Matt Allison Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 10 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said: Matt- How do you rate Obama's response to Putin's occupation of Crimea? Very poorly. But I understand why he waffled; everyone, myself included, had been hoping for many years that Russia had turned the corner and joined 21st century civilization, and that Putin was going to be a futuristic and visionary leader. Sadly, we were very wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
W. Niederhut Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 The Ukrainians are talking about closing the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum in Kiev. Some of you may be familiar with Bulgakov's novels, The Master and Magarita, and White Guard. He was a physician and native of Kiev who supported the Tsarist White Russians during the Civil War, but was not executed by the Bolsheviks because his play, The Days of the Turbins, was Stalin's favorite play. (He also survived the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.) Blugakov's novel, White Guard, was derived from his popular play, The Days of the Turbins. I recently watched the excellent Russian television film production of White Guard, set in Kiev in the winter of 1918, on Amazon Prime.* (There is also an outstanding film of The Master and Magarita, produced for Russian television some years ago.) White Guard is unpopular in Ukraine, because it depicts Petlyura and the Ukrainian nationalists of 1918 unfavorably. ‘Propaganda literature’: calls to close Mikhail Bulgakov museum in Kyiv | Mikhail Bulgakov | The Guardian * Watch The White Guard | Prime Video (amazon.com) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Thomas Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 1994 December 11 Russian forces enter Chechnya https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/yeltsin-orders-russian-forces-into-chechnya “In the largest Russian military offensive since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks pour into the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. Encountering only light resistance, Russian forces had by evening pushed to the outskirts of the Chechen capital of Grozny, where several thousand Chechen volunteers vowed a bitter fight against the Russians.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War “The 2008 Russo-Georgian War[note 3] was a war between Georgia, on one side, and Russia and the Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, on the other. The war took place in August following a period of worsening relations between Russia and Georgia, both formerly constituent republics of the Soviet Union. The fighting took place in the strategically important South Caucasus region. It is regarded as the first European war of the 21st century.[31] “ Chechnya 1994 Georgia 2008 Crimea 2014 Ukraine 2022 All you’ve got to do is look at a map to see what’s going on. Steve Thomas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 Muak is # 1 again!!! Elon Musk Becomes First Person Ever To Lose $200 Billion (ndtv.com) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 Trump’s Taxes Are the Best Case Yet for Putting Him in Prison (thedailybeast.com) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 U.S.-Trained Afghan Soldiers Angry Over Their Plight Are Ready To Join Russia's War Against Ukraine (juancole.com) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Allison Posted December 31, 2022 Share Posted December 31, 2022 4 hours ago, Steve Thomas said: Chechnya 1994 Georgia 2008 Crimea 2014 Ukraine 2022 All you’ve got to do is look at a map to see what’s going on. Yep. 100%. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirk Gallaway Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 Trump's main holding company racked up over $300M in losses This is between 2015 and 2020. https://www.axios.com/2022/12/30/trump-tax-returns-djt-business-losses 2020 Presidential debates with Trump and Biden. Tax question to Trump from Chris Wallace. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kirk Gallaway Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 Trump declared over 915.7 million in losses from 1985 to 1994! So Trump was on good behavior from 2015-2020 only carrying over 300 million dollars in losses! Transcripts of his main federal tax form, the 1040, from 1985 to 1994, were obtained by The Times in 2019. They showed that, in many years, Mr. Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer. Three pages of his 1995 returns, mailed anonymously to The Times during the 2016 campaign, showed that Mr. Trump had declared losses of $915.7 million, giving him a tax deduction that could have allowed him to avoid federal income taxes for almost two decades. Five months later, the journalist David Cay Johnston obtained two pages of Mr. Trump’s returns from 2005; that year, his fortunes had rebounded to the point that he was paying taxes. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html Barbara Walters asking Trump about his losses in 1990. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Allison Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 (edited) also, yep. 100% Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired off a scathing attack on Russia for a heartless wave of brutal holiday bombings, warning the “terrorist state” that it will never be forgiven for the outrageously cruel war it has launched against the people of Ukraine. “The terrorist state will not be forgiven. And those who give orders for such strikes, and those who carry them out, will not receive a pardon. To put it mildly,” Zelenskyy warned in an address on Saturday. He described Russian attackers as inhuman, vowing “NONhumans will lose.” “At Easter, they made such attacks, at Christmas, at New Year... They call themselves Christians, they are very proud of their Orthodoxy. But they are following the devil. They support him and are together with him,” Zelenskyy added. He said the only true purpose of the brutal war is so that one person — Russian President Vladimir Putin — can “remain in power until the end of his life.” “Your leader,” Zelenskyy added, addressing Russians, “wants to show that he has the troops behind him and that he is ahead. But he is just hiding. He hides behind the troops, behind missiles, behind the walls of his residences and palaces.” Putin “hides behind you and burns your country and your future. No one will ever forgive you for terror,” he warned Russians. “No one in the world will forgive you for this. Ukraine will never forgive.” Edited January 1, 2023 by Matt Allison Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Thomas Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 Ethics questions on fundraiser, expenses and more: Where George Santos' many scandals standhttps://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/30/where-the-george-santos-scandals-stand-00075871 Selling access to his swearing-in For between $100 and $500, Santos said donors could get a bus trip to Washington, lunch, a swearing-in ceremony and a campaign-led tour of the “Capitol grounds.” The invitation, first reported by CNN Thursday, launched a fresh round of questions about Santos’ ethics. Campaign finance experts at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center said it wasn’t immediately clear that the offer was a violation, since the invitation didn’t explicitly say the money paid was for a tour. Additionally, the tour offer was for the “Capitol grounds,” not the Capitol building itself or its office buildings, which could be a reference to the outdoor public space around the Capitol rather than private areas. Santos could run afoul of ethics rules barring the use of official resources for campaigns, however, if he explicitly held tours or meetings with donors in congressional buildings. Eye-popping expenditures Santos is also drawing scrutiny for a series of questionable expenditures made by his campaign. The campaign spent $11,000 to rent a suburban house in Huntington, Long Island, claiming it was lodging for staff, the New York Times reported — but neighbors said Santos himself was seen living there. It’s illegal for a candidate to spend campaign funds on their own personal expenses. The campaign also spent more than $40,000 on air travel, according to the Times — a figure far beyond what is typically spent during a local congressional campaign. Another $30,000 was spent on hotels across the country and $14,000 on car services. Dozens of expenditures by the campaign were listed in disclosure forms at $199.99, just below the $200 threshold where receipts are required. Nice guy. Steve Thomas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Thomas Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 Donald Trump's positive, uplifting message for the New Year: https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1609406998730182656|twgr^d0766c024b733852c23115fcc5665948f344615c|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fdonald-trump-says-us-like-third-world-country-video-nye-party-1770611 Steve Thomas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Cotter Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 (edited) On 12/31/2022 at 3:01 PM, Chris Barnard said: Thanks for taking the time to quote some of the video, I have been juggling a few balls over Xmas and really should have myself. He quotes JFK/The Missile Crisis 2 or 3 times and there is certainly a lot of wisdom in that. Most here on the forum agree with the logic when it came to Cuba and the Soviet Union but, when it comes to Ukraine, it is largely ignored. In my view we need escalation, detente and rapprochement. Mearsheimer uses the term 'modus vivendi'. I paused the video to have a good think on the unipolar comment. I think he is wrong. 20 years ago I would have agreed with him, as it was very much my fathers view. It's a very complicated topic with plenty of variables. We are seeing the dark side of unipolar and human nature shining through, instead of democratic principles. We are a captive audience in the west. We have become what we accuse the Russian and Chinese public of. Thanks, I'll add the podcast to my list. Happy New Year to you. Many happy returns, Chris. Regarding unipolarity vs multipolarity, JFK effectively favoured the latter, since he wanted to end the Cold War rather than win it and he supported the independence of Third World countries. Mearsheimer’s preference for unipolarity may have more to do with stability than anything else, which would be in keeping with the “amoral” pragmatism of the Realist school of thinking. Multipolarity is probably more sustainable in the long run, since the pax Americana approach inevitably generates resentment and resistance, which seems be manifested in the increased cooperation between BRICS and Global South countries independently of the USA. Also, there is an element of stupidity in the hubris of power arising from winning the cold war which has blinded US foreign policy makers to the convergence of interests between the US’s two main adversaries, China and Russia, and to the lunacy of the persistent “poking the bear” in eastern Europe. As Mearsheimer and others predicted, this has already resulted in disaster, as evidenced by the ongoing destruction of Ukraine. Moreover, since the predictions by western propaganda of an early economic, military and/or political Russian meltdown haven’t come to pass, the far greater and more widespread disaster described by Paul in the podcast I linked seems likely. To paraphrase the Chinese curse, we’re living in interesting times. Edited January 1, 2023 by John Cotter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matthew Koch Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Allison Posted January 1, 2023 Share Posted January 1, 2023 Imagine shilling for a dictator that wantonly kills children and civilians. Think about how much of a sub-human cretin you have to be to do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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