Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
In the interest of trying to be somewhat reasonable, the evidence to pin wrongdoing personally on Trump with regards to Russia, if it exists, is not public (though it doesn't look good). We've got records of probable suspicious communication (which could be his aides i.e. Manafort) and some allegations from an anonymous expert (and being an ex-intelligence person isn't in itself a guarantee of reliability or sanity). Compare to my post a couple of pages back outlining the evidence of Russia's hand in the hacking op, which is a whole lot of evidence...though we have it because the analysts are working on the civilian end of things.
Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes
By DAVID BARSTOW, MIKE Mc INTIRE, PATRICIA COHEN, SUSANNE CRAIG and RUSS BUETTNER
OCTOBER 31, 2016
Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.
But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.
Thanks to this one maneuver — which was later outlawed by Congress — Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.
Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.
Mr. Trump managed to save millions in personal taxes by borrowing – then losing – other people’s money. Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits to Mr. Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City.
As that empire floundered in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump pressured his financial backers to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt he could not repay. While the cancellation of so much debt gave new life to Mr. Trump’s casinos, it created a potentially crippling problem with the Internal Revenue Service. In the eyes of the I.R.S., a dollar of canceled debt is the same as a dollar of taxable income. This meant Mr. Trump faced the painful prospect of having to report the hundreds of millions of dollars of canceled debt as if it were hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income.
But Mr. Trump’s audacious tax-avoidance maneuver gave him a way to simply avoid reporting any of that canceled debt to the I.R.S. “He’s getting something for absolutely nothing,” John L. Buckley, who served as the chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, said in an interview.
The new documents, which include correspondence from Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers and bond offering disclosure statements, might also help explain how Mr. Trump reported a staggering loss of $916 million in his 1995 tax returns — portions of which were first published by The Times last month.
United States tax laws allowed Mr. Trump to use that $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income. But tax experts have been debating how Mr. Trump could have legally declared a deduction of that magnitude at all. Among other things, they have noted that Mr. Trump’s huge casino losses should have been offset by the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income he surely must have reported to the I.R.S. in the form of canceled casino debt.
By avoiding reporting his canceled casino debt in the first place, however, Mr. Trump’s $916 million deduction would not have been reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars. He could have preserved the deduction and used it instead to avoid paying income taxes he might otherwise have owed on books, TV shows or branding deals. Under the rules in effect in 1995, the $916 million loss could have been used to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income for 18 years.
Mr. Trump declined to comment for this article.
“Your e-mail suggests either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional misreading of the law,” Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Your thesis is a criticism, not just of Mr. Trump, but of all taxpayers who take the time and spend the money to try to comply with the dizzyingly complex and ambiguous tax laws without paying more tax than they owe. Mr. Trump does not think that taxpayers should file returns that resolve all doubt in favor of the I.R.S. And any tax experts that you have consulted are engaged in pure speculation. There is no news here.”
Mr. Trump financed his three Atlantic City gambling resorts with $1.3 billion in debt, most of it in the form of high interest junk bonds. By late 1990, after months of escalating operating losses, New Jersey casino regulators were warning that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question.” By 1992, all three casinos had filed for bankruptcy and bondholders were ultimately forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to salvage at least part of their investment.
The story of how Mr. Trump sidestepped a potentially ruinous tax bill from that forgiven debt emerged from documents recently discovered by The Times during a search of the casino bankruptcy filings. The documents offer only a partial description of events, and none of Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers agreed to be interviewed for this article.
At the time, Mr. Trump would have been hard-pressed to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes. According to assessments of his financial stability by New Jersey casino regulators, there were times in the early 1990s when Mr. Trump had no more than a few million dollars in his various bank accounts. He was so strapped for cash that his creditors were apoplectic when they learned that Mr. Trump had bought Marla Maples an engagement ring estimated to be worth $250,000.
It is unclear who first glimpsed a way for Mr. Trump to dodge a huge tax bill. But the basic maneuver he used was essentially a new twist on a contentious strategy corporations had been using for years to avoid taxes created by canceled debt.
The strategy — known among tax practitioners as a “stock-for-debt swap” — relies on mathematical sleight of hand. Say a company can repay only $60 million of a $100 million bank loan. If the bank forgives the remaining $40 million, the company faces a large tax bill because it will have to report that canceled $40 million debt as taxable income.
Clever tax lawyers found a way around this inconvenience. The company would simply swap stock for the $40 million in debt it could not repay. This way, it would look as if the entire $100 million loan had been repaid, and presto: There would be no tax bill due for $40 million in canceled debt.
Best of all, it did not matter if the actual market value of the stock was considerably less than the $40 million in canceled debt. (Stock in an effectively insolvent company could easily be next to worthless.) Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations, this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.
Alarmed by the obvious potential for abuse, Congress and the I.R.S. made repeated efforts during the 1980s to curb this brand of tax wizardry before banning its use by corporations altogether in 1993. But while policy makers were busy trying to stop corporations from using this particular ploy, the endlessly creative club of elite tax advisers was inventing a new way to circumvent the ban, this time through the use of partnerships.
This was the twist that was especially beneficial to Mr. Trump. Wealthy families like the Trumps often own real estate and other assets through partnerships rather than corporations. Mr. Trump, for example, owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos through partnerships, an arrangement that allowed casino profits to flow directly to his personal tax returns when times were good.
But what if times were bad? What if Mr. Trump’s casino partnerships could not repay hundreds of millions of dollars they owed to bondholders? And what if the bondholders were persuaded to forgive this debt? Wouldn’t that force the partnerships — i.e., Mr. Trump — to report hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income in the form of canceled debt?
Enter the tax advisers with their audacious plan: Why not eliminate all that taxable income from canceled debt by swapping “partnership equity” for debt in exactly the same way corporations had been swapping company stock for debt?
True enough, the I.R.S. and Congress had clearly signaled their disapproval of the basic concept. Fred T. Goldberg, who was the I.R.S. commissioner under George Bush, recalled in an interview that the I.R.S. frowned on partnership equity-for-debt swaps for the same reason it objected to corporate stock-for-debt swaps. “The fiction is that the partnership interest has the same value as the debt,” he said. Lee A. Sheppard, a contributing editor to Tax Notes, wrote in 1991 that trying to find a legal justification for this tactic was akin to proving “the existence of the Loch Ness monster.”
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump boasts of his mastery of tax loopholes and claims no other candidate for the White House has ever known more about the tax code. This background, he argues with evident disgust, gives him special insight into the way wealthy elites buy off politicians and hire high-priced lawyers and accountants to rig the tax system — just as, he claims, they rig elections.
That insight was on display in 1991 and 1992 when he was laying the groundwork to make a multimillion-dollar tax bill disappear.
Before proceeding with his plan, Mr. Trump did what most prudent taxpayers do — he sought a formal tax opinion letter. Such letters, typically written by highly-paid lawyers who spend entire careers mastering the roughly 10,000 pages of ever-changing statutes that make up the United States tax code, can provide important protection to taxpayers. As long as a tax adviser blesses a particular tax strategy in a formal opinion letter, the taxpayer most likely will not face penalties even if the I.R.S. ultimately rules the strategy was improper.
The language used in tax opinion letters has a specialized meaning understood by all tax professionals. So, for example, when a tax lawyer writes that a shelter is “more likely than not” going to be approved by the I.R.S., this means there is at least a 51 percent chance the shelter will withstand scrutiny. (This is known as an “M.L.T.N.” letter in the vernacular of tax lawyers.) A “should” letter means there is about a 75 percent chance the I.R.S. will not object. The gold standard, a “will” letter, means the I.R.S. is all but certain to bless the tax avoidance strategy.
But the opinion letters Mr. Trump received from his tax lawyers at Willkie Farr & Gallagher were far from the gold standard. The letters bluntly warned that there was no statute, regulation or judicial opinion that explicitly permitted Mr. Trump’s tax gambit. “Due to the lack of definitive judicial or administrative authority,” his lawyers wrote, “substantial uncertainties exist with respect to many of the tax consequences of the plan.”
Mr. Trump's own lawyers at Willkie Farr & Gallagher cautioned him about using a a tax avoidance maneuver in the 1990s. One letter, 25 pages long, analyzed seven distinct components of Mr. Trump’s proposed tax maneuver. It found only “substantial authority” for six of the components. In the stilted language of tax opinion letters, the phrase “substantial authority” is a red flag that the lawyers believe the I.R.S. can be expected to rule against the taxpayer roughly two-thirds of the time. In other words, Mr. Trump’s tax lawyers were telling him there were at least six different reasons the I.R.S. would likely cry foul if he were audited. In anticipation of that possibility, the lawyers even laid out a fallback plan that would have allowed Mr. Trump to spread the pain of a large tax hit over many years if the I.R.S. ultimately balked.
It is unclear whether the I.R.S. ever challenged Mr. Trump’s use of this specific tax maneuver. According to a financial disclosure statement prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants, he was under audit by tax authorities as of 1993, only a year after he avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income because of this legally suspect tactic. But the results of that audit are unknown and the agency declined to comment on Monday.
Regardless of whether the I.R.S. objected, Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance in this case violated a central principle of American tax law, said Mr. Buckley, the former chief of staff for Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation who later served as chief tax counsel for Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
“He deducted somebody else’s losses,” Mr. Buckley said. By that Mr. Buckley means that only the bondholders who forgave Mr. Trump’s unpaid casino debts should have been allowed to use those losses to offset future income and reduce their taxes. That Mr. Trump used the same losses to reduce his taxes ultimately increases the tax burden on everyone else, Mr. Buckley explained. “He is double dipping big time.”
In any event, Mr. Trump can no longer benefit from the same maneuver. Just as Congress acted in 1993 to ban stock-for-debt swaps by corporations, it acted in 2004 to ban equity-for-debt swaps by partnerships.
Among the members of Congress who voted to finally close the loophole: Senator Hillary Clinton of New York.
Megan Twohey contributed reporting.
i had a rather... interesting conversation with my mother
And basically what I gleaned from it is that she refuses to vote for Hillary out of the principle that, in order to get to her position she must've gotten tons of favors and how she owes everyone now- plus that she must have silenced or paid out people to quiet certain stuff, and the fact that she did irreparable damage to Lewinsky's career and took her position.
She also said Johnson is the best candidate that we have and how he's never getting the position, and that she'd rather waste her vote than vote for Trump because he's disgusting as well.
"There's not a girl alive who wouldn't be happy being called cute." ~Tamamo-no-MaeAnd that's special to Clinton why? I mean is she especially bad or something in that department? Because I've seen no evidence to suggest that she is.
So why vote for Johnson? He's still a politician and a man who works in politics, he's liable to be just as corrupt and indebted as Clinton is, what with him having been a governor.
The Lewinsky stuff I don't understand at all. What positon did Clinton take from her? How did Hillary damage Lewinsky's career?
edited 31st Oct '16 7:30:01 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyranhttps://twitter.com/sarahkendzior/status/793266915418312704
If this is even halfway true....
What a specular end to this election that would be.
New Survey coming this weekend!Oh come on Tactical, you know damn well that none of these stories are going to hit Trump. Every single deal breaker story since the tape (which didn't do as much damage as I thought it would) has amounted to nothing in terms of media attention and relevance.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.I mean, it could happen, but basically what I'd advice everyone to do, whenever they come across a juicy story, is:
- Check if you can find another source for it. It can't be one that's just copy-pasting from your original source, either. (And it can't be the one your original source was copied from. It needs to be an independent verification of the story.)
- Check if all of your sources are reliable. No rumours on Twitter, no tabloids. Look for actual news sites. If they're really biased (you can usually tell just by looking at the stories they picked for the front page, compared to other sites) you might want to look for some more neutral sources. Use the biased ones as supplemental material, at most. (They might add BS rumours to an otherwise true story, as well.)
- If at all possible, check out the primary source. If you're reading an article about a report from the government or a given politician or candidate, the article should have a link to that report or the press release about it from the source itself. Read that, or at least read the abstract and maybe the first couple of paragraphs. You'll have a good chance of finding something that your first source didn't mention or exaggerated.
- If the source of a claim is anonymous, your first instinct should be to doubt them. Exception: if it's part of a pattern of similar stories coming from unrelated sources, it's probably fine. Also, if there's a really good reason why the source would want to remain anonymous, make sure that the article also cites another source or at least confirms that they've looked into it. (And don't treat the story as confirmed if they didn't find anything that confirms it - it's still just one person that might be making stuff up.)
- If you see a candidate or campaign quoted by their opposition, you can be pretty confident that when you check the original source you'll find something quite different. The key, 9 times out of 10, is context.
- If you've looked for a second, independent source and couldn't find it, don't be so eager to spread it. Don't present it as a confirmed fact, either. If you have to share the story, at least make sure there's something in your post that indicates that there's not yet sufficient reason to fully trust that source.
Finally:
- If it sounds too much like what you wanted to hear, it's quite likely to be BS. Don't let your excitement about finding it deceive you. We all want to believe that there's a recent study that conclusively proves that chocolate makes you immune to the common cold, but if you see that story I'm telling you right now that when you go to the source, assuming it's even a real research institute, it will be something much less significant. It will be "55% of rats that ate chocolate mixed with a new medicine had fewer cases of the common cold than rats that were only given the medicine. There is no variant fit for human consumption yet, but trials could begin as early as 2027."
Similarly:
- HILLARY/TRUMP ARE A HUMAN BABY - CAUGHT ON CAMERA! -> a picture of Clinton/Trump kissing a baby at a campaign event.
That's a fair point. It's hard to think of other prominent candidates in the US who could get away with that statement and its implications. (It would also be hard to find such candidates in the West in general, but there are always some - the world's favourite Italian, Berlusconi, is one that for a long time seemed absolutely immune to all scandals.)
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.First off, because I was asked for it earlier in the day, here
, here
, and here
are the bits of pertinent info about NBC's polls before, during, and just after the Comey letter, and how there doesn't seem to be any change in their polls as a result.
As for the big story rom Mother Jones about Trump being a full on cultivated Russian asset, I won't believe it on their word alone, and I hope it's not true, certainly, so I'll wait and see on that one. But The Atlantic does have something of a parallel story up about Kremlin backed propagandists in Germany's far right and perhaps other European right wing movements
as a step in Moscow weakening Europe.
The magazine itself, also in German, was about politics. A superficial look might suggest it was the anti-American manifesto of some fringe left-wing German group (“Heil Hillary! Candidate of US Fascism” reads one headline), but closer inspection revealed it came from the other end of the ideological spectrum.
A glance at a political profile of Jürgen Elsässer, Compact’s purported editor, discloses that he had been an extreme leftist who opposed German reunification and worked for Neues Deutschland, once the official newspaper of the East German Socialist Unity Party, the client Communist Party ruling East Germany in the interests of the USSR. Yet at some point in the 2000s, he migrated to the far right, and is now aligned with the new anti-immigrant party, Alternative für Deutschland. The prestigious newspaper die Zeit flat out calls Elsässer a Kremlin propagandist.
Elsässer’s shift from one political extreme to the other suggests that that he is an apparatchik whose first loyalty has likely always been to Moscow. When the USSR represented an authoritarian version of the left, he was a leftist; when the party line of the successor Russian state changed to right-wing authoritarianism, he obediently tacked right—a circumstance which shows that “left” and “right” are often arbitrary categories, particularly when considering the fringes.
This year, the German public television network ZDF produced a documentary tracing the ideological and financial ties between Russia and extreme right-wing elements; among those elements was Elsässer. His own blogs show an over-the-top enthusiasm for the Russian regime, such as comparing Putin’s bombing of Aleppo with the Russian defense of Stalingrad. Whatever the realities of the situation in Syria, Russian intervention in the conflict hardly merits comparison with the decisive turning point of the Second World War.
There were other suggestions of Russian fingerprints on Elsässer’s magazine. It was printed on coated stock, with lots of photos and fairly high production values. Fringe parties generally can’t afford the production costs of this sort of thing—unless they are getting a bit of financial help. The editorial tone was a kind of unholy marriage between Breitbart.com and the Russian-funded website Sputnik, with a little Völkischer Beobachter thrown in for good measure (there was generous use of the term “Lügenpresse”—the lying press, a term popularized by the Nazis.) More to the point, it was written in the breathless, apocalyptic manner of the Soviet anti-NATO propaganda I used to see as a national-security analyst in Congress in the 1980s—with one exception.
Classic Soviet propaganda always treated Democrats and Republicans as essentially indistinguishable and interchangeable components of the bourgeois power structure, both equally worthy of denunciation. Compact, however, had several articles explicitly endorsing Donald J. Trump as an all-around swell guy, with one explaining how a President Trump would improve U.S. relations with Russia.
The propaganda message of this magazine crossed a threshold of sorts. The hacking of the Democratic National Committee that has been attributed to the Russians by the U.S. government is obviously intended to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, but the Russian government, and Vladimir Putin above all, have been careful to avoid being seen publicly praising or attacking either candidate.
Yet Putin, or at least his European allies, apparently see it as worth their while to spend money attacking Hillary and talking about Trump in terms so flattering that Caesar would have blushed, in a country whose citizens don’t have a vote in America’s election in any case. The Soviet Union’s goals in attempting to rouse the European (and above all, German) public against, say, NATO’s deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s was straightforward and understandable, but why would an ideological ally of Russia puff up Donald Trump to a German public that cannot vote for him?
The strategy becomes more comprehensible when one acknowledges that Trump received the nomination of one of America’s two major parties, and, not long ago, was tied with Clinton in the polls. The message to nationalist and authoritarian-minded Germans is that Trump is a model: If, in the self-styled “greatest democracy in the world” the demagogic real estate mogul could have a decent shot at becoming president, then the right-wing fringe parties of Germany and the rest of Europe are not toiling in vain. If they work hard enough and employ the right themes, they can win.
According to Igor Eidman, a sociologist and cousin of the murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, Putin’s policy objective in Germany is clear: The country is the keystone of Europe, and Chancellor Angela Merkel is by default the principal figure holding Europe together as a political entity. She is also the only Western leader to grow up under communist rule: She knows what the Stasi was like and also the KGB, Putin’s former employer (he was posted to East Germany before its collapse). Merkel is less than fond of Putin and the feeling is mutual.
When Merkel unwisely led with her chin at the height of the European refugee crisis, she provided an opening for right-wing parties in her own country and the rest of Europe to make electoral gains over the flood of refugees. She also granted Putin, smarting from Western sanctions over Ukraine, an opportunity for payback.
The amusing irony is that leaders of the nationalist-authoritarian right in Europe campaign on a platform of national sovereignty while rubles jingle in their pockets. Marine Le Pen’s National Front requested a 27-million euro loan from Russia, according to the party’s own treasurer. Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader and Brexit engineer, has appeared on RT, the Russian government-subsidized media empire (it spends more on foreign broadcasting than any other entity except the BBC). Farage may be better known to American political junkies for speaking at a Trump rally in Mississippi.
There is a fascinating historical parallel here: Throughout the Cold War, Moscow subsidized the leftist fringe in Western Europe. Now it does the same with right-wing parties there—same tactics, different ideological players.
- * *
One massive difference is this: If Trump’s own words are anything to go by, not to mention the activities of some of his former advisers like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, Moscow may have made inroads in the United States (Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, once mooted to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, remains an adviser; he has been a regular contributor to the Russian-funded news channel RT and was a paid guest at an RT gala where he was seated next to Putin—odd behavior for a former Defense Intelligence Agency director with the highest security clearances). Never in its wildest dreams could the old Soviet politburo have imagined it would get a U.S. major party candidate so congenial to its interests. All it had to work with was poor, old Gus Hall, the Communist Party USA’s perennial hapless candidate!
Compared to the Clinton emails or Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal, this has been an underplayed story, given the grave implications of foreign intervention in an American election. While an FBI investigation into improperly managed emails has already significantly influenced the presidential election (with the Bureau’s most recent lead growing from an investigation launched by revelations in a British tabloid article), the Department of Justice has been oddly passive, at least in public, in the face of substantial evidence of political subversion resulting from an adversarial foreign government’s spending resources to affect that same election.
There more in the full text of the article, including the history of the West intruding into Russia's backyard, both with the collapse of the USSR in the early 90s and then the Bush administration abandoning certain treaties and trying to expand NATO up to Russia doorstep.
TLDR version, Putin has kept up with at least some old propagandists who worked for the USSR, as well as some new ones willing to work for him, and been using them to forment dissent and perhaps turn home grown "alt right" style movements into useful pawns, even if it's to do nothing more than to increase division and fissures within other countries and keep them divided and focused inward.
If that all sounds conspiracy theoryish, it's worth noting that it's another old Cold War trick, and the US government used the free press of other countries, (mostly in Central and South America) to undermine them during the course of the Cold War. It's one of the reasons that certain Central and South American countries that sided with the USSR became absolutely brutal towards the press, as they had seen the US abuse either short wave radio signals, Voice of the Resistance type programs, (see Guatemala) or buy up local newspapers and them turn them into US propaganda rags that spoke nonstop against governments that stepped out of line from US desires.
I do wonder if, given the behavior of Russia, the embargoes over Ukraine and other things, if Putin sees himself as already engaged in a soft war against the rest of the world and is fighting it in the sneakiest ways possible. I certainly hope not, I'm just old enough to remember the real possibility of war in the 80s and was fortunate enough to see the end of the Cold War, I'd rather not see us all in a Cold War II, although I feel like it's headed that way.
edited 31st Oct '16 8:47:04 PM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |![]()
No no, the real final twist will be the reveal that Trump is secretly a robot piloted by tiny versions of Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon.
![]()
![]()
The stupid part about Russia's current aggression is the people in the West who apologize for it and make the insinuation (or say it out loud) that the U.S. is somehow to blame for Putin's actions. Way to apply a double standard, folks. Each nation is responsible for its own actions, and one atrocity does not excuse another. In no way is NATO or the U.S. a threat to Russia's sovereignty unless Russia has designs to annex its neighbors, and that's kind of the definition of bad behavior on the international stage.
It seems to me that Russia's leadership probably feels threatened by Western culture in general and U.S. culture specifically and is trying to push back with its own version of cultural influence. Of course, coming from the former USSR, its experience with cultural influence is espionage, spreading propaganda, and subverting international institutions. It's easier to convince shills to tell everyone how great they are than it is to actually be a good player.
edited 31st Oct '16 9:33:26 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I wouldn't trust the Mother Jones story just yet. For something that big you should always look for other sources before you believe it.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.