Pop Quiz

You thought pop quizzes were over once you got out of school, but it's always worthwhile to keep our minds sharp. Here's a quote made earlier in the day. See if you can fill in the blanks (there aren't very many) and then identify who said it.

There are issues of human rights and we've been concerned and I've talked a good deal about the problems of individuals, journalists and others, who have had difficulty. But there are also institutional issues, issues about the -- in a presidential system not having strong institutions, countervailing institutions, to the presidency. And I've been very open about the concerns that that raises in any country, not just in (1)__________ but in any country. If you don't have countervailing institutions, then the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.

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Ultimately, democratic guarantees come from institutional development. Democratic governance comes from a president who can never be too strong because there will always be a congress or a parliament to check him or her, because there will be an independent media to shed light on what is going on. Now, we did have in one case a kind of interesting discussion of how the Internet will be a source from which people will get their information globally, not -- and so one wonders to the degree that you even control the media how well you'll be able to control information in the long run. . . . And so one wonders, even if there is an attempt to control the media, if that's going to work in the long run. And I tend to think not.

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I've said that I think there's too much concentration of power in the (2)__________. . . . I've said it publicly before. Because it's just the absence of -- I think everybody has doubts about the independence, full independence, of the judiciary. . . . On a lot of very high-profile cases I think there are questions about the independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are I think questions about the strength of the (3)_________.

Have you filled in the blanks? No, it wasn't very hard--this is the first pop quiz we've featured in this blog, so I didn't want to make it difficult enough to scare people away. The correct answers, of course, are:

(1) Russia; (2) Kremlin; (3) Duma. The speaker was Condoleeza Rice, who's on a visit to Russia. Her press roundtable from earlier in the day came directly from the State Department Web site. You got them all correct, right?