Matt, I read your responses , and they basically come down to - Yeah. Trump did this and that. But so what. And you missed the entire point I was making. You wanted Trump to yell at Putin? Who cares. Had he done that then he’d have been blamed for bringing the US to the brink of war with Russia. Words mean NOTHING! You remember Obama’s infamous Syrian Red line threat over the use of chemical weapons? They used them. And used them again. Once again just words and no action. It took Trump to actually take the action Obama threatened. Again, words mean nothing. Were you threatened when Obama whispered to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev he would have more flexibility to negotiate on issues like missile defense after the 2012 election? It got attention, but nothing near this. How would that have been interpreted coming from Trumps mouth? But I’m sure you were critical of Obama too….;o/ 

Finally someone else posts some pictures of some Russian tchotchkes from a low end russian dollar store of Trump and Putin. As if this is supposed to show anything!? LOL. I also find it a bit unusual that they're selling flags with the writing in ENGLISH and not Russian.Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to sell to the Russian market. Share away with the pictures, just don’t think too hard about it.

Feel free to post those pictures on your Facebook.

Natural gas is only shipped via pipeline to Canada and Mexico (for obvious reasons). LNG (the other way to ship it) costs 4x as much for the same amount of energy. So the Germans are supposed to think buying from the US is a good idea?

You may find it surprising that Germany is the 13th largest exporter of natural gas (second largest in Europe behind Norway who they do import from).  But just like the US being a major importer of oil, it's also a major exporter.  This sort of thing is just business in the world of commodity products, and not the sign of an anti-American agenda. Doing business with Russia is *not* the problem. For literally anybody.

The Germans actually have been addressing the energy independence problem, as growth in the renewables sector in Germany has been impressively swift. As has been mockery from the right for attempting it.

Did Obama make mistakes? Sure. Unavoidable. Because in politics, particularly international politics, sometimes there may be no good solution."Nothing" may be the best option but the hardest to do, etc. Sometimes stuff just goes down in flames and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.  In Assad's case, the dude is clearly All In. If he loses, he's first against the wall when he does. Dealing with the desperate makes influencing him more than tricky to get any result we would like.  Bombing airfields after warning them way ahead of time that we were going to do it won't (and didn't) really accomplish much.

As for those Russian Mercenaries, it's funny Putin would allow such a thing to even exist.  Unless he wanted a completely expendable force that gave him lots of plausible deniability.

Trump's problem is that he thinks complicated things are simple. He's a walking poster boy for Dunning Kruger Syndrome. A knee-jerk reactionary who thinks an un-studied off-the-cuff idea is a "policy." He thinks his expertise in the Steak industry is a match for Putin's years of KGB training, experience and personal malevolence. It clearly doesn't occur to him that he can be played for a sucker. On TV.

And thanks Micheal and Sam!  Some weird Eastern European thing?  I don't think I've ever seen the like (collectibles celebrating a foreign leader or relationship with a foreign country) here in the US.