With so many accomplishments in the first 100 days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency – the immigration ban, the defunding of sanctuary cities, repeal and replace, infrastructure improvement, education reform, jobs for miners and other disaffected workers and the building of the Mexican wall, oh, wait, that stuff didn’t happen – it’s no wonder that Russkiegate was put on the back burner. When you’re sending Syria a calling card in the form of 59 Tomahawk missiles and aircraft carriers in the direction of South Korea – eventually – it’s easy to see how the Russian hacking scandal and possible ties to the Trump administration might seem like ancient history. ...
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Where would the Olympics be without the drama and simultaneous comic relief that is figure skating?
Thursday night was the latest chapter in the farce as Russia’s Adelina Sotnikova beat the seamless defending champ, South Korea’s Yuna Kim, for the ladies’ gold medal by five whole points. The decisive margin of victory, Kim’s clearly superior artistic (and let’s face it, overall) performance and the revelation that the judges included the wife of the head of the Russian skating federation and a Ukrainian involved in a 1998 ice dance controversy has led 1.7 million to petition for reform on change.org.
Good luck with that. The current convoluted system, which would require an Einstein to parse, was put in place to counteract the kind of abuse being alleged now. In the frozen world of figure skating, the Cold War never ends.
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