog (or, for that matter, any other) partially to prove to Dave S that I can, partially to procrastinate doing my Russian homework, and partially because I want to vent about the poor excuse for an election Czar Putin is about to rig in Russia (actually the fix is long in and it won't involve counting of votes on Election Day. See attached piece - hope I did it right- from NY Times on intimidations, arrests, rally bans, confiscations, etc. already taking place long in advance of Sunday's elections.) Kind of reminds me of shenanigans (which is putting it lightly) in Belarus before their 2006 "elections". Except there will be no all night campout demonstrations by a small but determined band of opposition activists in the main square in Moscow. The colored revolutions have been rolled back and democracy is in the ICU unit in every country in the region (including Georgia). More on that in the next post.