An Unlikely Republican Heroine Turns Up In Georgia

Aishtan Shakarian, Georgian entrepreneur who doesn't believe in regulatory constraints that protect society from predators

Republicans may be getting women pissed off with all their plotting against their health-- Obama won women by 13 points in 2008 but Republicans almost totally closed the gap in 2010 by not talking about their inbred misogyny-- but the GOP may need a better solution in 2012 with all this talk about no more pap smears or contraception. There's a Geogian woman they can hold up as an ideal of Republican core values-- and she isn't even some tarted, up self-entitled billionaire like Meg Whitman. In fact, this Georgia woman is poor and hard working-- and exudes the core GOP/Randian essence.

Meet Aishtan Shakarian, 75, who lives in a small village, Armazi,, near Tbilisi. Now she may be senile or even deranged and mentally unbalanced, but why should that stop the GOP from holding her up as a role model. After all, look no further than Palin, Bachmann, Schmidt, Brewer, Foxx... Like them, and any good Republican, Shakarian doesn't want anyone interfering with her right to make a living. She was scavenging for scrap metal (copper) last week when she damaged an international fiber-optic backbone cable that connects much of the southern Caucasus to Europe. Armenia lost all cable connectivity for 12 hours and triggered partial service interruptions in Georgia and Azerbaijan.

The damage Ms. Shakarian caused to the line with her shovel sent alarm signals to the control rooms in Tbilisi, the operators said. She was caught digging in the village of Ksani, some 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, from the capital, said police spokesman Zurab Gvenetadze.

"The woman was hunting for some copper lines that she was hoping she could to sell," Mr. Gvenetadze said.

Scrap metal is a staple export for Georgia and scavengers have been known to steal the lids from communications wells, and to strip electricity lines in the search for metal they can sell to exporters.
Some Armenian telecommunications operators switched to alternative supply lines from Iran, but others were down for the full 12 hours of the interruption, according to Novosti Armenia, an Armenian news agency.

The Georgia section of the international cable, commonly called the country's West-East fiber-optic backbone, is laid underground along railway tracks and operated by Georgia's state railway company and its partners. The line comes to Georgia from Bulgaria, crossing the Black Sea to the Georgian port of Poti. It later forks into Armenia and Azerbaijan.

"This is not the first time someone has been digging potatoes or searching for copper in Georgia and damaged our cable," one Armenian information security expert, Samvel Martirosian said to the Armenian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The same cable was damaged last year, although the cause of that outage wasn't specified at the time.

Police said Mrs. Shakarian didn't resist arrest and admitted her guilt. She was acting alone and was released pending trial, Mr. Gvenetadze said. Ms. Shakarian faces a fine, community service or one year in prison.

"Her age is a mitigating factor. I am not expecting the prosecution to push for a strict punishment," the police spokesman said.

Aishtan (AKA, Hayastan) Shakarian says she's never heard of the Internet and cries as fervently as John Boehner. "I have no idea what the Internet is," she insisted. Her son Sergo said "My mother is innocent. She is crying all the time. She is so scared." But he Georgian Ministry of the Interior says that despite her claims to innocence, Shakarian had already confessed to cutting the cable. She been dubbed the spade-hacker by local media.

If the GOP succeeds is dismantling the regulatory agencies that protect consumers they will have achieved on a far greater scale exactly what Ms. Shakarian has managed to do to Armenia's Internet with a few thrusts of her shovel. A real heroine of the Republican Party!