Every move the Putin administration makes today is dictated by the desire to shape Russia's future internal power structure and to set the course for the country's foreign and security affairs in general, and its relationship with the United States in particular for years to come.

Keeping the relationship with Washington on the verge of a crisis and inventing an imaginary "American enemy" is creating much needed legitimacy for the current Russian leadership, which now has only Mr. Putin's personal popularity as its political base.

The image of Russia surrounded by enemies is absolutely necessary for today's Russian ruling class of senior secret police officers, as it positions them in the eyes of the people as the saviors and defenders of Mother Russia.

Russia is being Re-Sovietized.

At a conference on the future of the European Union held in Brussels last week and co-sponsored by George Soros, it was advocated that the EU expel member states that are "not European enough."  One country in particular which Europe should throw out because it hampers the EU's aim of transforming itself into a federal superstate is Poland.

What have the Poles done to antagonize the Eurocrats? Today (October 10) is the "European Day Against the Death Penalty." The EU wanted to inaugurate the event with a common European declaration against capital punishment. Poland thwarted this by refusing to sign the declaration because the EU did not condemn abortion and euthanasia as well.

Last month, during an EU meeting on the death penalty, the Polish justice minister confronted his Danish colleague with Denmark's annual 15,000 abortions and the latter got so angry that she left the room, slamming the door.
 
Other countries, such as Belgium and Portugal, accuse Poland of "immoral and unworthy behavior" by daring to compare abortion and euthanasia to the death penalty. Richard Howitt, a British Labor politician and the vice president of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee, said that Poland's refusal to reject the death penalty brings into question its commitment to European values.

As the junta's misbehavior worsened in Burma (albeit the ruling thugs have rechristened it Myanmar) last week, pundits suggested that we should force China to pressure its client to treat the pro-democracy demonstrators politely - by threatening to boycott next year's Beijing Olympics.

Sorry, but Burma's far more important to China's vision for the coming decades than the Pollution-and-Oppression Games. The bullies in Beijing see the Olympics as a coming-out party - but Burma is a strategic lifeline.

So, sure, if the Burma situation worsens as China stonewalls, we can and should punish Beijing by boycotting the 2008 Games. But we have to have realistic expectations regarding the results.

On the flip side, some Westerners argue that China isn't really the decisive player in Burma - that Western corporations flying under the radar screen do more to prop up the junta than Beijing does.

Absolute bull. This doesn't mean that greedy multinationals don't lurk out in those jungles - but to ascribe more power to them than to Beijing is like blaming purse-snatchers for the junk-mortgage crisis.

Here's the real situation:

Ever heard of the West Lothian Question? West Lothian is the Scottish region immediately to the west of Edinburgh. The question is so called because it was first posed by Tam Dalyell, a Labor member of the British Parliament for West Lothian.

Mr. Dalyell wondered how long the English would tolerate the situation in which Scottish members of the British Parliament, such as himself, have a (sometimes decisive) say about issues affecting only England, while English parliamentarians have no say about the same matters in Scotland.

Several proposals have been made to solve this anomaly. One of them is to abolish the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. Another is to give England its own parliament, which would imply that the United Kingdom become a federation of four states - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The solution proposed by the Labor government in Westminster, currently led by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (a Scot) and previously by Mr. Blair (also a Scot), is to dissolve England by splitting it up into nine regions, each with its own parliamentary assembly.

The Iranian president's welcome to Columbia - following a self-serving whine by the university's president - reflected brainless activism, not academic freedom.  It was the professoriate imitating Hollywood's embrace of terrorists.

We hear a great deal about the dumbing down of students, but the real problem has been the dumbing down of their professors.

Yes, there's been a media fuss over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's propaganda opportunity. But that just makes the faculty-lounge "heroes" feel even more self-righteous. Anyway, post-modern professors seek publicity, not knowledge.

And we give it to the weasels.

Meanwhile, Columbia denies our military's ROTC programs the chance to recruit and teach on campus - ostensibly because of the Congress-approved "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Of course, it's just a cultural issue when Ahmadinejad executes homosexuals (although, according to him, there aren't any in Iran).

The ban on ROTC isn't really about gay rights, though. The professors and student-activists behind it believe they're punishing the wicked, wicked Pentagon. Well, let me break the truth to Professor Bunkum: The military doesn't need Ivy League recruits.

We're doing just fine without them, thanks.

CO₂ is not the most important greenhouse gas.  Water has somewhere between five and seven times as much heating effect as CO_2.  

In fact, if the Kyoto Treaty were to be adhered to, by the year 2050, according to the alarmists' own models, the net effect would be to slow the increase in average temperature by less than seven one hundredths of a degree Celsius, a number too small to measure. 

So, if water is five times more important than CO₂  in warming, why has there not been a Kyoto-type conference to convince nations to reduce their water footprint?  Shouldn't liberals pay five times as much for water credits as they do for carbon credits?  

In the Moslem fifth of the world, probably about a quarter of the population wishes to be in conflict with America and the West. Probably more than half do not wish such conflict but wrongly suspect that America is out to divide and suppress Islam.

Meanwhile, much of the Moslem Westernized elite (no more than 5 percent of the total Islamic population) both in Moslem countries and in America and the West rather desperately hope radical Islam and the Western response it has induced would just go away. They would prefer to live and prosper peacefully in the globalized Western political world.

Moslem governments in the Middle East and elsewhere are playing a dangerous double game - cooperating with Western intelligence and covert military efforts and jailing some of the terrorists, while at the same time giving rhetorical and sometime financial support to much of the deranged paranoia about Americans and the Jews that further inflames the radical instincts of the Moslem masses.

In fairness to those governments, most governments - West or East - live in the short term. In the long term, the Moslem regimes would be overthrown if the radicals gain power, but in the short term they would risk further inflaming the radicals if they didn't rhetorically support their madness. So the Moslem governments increasingly risk losing tomorrow for the sake of staying alive today.