Free Republic

MOSCOW (AFP) - A Russian region has restored a memorial to Josef Stalin in a bid to boost tourism, in the latest of a spate of new statues and busts of the former Soviet dictator. "The idea was launched by travel agents," Yevgeny Pashenko -- a deputy governor of the Krasnoyarsk region in south Siberia -- was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. "It's a purely commercial project aimed to attract tourists in the region, without any political basis," he added Wednesday. The 400-square-metre memorial has a life-size statue of Stalin in the centre. It has been closed...

On Wednesday December 14 an event occurred which does not leave much space for doubts that the “gas blackmail” exercised by Russia has got nothing to do with the gas itself. The “Gasprom” stand with regard to the price of gas had undergone a miraculous change. The price that the Russian monopolist is demanding for its product has gone up from $160 per 1000 cubic meters to $230. This means that a fair price is absolutely out of the question if to consider the Russian motivation in this matter. Simply because prices for such a commodity never undergo rapid changes,...

...[T]he TV networks... say they have revamped the way they collect and analyze polling data, using more sophisticated equipment and better communications. To tone down their competitive instincts in "calling" states for either candidate, some are blocking their news desks from watching rivals' shows. All the networks are also striving to get their respective "decision desks" -- the units that make the calls -- to work more closely with the producers and reporters.... CBS News said the computers VNS used weren't sophisticated enough to compare voting data with historical information and were incapable of raising red flags where they were...

What is American Corporatism? By Robert Locke FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2002 We are probably heading into some economic heavy weather which will spur needed debate on what's right and wrong with our economy. This will require our being clear about what kind of economy we really have. I have mentioned before that we increasingly live not in a capitalist society but in a corporatist one, and I would like to flesh out this notion. What is corporatism? In a (somewhat inaccurate) phrase, socialism for the bourgeois. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership...