Echoes of Victory Day and the Inauguration

I happened to catch a re-run of the Daily Show a week or two ago and saw Jon Stewart's hilarious and surprisingly on-point riff on the Victory Day parade and Medvedev's inauguration ceremony. Transcribing selected sound bites from the clip wouldn't do it justice - just watch it and laugh:

That - as well as the return of the outstanding Darkness at Noon, which is back on line and has posted an original video of the V-Day festivities in Moscow, inspired me to corral a few links to online material on the events in Moscow of four weeks or so ago.

CSIS's Sarah Mendelson wrote a "critical questions" brief about the significance of the re-militarization of the Victory Day celebrations, which included a brief digression down memory lane, as Mendelson recalled attending a Soviet military parade in late 1990.

Global Voices Online had roundups about both the inauguration and Victory Day. And the always interesting Wu Wei has an interesting account of what it was like to watch Medvedev's inauguration on Georgian TV.

[Update June 15: I wanted to direct readers as well to this link which fell through the cracks - Oleg Panfilov's brief comments stating that the question of who has the upper hand as between Putin and Medvedev will become clear when one of the two begins to enjoy an advantage in TV coverage.]