Fact-checking is a terrible way to report on Donald Trump's lying . It's like we enter into a dialogue with him. It's as though, he says "A," and we check "A," and it gives it no context. Saying that he's "misstating" is an even worse way of covering it. That's NPR's ridiculous policy of not calling his lies "lies." It's really destructive.

Russian law on banning nontraditional relationships basically says you cannot have any portrayal, neutral or positive, of homosexual relationships or nontraditional families, period. And you also cannot have negative portrayals of heterosexual relationships. So along the way, the law completely quashes any kind of public discussion on domestic violence. No discussion of relationships at all, unless you want to showcase a heterosexual love story, that preferably involves reproduction.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.

For the first ten years, Vladimir Putin was constructing his power structure, and now he's defending it. He's retrenching, mobilizing a shrinking constituency, constructing an enemy that's really scary. It's war. And when you look at the anti-gay campaign, it's a classic case of war rhetoric: demonstrating an immediate and extreme danger.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

I have no doubt that there are Russian efforts to disturb the fabric of American democracy, but they're disruption efforts. The working theory behind the intelligence report on Russian interference in the president election is that Russia influenced American public opinion. We may not like that, but if it influenced American public opinion, at least in the guise of legitimate activity - which is what the report says - then there's nothing you can do about that. Where it would be improper and illegal would be if there was actual collusion in those efforts. We don't know that.

There's another piece of legislation in Russia that would make "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" a cause for removing parental rights, and remove children from same-sex families altogether. It was withdrawn, most likely temporarily, under international pressure. What "allowing for nontraditional sexual relations" means, nobody knows. And this is part of the point of all of these laws. They have to be vague to not just enable but require selective enforcement.