So I bought a few newspapers this morning.

The Wall St. Journal doesn't come on Sundays. So I went to a local grocery and bought:

1. The Boston Herald, a daily tabloid owned by Murdoch.

2. The New York Times, owned by Pinchy Sulzberger.

3. The Boston Globe, recently sold by Pinchy Sulzberger for pennies on the dollar.




The Murdoch rag has a top of the fold story (Putin Puts US in Bind) and full coverage of events via European newswires, esp. AFP and Reuters.

The Boston Globe has no first page coverage at all. The big story in the Boston Globe this morning is that the faggots might get to disrupt and mock the upcoming Patrick's Day Parade with their rainbow banner after all.

The New York Times has front page coverage of Ukraine, but the primary slant is the effrontery to President Obama and the embarassment that this causes for him at a juncture in history dominated by peacemaking and the flowering of democracy.

The New York Times wastes more op-ed ink on the implications on acceptance of the Gay Lifestyle than it spends on the very real prospect of total war.

Apparently Russian conquest/annexation of Ukraine is an unseemly prospect. If a pro-Gay totalitarian regime were invading Crimea and eastern Ukraine, we would all be celebrating; but the unlawful incursion of the hateful and hurtful Russian force must be deplored in strong terms.


Christ.

Does anyone wonder why Putin and Russia are acting with complete disregard for the Enlightened and Progressive West?

 

Up here we have the opposite. The Conservative rags go on about sports, gays and some other non NEWS story while 'The Star' has mostly NEWS stories that matter but also slip in ones about gay rights and others that no one really care about.

It all depends upon the readership that they are postulating to.

 

Look what happened in Syria, that guy of yours Kerry, talked the talk but didn't walk the walk. The UK wouldn't back up the US then, so unless there's another coalition of the willing does anyone expect anything to happen?

 

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Clarise,

I can sum up why Putin is not afraid to invade the Ukraine as they have...

The failed and incompetent administration under President Obama.

The admin has been caught with their pants down, made empty promises, empty threats to 'do something' and have effectively panicked.

What matters now is to see how badly the admin, from the top down, will push it and who in the admin will make a idiotic miscalculation that leads to a shooting war between us and Russia.

If we are fortunate, no one will do anything other than cower as they are.

No matter what, the admin has once again brought shame down on the nation, and gotten us into a lose-lose-lose situation.

 

Hah! But that's just it! You've nailed the point of my irritation.

The editorial slant of the NYT and Globe toward social engineering and progressive indoctrination defies common sense or any form of logic in terms of markets.

The NYT is borderline insolvent. Its Sunday edition has become so diluted by lack of readership and ad dollars that it has lost its op-ed section (now merged with the A section) and no longer has a distinct section for funny papers. As for the Boston Globe, the New York Times Corporation bought it for more than $1 billion and recently sold it to the Henry family (owners of the Red Sox baseball club) for about $70 million.

Who is paying subscriptions for those papers? Virtually no one. Who is buying ad space? Virtually no one.

Their editors, almost entirely the products of ultra-left humanities indoctrination at Harvard, Columbia and the New School (of Manhattan), are literally driving the papers into insolvency by using them as pulpits for their progressivist propaganda.

Meanwhile, the Murdoch papers are the only major rags in the U.S. that are making money. The only money-making division of the Boston Globe is its Western Massachusetts printing press division, which is kept in the black by printing and delivering the New England editions of the Wall St. Journal!

All of the above is true. I couldn't make it up if I tried. And as far as I am concerned, it is indicative of the decline and ongoing fall of the United States of America. Our media has lost its way, just as the nation itself has lost its way, and the decline of both is inextricably tied.


(EDIT - my dollars might be wrong for Globe bought and sold, but the proportions are accurate. I am fact-checking, but I might not make the 10 minute time limit. Yep, numbers are wrong. Fixed above.)

 

I expect this: more empty words and posturing by the Obama-administraiton, and probably at some point get around to blaming former Pres Bush, the Tea Party, the Republicans, Christians, and anyone else they can.

I do expect to see sudden vacancies open up in the intelligence gathering organizations who have failed to predict this happening. Mostly this will be put upon the heads of the military to further 'justify' Obama's weakening of our armed forces.

 

Problem I see with Crimea is that a large portion of that area's population is Russian and want to be rejoined with the motherland....

That makes it real tuff to go in and take the other side of the Russian view...

Now the rest of the Ukraine is another story...

 

Absolutely true, and it is one more reason we do not need to get involved.

 

John Botox Kerry was almost president. (Yikes.)

His handlers tried to market him as an erudite, progressive alternative to George Bush.

Just one problem: Bush and Kerry went to Yale together. Bush was a hell of a lot smarter, from prep school all the way through grad school.

We in Massachusetts know first hand that Kerry is a gibbering idiot, because the fool was a senator for Massachusetts. That half-assed, philandering little gigolo is even dumber than Obama. And that's saying something.

 

Large portion yes, but not all of the Crimea. What's an acceptable percentage of the population for Russia to annex? Who's next Latvia, Estonia, Poland?

Russia and Putin's administration see Western politicians visiting Kiev as meddling, but they don't consider invading another country's borders with their military as meddling, they consider it protecting Russian interests. If the Philippines were to invade Guam, justification being Guam's large Filipino population, there would be outrage.

 

Vladimir Putin has been saying for decades that Ukraine is a territory of Russia. He does not speak idly.

My bet: he is preparing to invade and annex all of the Ukraine, once and for all, and he is using this calm before the storm to set his peaces and engineer a pretext.

 

Didn't Hitler said he had to protect the German population of Austria by annexing it?
A European power moving on it's neighbors and an Asian power threatening its neighbors.boy didn't I read about this in a book?

 

At least there actually are Russian interests in the Crimea. I'm at a loss to conjure up any legitimate British or American interests in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

Saddam should have been removed from power in 1991. That would have removed the need for recent war and occupation. There was a legitimate need to be in Afghanistan, but Al Qaeda moved to Pakistan not long after the war began, there was no legitimate need to be there afterwards. However, securing and protecting the people of Afghanistan from Taliban repercussions seemed a worthy cause.

But all this is moot, because whether or not Russia has a legitimate right to invade Ukraine has nothing to do with the American led Coalition in Iraq or the NATO led action in Afghanistan. Two wrongs never make a right.

 

Nor they do, but the West having shat all over the concept of international law for the last fifteen years, does very much make an excuse for Russia to do the same, and if we object we are hypocrites.

 

DeviousDave, Heyesey and every other U.K. disputant, a question:

Here in the U.S. kids play a board game called Risk. Do you have it over there?

It's a somewhat simplified map of the world. The ultimate object of the game is to conquer it, though in really good rounds if all players are strong, an equilibrium can be reached and it can go for so long that it essentially ends (out of boredom) with no winner.

Europe and North America are worth five points each. South America is worth three points. Oceania and Australia are worth three points. Africa (if I recall) is worth four.

Asia is worth seven points, but it is hard to hold.

Any American kid who has ever played Risk knows that the key to a potentially stable equilibrium between Europe/Africa and Asia is to hold the Ukraine. It is bigger than France, and it is at the strategically vital center between Asia, Europe and Africa (the latter because it is Asia's gateway to the Mediterranean).

In Risk, holding the Ukraine is also the key to conquering Europe, so it is contested almost from the beginning. If Risk ends with a winner (conquest), that winner almost always has held Ukraine from the beginning of the game to the end.

It is almost impossible to win Risk without holding Ukraine from early on.

I don't know if Risk is a game that kids have ever played in Russia, but childplay often imitates life.

Ukraine is vital to the future of both Europe and Russia.

Russia will not let it go to the European Union. Ever. They will conquer it first. And they will conquer it soon.

 

I have played it, long ago; it's out of date now that air travel means the links between continents are an irrelevance. But you still have a valid point.



What's always made me wonder, is why we didn't invite Russia to join NATO and the European Union. If you make a friend out of your potential enemies, you have no enemies...

 

There is no making russia a friend in the cards. Actually we are probably hated by a good many UN members.

 

That might just be the most correct thing you have written on this forum. The problem is that both parties seem to think that they know how to change that.