Ukraine Election

The recent presidential election in Ukraine is an interesting story. Although I can hardly tell the protagonists apart from each other (both of their first names are Viktor, and there last names are also similar), I have been trying to follow the developments. Today, an election commission declared the Kremlin-backed candidate the winner, sparking protests from his opponent's followers that threatens to escalate into open conflict. I've seen one publication go so far as to say civil war is a possibility. There are thousdands of protesters in the street. Can you imagine this happening in front of the White House? I think that this would have been a possibility had we had another election like the 2000 debacle. The Bush administration is in somewhat of a bind. There are widespread allegations that the voting in the Ukrained was flawed. The administration obviously does not want to be seen as endorsing an invalid election. On the other hand, the Bushites also don't want to damage their relationship with Putin, who publicly endorsed Bush's reelection. As Putin continues to consolidate power in Russia, it is becoming increasingly hard for the Bush administration to avoid criticizing the Russian president. I wonder how Ms. Rice at the State Department will handle this situation. Remember, she grew her roots in the Cold War as an expert on Soviet issues. Does she still harbor some of the anti-Soviet bias that was sure to have accompanied her earlier study? With the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy constantly on his lips, he cannot simply turn a blind eye to an obvious subversion of democracy, if the election is indeed "proven" to have been fraudulant. An open conflict between Washington and Moscow is not what either country needs at this time. Stay tuned!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The agony of victory....a.k.a. picking my jaw up off the floor

Allright. I've now had nearly 24 hours (although its taken me a couple of days to complete this post) to calm down, reflect upon and digest the improbable gut wrenching game yesterday in which the heavily favored Colts lost to the Steelers 21-18. I wrote last year of not being as emotionally attached to the Steelers as I have been in the past. I wrote last week of how I thought that I might be spending too much valuable time following the Steelers, especially since I have absolutely no control over the outcome of their games. Let me just say this: yesterday's game was probably in the top five emotionally draining, and ultimately gratifying, experiences of my life. Ouside of my wedding and the birth of my two sons, I can't remember being as nervous, deflated, joyful, stunned and exhilirated as I was yesterday----all withing about a ten minute stretch of seemingly neverending time! What could have been a devestating loss to live with in the offseason (and, forever, for Jerome...
Read more

"The Axis of Evil and the Doctrine of Preemption Three Years On"

Jerod and I attended a lecture by Brookings Institution fellow Michael O'Hanlon last night at Park University in Parkville, MO. The lecture was part of the Jerzy Hauptmann Distinguished Guest Lecture series. As a Park University M.B.A. alum, I received an invitation to the 13th annual lecture in the series. I like going to events like this, especially since I was interested in the content of this particular lecture, of which the title was the title of this post. Dr. O'Hanlon described himself as a Sam Nunn Democrat at the beginning of the lecture. It's always difficult to prevent political feeling from entering into objective analysis, and I don't know how you measure the "objectiveness" of analysis, but I feel that most Brookings scholars are at least "fair", and Dr. O'Hanlon was no exception. His analysis of the doctrine of preemption was focused on the effectiveness of the doctrine, as opposed to any moral righteousness or implications of the...
Read more

Removing a password that was created in a previous version from an Access 2007 database

Earlier this week I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to remove a password from an Access 2007 database (file extension .accdb). The database was created in a previous version of access and subsequently "upgraded" to the Access 2007 format. I believe some type of a wizard was used to perform the "upgrade." The security model is evidently different in Access 2007 than in previous versions. It doesn't appear that you can set/unset database passwords. Instead, in Access 2007, there is an option to Encrypt with Password. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be logically similar to the earlier version password architecture, but there was no way that I could find to easily remove the password that had been created in the earlier version when using the Access 2007 interface. Access security has always been confusing to me, and I need to take the time someday to understand how the security model is supposed to work in Access 2007. An...
Read more