I’m with you on the looks, but man, I need the tinting to keep down on the friggin’ heat. A (good) sunshade gets you like 80% of the way there, but the tint really makes for a slightly acceptable vehicle after baking in the Phoenix sun for 6 hours.

Obama was the most economically illiterate President in the history of our country. He put his boot on the throat of the US economy and lead us to an unnecessarily long recession and the worst (slowest) recovery in generations...all the while adding trillions of dollars of debt. He had no effing clue what to do.

Because it’s the only lawless country with an extensive coastline.  And once ships started hiring mercenaries the attacks have dropped off radically.  No need for us to spend time and money defending other country’s ships because they are too cheap.

So France and UK split up half of Czechoslovakia with Germany in 1938? What’s that? No?

Again the SU had deeeeep dark hole to crawl out from

I’ll take your CNBC and raise you one CNN:

Owning and operating most of NATO’s army gives the U.S. a tremendous advantage.

It’s easy to create shiny public works to show the outside world how impressive you are, when all your subjects are on food stamps and have very few luxuries and work every day in support of the state.

I heard reports that NATO countries were stepping up. 

Waterways near India and Pakistan, the Koreas and Japan, Japan and China, Japan and Russia, Yemen, Black Sea, Greece and Turkey, Gibraltar and Spain. And now the whole South China Sea. All potential zones of conflict.

North Korea has some pretty shiny public works, too!

Every country has pockets of deep poverty. Well, no, that’s not quite true, not every country - I don’t think Monaco or Liechtenstein do, but basically all others. The difference is, in the Soviet Union, the vast majority of the population lived a sub-middle class existence by our standards, poverty was the rule, not…

Not a paper bear, a bear with a population that had average living standards well below western countries, who also had a very well equipped and nuclear armed military. They put nearly everything they had into their military, neglecting everything else. The rest of their economy and society was essentially at a…

With a similar GDP México does not spend that kind of money on weapons at all and still can’t care appropiately for her citizens, I dread how social services must be in Russia between that kind of spending for “defense” and the looting by Putin and friends.

Unfortunately, Putin never got the memo that the Cold War was over, because Yeltsin accidentally vomited on it and threw it away.

Russia, and, really, the Soviet Union before them, has always been essentially a developing country trying desperately to maintain a military on par with a developed super power. They have an economy the size of Italy, and Italy can't afford the sort of navy they used to have, either, let alone one the size of the…

Friendly reminder that New York, Texas, and California all have a larger GDP than Russia.

Russia’s population trends have been flat to negative for the last 20 years, it’s not difficult to see why they might have difficulty keeping something as expensive as a navy current and functional.

I would think ships would be nice to have as a way to project force far from friendly borders. Yes, the age of flinging 16" shells back and forth across the horizon are over, but with a strong navy you can park an aircraft carrier close to any theater and give yourself air support. With enough ships to screen your…

Ha! Your navy sucks Russia!