So there were valid, non-Stalinist motivations for the audit?

Does "valid" necessarily imply "non-Stalinist"?  I don't get what, exactly, Ames and his band of merry morons did to warrant an audit that isn't completely common on the Internets in almost any developed country.  (And note to the Russian government: You don't look serious.  You look like you're wetting your pants over the intellectual equivalent of any generic MySpace page.)  It sounds, at least to me, like the bureaucrats decided they'd worn out their welcome, and that an audit might be in order to put enough pressure on the eXile to make it go away.

Now Ames has decided Russia is a scary police state.  But Ames was telling me forever that Russia was this awesome place with drugs and women and, oh, Putin's good people and all that rubbish.

Seems to have a little trouble keeping his story straight.  Shocking.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin