Putin & Donnie

Russia Monitor: Who Ya’ Gonna Believe, Your Lyin’ Eyes Or Putin’s Grin?

  “According to the poll, 57 percent believe it’s likely that Russia “has compromising information“ on Trump, compared to 31 percent who don’t think it’s likely.” — Poll: Shutdown, Russia drive Trump to all-time high disapproval. By Dan Peak The Commoner Call (1/24/19) Dear Fellow Readers, The poll referenced above is worth a quick read. We, the American public, do not support Trump’s government shutdown as a strong-arm tactic to build a monument to himself. Aside from the tactic, we, the majority, do not support his Wall … period. The guy who self-promoted as master of the  ‘Art of the Deal’ may…

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Putin Must Be Sooo Happy: Trump & His Teeny, Tiny Twitter Thumbs Exposed Location, Faces Of Navy Seals Team In Iraq Tweet

  [Editor’s Note: Imagine the conniption fits the Rethuglicans would have had if Obama had done this. They would have moved for impeachment. When Trump does it? Uh, whatever… — Mark L. Taylor] By Mary Papenfuss HuffPost (12/28/18) President Donald Trump posed with members of a Navy Seals special ops team in Iraq this week, then reportedly exposed information about them on Twitter that’s usually classified. The location of such a deployment, as well as the identities or identifiable faces of service members, are usually classified, Defense Department sources told Newsweek magazine. “The fact is they are a special operations…


Russian Trolls Prey Upon & Pry Open The Toxic Way We Do Our Politics

  By Rafael Behr The Guardian (11/13/18) To understand the current political frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic, it helps to know Tortuous Convolvulus. Unfamiliar with his work? Convolvulus was a spy, operating around 50BC, a specialist in psychological warfare. He was deployed by Julius Caesar against a stubborn Gallic rebellion, and his methods were not so different to those of Russian cyber-saboteurs against western democracies. It is worth adding that Convolvulus is a character from Asterix and the Roman Agent, a book known to most English readers in translation by Anthea Bell. The sad news of Bell’s death last month triggered many…


Snared: When A Young Trump Went To Russia

  By Craig Unger The New Republica (8/15/18) On a frigid December day in 2017, Oleg Kalugin opens the door of his house in Rockville, Maryland, an upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., to meet me. Nothing in particular distinguishes his split-level suburban home from those of the other professionals in the neighborhood, but the man who lives there is very much out of the ordinary, a former KGB spymaster who is now an American citizen. Born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), Kalugin, at 83, now lives just half an hour’s drive from the White House, which for decades was dead…


Former Naval Intel Office Malcolm Nance On “The Plot To Destroy Democracy”

  “This man is in debt. He is in to Moscow in the way a that a crack who has stolen two kilos of crack is in debt to a Colombian cartel.” — Malcolm Nance [Editor’s Note: Get a dose of reality about the very real gathering civil war threat we are facing. This interview is well worth the time. — Mark L. Taylor] 31-Minute Video ***** The Plot To Hack America – Malcolm Nance [Editor’s Note: Malcolm Nance is a former Navy counter intelligence officer. I would take varying degrees of issue with some of his comments in this…


Moving In For The Kill: Putin Leads The Way In Exploiting Democracy’s Lost Promise

  By Brian Grodsky The Conversation (5/22/18) How do you give democracy a bad name? You fail to deliver on its promise. People fighting for democracy want individual rights and freedoms, but they also want and expect economic prosperity. So every democratic movement that doesn’t produce both the political and economic rights people expect becomes a nail in the coffin of democracy. Russia’s experiment with democracy and market reforms started in 1991 but began to collapse with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power at the end of 1999. President Putin’s March re-election is the latest sign that the liberal experiment in Russia is…


Authoritarianism Scholar Timothy Snyder: Reporters – Are The Heroes Of Our Time

  “Everything good we take for granted in a free society depends upon factuality. Without reporters we don’t have factuality.” By Timothy Snyder (3/10/18) Without the people who seek facts, we can forget about justice, freedom, and equality. Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University, specializing in eastern Europe, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. His books have received widespread acclaim. His most recent book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” explores the everyday ways a citizen can resist the authoritarianism of today. He is also the author of “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” and, forthcoming…



Trump, Russia, Election. Quid, Pro, Quo.

  Sanctions? What sanctions? By Charles Pierce Esquire (1/30/18) Here’s a story that you will not find in Tuesday morning’s editions of either the New York Times or The Washington Post because reasons, I guess. On Monday, when President* Trump was fitting the employees of the Department of Justice for their armbands, he also was supposed to sign a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia for its ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election. Congress voted these new sanctions almost unanimously last year. You know what’s coming, right? You don’t even need Reuters to see where the quid exchanges a warm embrace with the quo. “Today, we have informed Congress that this…


Russia Monitor: Putin’s All-Purpose Fool Tool

“He knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the president.” – Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper referring to Putin’s relationship with Trump. (CNN – 12/18/17)   By Dan Peak The Commoner Call (12/21/17) Dear Fellow Readers, COLLUSION! As NBC News reported Tuesday, soon after Trump became the Republican nominee senior FBI officials briefed him on counterintelligence. including a very specific warning that foreign adversaries “would probably try to spy on and infiltrate his campaign”. These briefings are common practice with presidential nominees. Candidates are encouraged to report such contacts: FBI Warned Trump In 2016 Russians…


VIDEO: America’s Mobster President—New Evidence In Dutch Documentary Of Trump’s International Money Laundering Circles

  By Steven Rosenfeld AlterNet (9/29/17) President Trump’s Manhattan properties and business partners, including former Soviet Union-connected oligarchs, were involved in a larger international money-laundering scheme involving upward of $1 billion, according to Dutch filmmakers whose third installment in an investigative series aired on public TV in Holland Wednesday. “We wanted to know in depth how money was transferred from Kazakhstan to the United States and how this could relate to Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and Trump’s real estate,” said Sander Rietveld, director of The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump, Part III: The Multibillion-Dollar Fraud, broadcast on Zembla, a program…


‘On Point’ – How Brutal Totalitarianism Took Over Russia

  By Tom Ashbrook On Point (10/2/17) Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen on how modern Russia took a wrong turn on the road to democracy and its march, now, to totalitarianism. Reporter Masha Gessen grew up in Russia.  Left young when it was still the Soviet Union.  Came back when there was an opening to democracy, and watched as Russia went the other way – to Vladimir Putin and what she now plainly calls totalitarianism.  Why did that happen?  What does it mean for Russians and for the world?  For the United States in particular?  This hour On Point:  Mashsa Gessen…


‘The Russia Monitor’ – New Commoner Call Feature Will Keep Track Of The Emerging Crime Scene

“If you think something is coincidence, you are not paying attention.” By Dan Peak The Commoner Call (3/23/17) Dear Fellow Readers, I read the Commoner Call every day and I have appreciated the new approach of bringing focus to an issue, it offers both a wider perspective and more depth to a topic. I’m sure you’ve noticed the recurring focus on Russia.  Commoner Call editor Mark Taylor and I have shared thoughts on this for a number of months.  I had this idea, “The Russia Monitor” as a category of the Commoner Call to bring ongoing focus and order given…