>Katactpodpa!* (*Catastrophe!): Russians run out of booze
>http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1168235.ece

Must be the Russians are somehow on the right track. This is about the tenth thing I hear about current state of affairs in Russia in the last six days, and that's just from NPR and BBC.

And that's not something that I started noticing yesterday - it's that somehow whatever Russia does is bad. The Al-Qaeda in Chechnya are "rebels", elsewhere they are terrorists. Russia pays off its debts to the Paris club, and they get predictions about how and why it will be bad for their economy (debt is good? - c'mon). Hodorkovsky gets painted as a victim of the system. Few hundred retired people demonstrate in the streets because they've lost their privilege to free public transportation, and the media here start counting how many days before Putin falls in another color-coded "revolution"... as if the retired people here ever had totally free public transportation in every city (i.e. not partial and spotty programs here and there, but something guaranteed and backed up by federal law).

So... I figure the Russians know what they're doing. At least their snafus get nice coverage.