New Term, Same Old Putin

Mad Vlad Putin stole another election and he's paying those who went against him back in that old KGB way:

Russian riot police beat protesters with batons and hauled away dozens on Sunday after skirmishes broke out at a demonstration in Moscow against Vladimir Putin on the eve of his return to the presidency.

Vlad couldn't even wait until he got back into office, he sent his goons out to settle old scores as soon as he could:

 Opposition leaders Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Udaltsov were among those detained at the rally, at which police tried to push back protesters who advanced towards them holding metal crowd barriers.

Putin still is an avid believer in Soviet-style government and, as the former head of KGB, knows how to deal with internal threats. Medvedev was a Putin puppet but now the chief thug is back and he's establishing his power base right off the bat.

But he's not only returning to the glory days of the USSR internally, he's steering foreign policy back to the bad old days. Putin gave The One the finger and said he's just too damn busy to attend the G-8 summit that Obama moved from Chicago to Camp David to suit Vlad.

Even more importantly, Putin threw down the gauntlet on our missile defense plans:

Whether or not the schedule change marked an intentional snub, the let-down comes less than a week after the nation's military chief of staff warned that Russia would consider preemptive strikes, if a dispute with the United States over a Europe-based missile defense system worsens.

Drew at AoSHQ has more on Obama's ideas of missile defense and here's a piece I wrote awhile back.