American Committee for US-Russia Accord

For the past year, there has been a debate in Washington as to whether or not the Russians were going to roll tanks into the Baltics. They took over Crimea “at gun point,” the saying goes, so their ex-Soviet enclaves along the Baltic Sea were surely next. It is no surprise then that presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated that concern during Thursday’s debate with Bernie Sanders.

The Russia thing is a tedious and lurid spectacle, a shooting match, like Whitewater before it, in which armed participants are allowed to circle endlessly, at taxpayers’ expense, around invisible targets that they mysteriously never manage to hit but whose existence is as obvious to one group of partisan onlookers as it is unthinkable to the other.

STARTFOR’s George Friedman writes “Turkey and Russia are now both at critical points. Russia is trying to maintain its balance economically and strategically. Turkey is intersecting, simply by geography, with four destabilizing regions: Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia. Both countries have profound vulnerabilities and are therefore hyper-sensitive to the moves of the other.”

While there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign.

Hasty decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic are causing irreparable damage to journalism as a whole.

Most Americans were told Donald Trump won the presidential election last year. But his policy toward Russia looks suspiciously like what a President Hillary Clinton would have pursued.

Sceptical voices, such as those of the VIPS, have been drowned out by a din of disinformation. Flagrantly false stories, like the Washington Post report that the Russians had hacked into the Vermont electrical grid, are published, then retracted 24 hours later. Sometimes, like the stories about Russian interference in the French and German elections, they are not retracted even after they have been discredited.

Bob Garfield talks to Glenn Greenwald about his article on the CNN debacle and why the media need to do better if they want to regain public trust.

According to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, fresh off a meeting with Vladimir Putin, US-Russian relations   “are probably the worst they have been since before the end of the Cold War. Mutual trust has been dissipated on both sides. Confrontation has replaced cooperation.”

Amid news the Mueller probe could extend through 2018, Guardian reporter Luke Harding and TRNN’s Aaron Mate discuss Russiagate and Harding’s new book “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win”

Putin again had some interesting things to say, though one could scarcely glean this from Western press reports, and certainly not from the US media. Beelzebub is never deserving of serious attention.