Vladimir Putin has crafted a clever position vis-a-vis Ed Snowden, acknowledging he's more a civil rights activist seeking asylum than anything, while emphasizing the Russian intelligence services have not worked with him and have no real reason to do so -- not counting the above high profile "exchange" (not in real time) of course.
Putin also thinks the District was overly aggressive with its attempts to track him down, which somewhat forced him to find protection in Russia. That had not been the original plan.
Minus any extradition treaty with the District of Columbia, which Putin claims Russia has offered to institute in the past, only to be rebuffed, there's no mechanism in place to get wanted criminals returned to Russia.
I also finally tuned in John McAfee and his Libertarian party candidacy. What an interesting guy right? Former NSA (and CIA) chief Hayden takes a position far closer to McAfee's and Apple's than the FBI's.
Mining Youtube and the rest of the Internet is rewarding when it comes to following a lot of threads.
My hypothesis is the US presidential race has become more farcical in proportion to individuals not trusting they're getting truthful information on so many important topics.
Nixon-Kissinger's secret bombings in Indochina were big contributors to the breakdown in trust, although the Kennedy assassinations really got the ball rolling.
Average people came to realization that lies are the common currency, not truths, at the "highest" levels (whatever that means).
That was a paradigm shift. Taken to its logical conclusion, we get what we see today: candidates without the context of gravitas.
Gravitas sans Veritas is mighty hard to sustain over the long haul, lets put it that way.
We could go back to the Business Plot and Smedley "War is Racket" Butler for more grist for the mill.
Another reason the political sphere is leaking gravitas is people without much of an engineering background may come across as insufficiently literate in the computer age. Many senators recognize this as a problem.
The foray of legislative bodies into crafting a "Common Core" thereby politicizing STEM content in particular, has made them easy targets for critics. Why should people this ignorant be making the rules?
