Georgia Ink

post-"NATO summit" impressions

There is a saying that after battle people swing fists. In our case, I expected more of pointing fingers, rather then fists. Unfortunately it did not turn out as bad. At least the government managed to sell the result of the summit to Georgian public as a success. Blame whoever you want...

Russia does not veto NATO. Yeah, right... And Germany is willing to stop getting gas from Russia if Russia says that Georgia's NATO membership is a problem, right? Who are we kidding, they have more than a veto power, they have fuel.

That brings us to a logical conclusion - what happens to NATO when members cannot decide what the priorities are?

Wasn't it fun? Months and months, we were all preparing for the day when in Bucharest, at the NATO summit, Georgia would be presented the Membership Action Plan. All we got was a communique with a promise. What now?

irony

There might be nothing ironic in what I will write here. Just a collection of thoughts more or less related to this blog. I started this blog to share my doodles with those who could not get their hand on printed versions. I don't even know if it is possible to get a printed version of the Georgia Today in the US. Back in December neither the Messenger, not GT posted cartoons on the web version of their paper, so it went live. I never intended this blog to be exclusively "political/editorial cartoon" blog, but rather a place to dump all those ink drawings I do.

I am going to try and put a very non-political one here, see if it blows up in my face :)

Irony however, is how some people end up on my blog. Comments section seems to be exclusively empty, so I resorted to Google analytics. There is an interesting part of those analytics that tells you about people who find your site through Google search. It gives you the term they used. Last couple months I have seen odd combinations, sometimes so odd that I am shocked that this blog come up in the list of results. Not this week. It seems a bit "normal" this week. However, here's the list of searches for last few days:

cartoon georgia maps

georgia khachapuri

georgia tuday

georgian diasporas

multiplex solutions + swiss

roofing cartoons

I am curious if any of those people meant to see my cartoons. But they did click the link as it came up. For most of those terms blog.shioshvili.com is actually on the first page. Roofing cartoons? Strange...

deadlock

Bucharest summit is over and Georgia did not get the MAP. Maybe Georgia got a better deal, only time will show. My opinion is that Georgia wants NATO membership to resolve conflicts, while NATO would prefer Georgia resolve its conflicts before letting it join.

no hope

Story is at least couple weeks old, but still unresolved. It is not yet clear who the owner of Imedi is, and there is a likelihood that this battle will very adversely affect Imedi itself. Recently I noticed a poster with Public Broadcaster's crowd, one of them being former Imedi anchor. People do not wait around for months on, it's already been at least five months, will the public be interested to see it come back?

Khinkali for NATO

Couple more days and we will see what is boiling in the pot for Georgia. I have heard that it quite possible that Georgia will get the MAP, and Putin will not be in Bucharest during the summit. Instead he will meet Bush in Sochi. I was told, Mr. Putin does not want to be there when Georgia gets the invitation.

Hunger strike vs fasting

This cartoon ran in the Messenger last week. I felt somewhat uncomfortable touching religion, but feel justified taking into consideration the fact that the Patriarch got involved in politics himself. My personal opinion is that the religion should stay out of politics, period. What we saw was a very reason church has to stay out of politics - it ended up in the middle, both sides claiming something that was never really there.

Religion was first brought up by Tbilisi's mayor though, as far as I know. He has been out of media attention for quite a while, and after couple months he made a "hunger strike is un-Christian" statement. A friend asked if I knew why hunger strike is un-Christian, and I do not. I have theories, but none of them seem plausible enough to share.

This cartoon did cause a little trouble - not as bad as Danish Islam-related cartoon did - between the owner and the editor of the newspaper. Well, it ran and I have not received any threatening phone calls just quite yet...

Welcome to Bucharest

There are only couple weeks left before the summit and some have their hopes a bit too high. There are a few countries that oppose the idea of Georgia being handed MAP, some are neutral, some want it and will support it. The real question is, will Bush's support make real difference? Possibly they will create a new status for Georgia and Ukraine, or tell both to wait a couple years and "re-apply"? Whatever the option, it is not very likely that Georgia will be getting a MAP this time around...

How to finance Misha's promises

They had to find a way to finance all those promises he made, did not they? It seems that slashing military budget is not an option, so new money was needed, so more property will be sold off - to finance at least some of the budget adjustments. There are a few problems with the change they introduced, they claim that economy will grow even more than expected, and inflation will stay at 8%. Last two months, inflation has been close to 12%, but annual will somehow manage to stick to 8%? Even with dollar taking a beating, inflation seems to be still high, what happens when dollar turns around and gets stronger? What happens when housing market blows in Tbilisi?

State of Opposition

Unfortunately, this is already outdated - opposition has fallen apart even more, and more new parties have been formed. They cannot agree whose resignation they want, about elections, about hunger strike, about this, about that...

Georgia in a nutshell

roofing

back to business, a bit over a year later, Tbilisi airport loses part of the roofing again. This is what Misha said on February 7th, 2007: "This is one of the best airports in Europe. Two years ago I promised to have it and we have done it. This airport is much better than the airport in Brussels, or the airport in Munich." Was he serious? Has he been to Munich airport at all? Well, I don't think Munich airport loses roofing on an annual basis.

Welcome to the domain of Turkish quality, sugar coated with Georgian lies.