Puppet MastersS


Propaganda

Reagan's son thinks Trump supporters would elect Putin as President over any Democrat


Sputnik
Sun, 29 Jul 2018 13:25 UTC
Trump and Putin
© Sputnik/Sergey Guneev
The US president has been dealing with accusations of having ties with Russia and of being too "soft" on its president, while Trump himself has claimed he's been the hardest on Putin of all US presidents.

Ron Reagan, the son of the 40th US president has suggested during an interview with MSNBC that if Vladimir Putin ran for the US presidency, he would win over any democrat in the eyes of Donald Trump's supporters.

Comment: Or is Ron Reagan attempting to further push the anti-Russian narrative?

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Propaganda

WaPo pitches the propaganda: "God bless the deep state" and US intelligence agencies

John Hall
FM Shooter
Mon, 23 Jul 2018 21:29 UTC
trump putin helsinki
© BBC
Last Thursday, Eugene Robinson - MSNBC analyst and writer for the Washington Post - published a column criticizing President Trump for failing to side with the U.S. intelligence community over their conclusion on Russian meddling in the 2016 election during a diplomatic summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.

Remember when the "deep state" was written off as a conspiracy theory? How times have changed.

Robinson writes:
With a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.
Throughout his article, Robinson defends the integrity and reputation of U.S. intelligence agencies - the same organizations that concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and launched us into a decade-long quagmire in the Middle East.
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Attention

All the President's vermin: Having Cohen as his personal attorney, Trump needs no enemies

Robert Bridge
RT
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 20:55 UTC
Trump Cohen
© Jonathan Ernst/ReutersPresident Donald Trump and lawyer Michael Cohen
Just when it looked as though the witch hunt against Trump had dragged up every last speck of dirt on the mogul's multifaceted life, along comes the US President's personal attorney to prove just how ugly things can get.

One needn't love, like, or even vaguely tolerate US President Donald Trump to admit that the latest broadside against his ship of state has been by far the cruelest and - to borrow a word that has been tossed around lately with great abandon - treasonous, at least as far as a lawyer betraying the trust of his long-term legal client is concerned.

Amid much hype and bombast, CNN this week aired a 'secret' audio recording of Trump discussing with his personal attorney Michael Cohen how they would purchase the rights to a Playboy model's story - bought by American Media in August 2016 - of an affair she had with Trump over a decade ago (no, not Stormy Daniels, of adult-film fame, but rather one Karen McDougal).

It's important to note that the taped conversation between Trump and Cohen - that Cohen recorded - took place in September 2016, months after it was already known Trump would be representing the Republican ticket in the presidential elections. Needless to say, this is very curious timing on the part of Cohen to decide to start taping his private conversations with a future presidential candidate.

Comment: See also:

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Russian Flag

Best of the Web: The Real Reason The US Must Talk to Russia: Its Military Prowess

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Sat, 21 Jul 2018 01:06 UTC
Russian warships
© AFP/Olga MaltsevaRussian Warships
Future historians may well identify Russian President Vladimir Putin's landmark March 1 speech as the ultimate game-changer in the 21st-century New Great Game in Eurasia. The reason is minutely detailed in Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, a new book by Russian military/naval analyst Andrei Martyanov.

Martyanov is uniquely equipped for the task. Born in Baku in the early 1960s, he was a naval officer in the USSR era up to 1990. He moved to the US in the mid-1990s and is now a lab director in an aerospace firm. He belongs to an extremely rarefied group: top military/naval analysts specializing in US-Russia.

From quoting Alexis de Tocqueville and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace to revisiting the balance of power during the Soviet era and beyond, Martyanov carefully tracks how the only nation on the planet "which can militarily defeat the United States conventionally" has reacted to a situation where any "meaningful dialogue between Russia and America's politicians is virtually impossible."
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Attention

What everyone may have ignored in Helsinki

Jon Basil Utley
The American Conservative
Wed, 25 Jul 2018 00:00 UTC
PutinTrump
© Office of the Russian President/Kremin.ruPresidents Trump and Putin, Helsinki, Finland
The Washington establishment came to their own conclusions about Russia and NATO - but this is what they missed.

Sifting through the cacophony of commentary from the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki, here are four key points missed, ignored or glossed over by the Washington establishment and mainstream news coverage-and they require a good airing.

They are:

1) It's clear now that Europeans will increase their contributions to NATO. But Big Media totally ignored the trillion dollar gorilla in room: Why does anyone have to spend so much on NATO in the first place?

Are we planning a ground attack on Russia because we really think the former Soviet Empire will invade Poland or the Baltic nations? Are we planning for a land war in Europe to intervene in the Ukraine? What for is the money? The Trump administration and Big Media, for all their noise, mainly argue that more spending is good. There is no debate about the reasons why. Meanwhile Russia is cutting its military spending.

Comment: Given that criticism is often based on assumptions and perspective (true or biased), how close do the above points come to a real and fair assessment of the state of the US-Russia relationship and factors of contention?

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Pirates

Trump is due for the mother of all migraines: ISIS is back in Iraq

Martin Jay
RT
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 16:24 UTC
ISIS person flag
© VOA
Just when Trump thought he was getting the hang of the Middle East, things start to get a tad complicated. Despite congratulating himself in Helsinki about defeating ISIS in Iraq, it seems that this was more of his own fake news.

US President Donald Trump's forays into promoting himself on the international diplomacy circuit haven't amounted to much. In Brussels, he claimed to have nailed down a commitment from NATO members for increased spending, when in reality, this was entirely untrue. In the UK, he told a journalist that there was no UK-US trade deal possible, then said only hours later that his own (recorded) interview was "fake news." And at the Helsinki meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the US president looked bewildered, lost, confused like a man fazed by his surroundings.

And now Trump has a new headache in the Middle East.

In recent weeks, a number of respected journalists and commentators in Iraq are talking about how ISIS is anything but destroyed - but in fact, regrouping and on the rise.

Comment: The US-created deviant child is reportedly coming back to haunt. All suggested solutions have their intrinsic problems for any decision the president might make. And, his support for choosing a course of action will not come from within his administration nor the Congress...it will come from the US citizens who have no power and from other controversial countries such as Russia. Yes, a migraine.

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Snakes in Suits

Federal judge: Steele dossier creator Fusion GPS has been ordered to fess up its claims


RT
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 15:23 UTC
gavel
© Getty Images
A federal judge has ordered opposition research firm Fusion GPS to answer a series of questions on the Steele dossier, which contained unverified allegations against Donald Trump, and helped start the 'Russiagate' probe.

The ruling was issued by a US district judge in Florida on Tuesday, in a defamation lawsuit filed by a Russian tech executive against BuzzFeed News, which published the full, unverified dossier in January 2017. Multiple other outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, declined to publish the dossier, as they could not verify its claims.

Now, Fusion GPS will have to answer a wide-ranging series of questions: about the Democrat-connected law firm that requested the dossier, about the efforts the company made to fact-check its allegations, and about the man who actually compiled it; former British spy Christopher Steele.


Comment: The beginning of the grand unraveling or another can of worms?

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Whistle

Mattis: US not planning Iran regime change; Aussie report is 'fiction'


RT
Fri, 27 Jul 2018 21:18 UTC
Mattis
© Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith, Dept of Defense/FlickrUS Secretary of Defense James Mattis
The Pentagon has no policy for regime change in Iran and the Australian news report that claimed the US was about to launch an attack on Tehran is 'fiction,' US Secretary of Defense James Mattis told reporters.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported on Friday that the US is preparing to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities "perhaps as early as next month," citing "senior figures" in the government.
"I have no idea where the Australian news people got that," Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday. "I'm confident it is not something that's being considered right now, and I think it's a complete - frankly, it's - it's fiction."
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull also pushed back on the ABC report, calling it "speculation" based on anonymous sources.

Asked if the Trump administration has a policy of regime change in Iran, Mattis replied,
"There's none that's been instituted. We need them to change their behavior on a number of threats that they can pose with their military, with their secret services, with their surrogates and with their proxies," Mattis said, according to Reuters.

Comment: Second-guessing is now the nature of reporting, supported by a splatter of messages, opinions and fiction. Has news and announcements become uncoordinated chaos amongst administration personnel, or a mechanism of purposeful-opinion confusion?

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Oil Well

Iran plans launch of national cryptocurrency, ditching the dollar in oil trade


RT
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 15:44 UTC
Iran sanctions
© blackgolddiggers.com
Tehran is seeking ways to bypass looming US sanctions by launching a cryptocurrency that would help the Islamic Republic trade oil without using the dollar.

"We are trying to prepare the ground to use a domestic digital currency in the country," Alireza Daliri, deputy for management and investment at the Directorate for Scientific and Technological Affairs, told Iranian news agency ISNA, as quoted by PressTV.

"This currency would facilitate the transfer of money [to and from] anywhere in the world. Besides, it can help us at the time of sanctions."

US President Donald Trump said the United States will quit the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran and re-impose sanctions "at the highest level" against the country. The sanctions would limit Iran's access to the US dollar payment system. Oil, the country's largest export, is mostly traded in dollars across the globe.

Comment: See also:

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Jet4

Andrei Martyanov's "Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning"

Stephen Lendman
Global Research
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 19:04 UTC
The cutting-edge issue of our time is whether humanity can survive America's rage for global dominance while failing to acknowledge its declining supremacy relative to other nations.
Military plane
In his must read new book, titled "Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning," Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov discussed this important issue - America's inexorable decline despite spending countless trillions of dollars to remain the dominant global superpower.

Comment: See also: The Real Reason The US Must Talk to Russia: Its Military Prowess

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