President Medvedev takes responsibility for countering the crisis President Medvedev sets out his anti-crisis priorities

 President Medvedev has made it clear that as the head of state, he regards anti-crisis policy as his responsibility. Two topics stood out in his interview: ruble devaluation and rising unemployment. He also noted the need for oversight with regard to the state funding allocated to support the economy.

The United States will be glad to see the back of Bush and his team. The country is being rocked by the financial crisis. The situation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and nuclear Pakistan could hardly be worse. Every opinion poll suggests unequivocally that the incumbent U.S. president is easily the least successful on record. Some fifty years from now this age may be seen differently, but this must be cold comfort for George Bush Jr. What he sorely needs now is a victory, however token, so that he could exit with his head held high, or at least medium high. Many people expected Bush to actually venture a bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations, but it is already clear that this is not going to happen. So the only thing he might yet try to accomplish is to drag Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, by fair means or foul. A more inauspicious moment for the job would be hard to find. Ukraine is being rent apart by domestic political strife, and anyway the polls point to am absolute majority of its citizens being dead against accession to NATO.

No particular complications are expected in Russian-American relations in the foreseeable future, if only because the administration of President-elect Barack Obama won't regard issues like missile defense deployment in Europe, or NATO expansion, as priorities for a long time to come. These are the views of Leon Aron, director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

My interest in this subject stems partly from personal experience. My homeland, South Korea, has suffered the ravages of conventional war and faced threats from nuclear weapons and other WMD. But, of course, such threats are not unique to Asia.

The architect of today’s Georgia is Mikheil Saakashvili. Misha, as he is universally known, is young, brilliant, charismatic, American-educated and staffs his government with people like him. You get the sense that any given Georgian cabinet official is about half the age and double the I.Q. of his or her American equivalent. Now with Georgians mauled by the bear in the brief August war, they desperately want to join NATO for protection, and one of the few things that Barack Obama and John McCain agreed on in the campaign was to oblige by continuing the process of admitting Georgia into NATO. In fact, that’s an awful idea. President-elect Obama needs a new approach to Russia if we want to avoid a new cold war, and we also need to get over our crush on Misha.

A crisis is never the end of the world, most often it simply means an acceleration of processes. The wise Chinese depict the word "crisis" with two pictograms: One of them means "danger," the other "opportunity." Rational behavior during a crisis means not panicking when you sense a threat, but looking for new
opportunities in rapidly changing circumstances. That applies both to each individual and to the entire country. If you follow the classical definitions, an
economic crisis (krizis; the author is using this word as synonymous with "recession") means a reduction in production and in the volume of GDP.
Therefore, strictly speaking, a crisis has arrived in the United States and Britain and is expected in certain euro-zone countries. In Russia at the moment, however, there is no economic crisis, but a reduction in the rate of growth -- this year, from the expected 8.2% to 7%. There are no grounds for panic. But that does not mean there are no dangers. There are, and they are very real.

Now, as we learn, the “white Caucasians” - especially after deducting from their numbers the homosexuals, feminists and other pseudo-intellectuals as well as the immature youth brought up by their belligerent PC mentors – are becoming in the US a near minority. While the colored people of different shapes and shades came out as a prevailing majority of the electorate. I remember that horrifying TV picture of the line of voters in Chicago – it looked to me exactly like a line for the welfare checks. For them “the change we need” will definitely be for the better. But almost everybody forgot somehow that the verb “change” has a double meaning; it could be just as well the “change” for worse too. Summing up all the dynamics of “changes” I witnessed in America for the last 40 years and forecasting the future by extrapolating such evidently revealed existing trends, with the greatest pain I can ascertain that the latter alternative - “change for worse” - is much, much more probable.

Medvedev’s statement regarding the deployment of Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad Region in response to the US intention to station Bullistic Missile Defense (BMD) facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic was hardly among the Kremlin’s most fortunate moves. Considering that Obama himself was not a great supporter of that project, what with its highly dubious technological efficiency and exorbitant cost, it would probably have been more expedient to let the new US president freeze or even bury this idea of George Bush’s. Then again, the timing for making such a statement, with Obama only just emerging victorious from a grueling race, was rather less than perfect. After McCain admitted defeat, a phone call to congratulate the new White House resident and wish him success in his difficult mission might have been more fitting. Memorably, Putin’s phone call to Bush on 11 September 2001 was instrumental in establishing a personal friendship between the two presidents that exerted some restraint on the zeal of the Cold War Warriors.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. t's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference. It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

A few days ago – precisely on October 12 – America was commemorating the “Columbus Day”, quite peculiar but now rather controversial national holiday. In 1937 President Roosevelt had declared this day to be an official state holiday, although it was already celebrated since 1792, exactly three centuries after the day when Christopher Columbus apparently set foot in the New World. I know why some people in both Americas do not like this day. Yet I firmly believe that this historic event is worth the worldwide celebration; in these notes I’ll try to prove it to you.