The never-Trumpers are never going to surrender the myth that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump.

Their investment in the myth is just too huge.

For Clinton and her campaign, it is the only way to explain how they booted away a presidential election even Trump thought he had lost in November. To the mainstream media, this is the smoking gun in their Acela Corridor conspiracy to delegitimize Trump's presidency.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sees Russian hacking as a way to put a cloud over the administration before it begins. But it is the uber-hawks hereabouts who are after the really big game.

They seek to demonize Putin as the saboteur of democracy — someone who corrupted an American presidential election to bring about victory for a "useful idiot" whom Clinton called Putin's "puppet."

If the War Party can convert this "fake story" into the real story of 2016, then they can scuttle any Trump effort to attain the rapprochement with Russia that Trump promised to try to achieve.

If they can stigmatize Trump as "Putin's president" and Putin as America's implacable enemy, then the Russophobes are back in business.

Nor is the War Party disguising its goal.

Donald Trump's win in the US election allowed the world to avoid a massive conflict, which would have erupted if Hillary Clinton had become president, renowned Serbian movie director Emir Kusturica said. "If Madame Clinton had been elected, there would've been a great war, but now, with Trump, I think that it won't happen," Kusturica told journalists in Moscow on Wednesday, as cited by TASS.

The winner of two Golden Palm Branches at the Cannes Film Festival has arrived in the Russian capital to premiere his new movie, On the Milky Road. The story in the picture, starring Monica Bellucci and Kusturica himself, unfolds during the Bosnian war of 1992 - 1995.

"The war will never let us be. There will always be war in the world. It's a standard condition for humans. We had this war. Like the war in Ukraine, it wasn't out war. This war was imposed on us. And I think that's what our film speaks about," the Bosnian-born director explained. Kusturica also said that his appearance in On the Milky Road was his last in front of the camera as an actor.

"This movie was very hard for me. Acting in it was a big problem. The work of an actor and a film director are two different things. When I saw the playback, I understood that it was not quite what I should have done as a film director," the 62-year-old explained.

Renowned American strategist Roger Stone has launched a petition, asking President-elect Donald Trump to prosecute former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her family for breaching the law.

The long-time ally of Trump said Monday that Clinton's crimes in using a private server to exchange sensitive data between 2009 and 2013 should not go unpunished.

"No way should Hillary Clinton avoid prosecution #LockHerUp Sign our petition to the Donald Trump Administration," Stone said in a tweet, while introducing chargehillaryclinton.com, his new website.

The website included a petition addressed to Trump and his nominee for attorney general Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, asking them to also probe Hillary's husband, former president Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea.

"Either we are a nation of laws or we are a 'banana republic' led by criminals," the petition said. "After the Watergate scandal, the mainstream media told us repeatedly that 'no person is above the law.'"

Police in Berlin are offering a reward of €100,000 (US$104,260) for information leading to the arrest of the man suspected of involvement in Monday's attack on a Christmas market which left 12 dead and 48 injured.

A search is currently underway for 24-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri, who could be armed and dangerous, according to a statement from the Federal Prosecutor's Office (GBA).

Apparently the established policy bureaucracy in Washington is getting the shivers at The Donald's approach.

The Guardian reports that many career staffers of the National Security Council are quitting their jobs and looking for other work, believing they have no future under Gen. Michael Flynn's tenure:

The White House is struggling to prevent a crippling exodus of foreign policy staffers eager to leave before the arrival of the Trump administration, according to current and former officials.

The top level officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are political appointees who have to submit resignations and leave in a normal transition. The rest of the 400 NSC staff are career civil servants on secondment from other departments. An unusual number of these more junior officials are now looking to depart.

In a related story, democrats in congress are trying to protect establishment bureaucrats in the US State Department from getting canned by Trump. They sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking that he not reveal names of state department officials who worked on foreign policies at odds with Trump's.

Yes, the title is provocative, but no, this is not "apology porn" for one of the most virulently anti-Russian and pro-American parties in the world. Instead, it's a sober briefing about the mildly unfolding regime change events which are taking place in Poland nowadays. The ruling PiS party's foreign policy is absolutely indefensible from a multipolar standpoint, as is its internal witch hunt against "Russian spies" which dramatically culminated with the arrest of Mateusz Piskorski, Poland's highest-profile political prisoner.

Submitting that PiS represents a lot of despicable ideas, it also in all objectivity stands for a few significant strains of thought which run absolutely counter to the ruling EU establishment and thus present a unique challenge for the unipolar totalitarians.

Eurocautionary Roots

For example, PiS is against the dominance that Brussels exercises over its subordinates' affairs and is in favor of the "Orban approach" of EU decentralization and internal reform. This is the polar opposite of what Germany and France are pursuing, and it's likely attributable to the fact that Polish "Gray Cardinal" Jaroslaw Kaczynski is a conservative "Eurocautionary" (the author's more palatable description for what the Mainstream Media smears as "Euroskeptics").

Moreover, PiS is a Catholic party which emphasizes religious values and their historic role in Polish society, whereas the EU elite are militant atheists. Relatedly, PiS is vehemently against the latest and most dangerous iteration of "political correctness" in the EU, which is the forced "refugee resettlement" of thousands of civilizationally dissimilar immigrants to each of the member states. In the case of Poland, these individuals would be shipped to a country which is almost completely ethnically and religiously homogeneous, thus leading to near-instantaneous destabilizations on the local, regional, and perhaps even national level, ergo why the party is so strongly opposed to this measure.

The US Navy's Zumwalt-class destroyer is yet another military project suffering from cost ballooning and performance issues created by a flawed procurement system that encourages such creations, the conservative National Review magazine wrote.

The Zumwalt project, or DDG-1000, was touted as an advanced stealth warship for the 21st century, capable of dominating the world's maritime zones for decades to come. Of the planned 32 ships, 29 have been canceled due to ever-increasing cost blowouts.

The flagship, the USS Zumwalt, has experienced a series of embarrassing breakdowns both before and after its commission in October. As she was making her first voyage to San Diego, the destroyer had to stop engines in the Panama Canal and be towed on.

In an online publication on Monday, the popular National Review branded the project an "unmitigated disaster." The article harshly criticized the rationale behind the Zumwalt design and its skyrocketing price, which was a result of procurement system that lacks accountability for waste and doesn't prevent ties between military commanders and defense contractors.

The top Republican in the U.S. Senate has again rejected calls for a special congressional committee to investigate alleged Russian computer hacking during the U.S. presidential election.

Senator Mitch McConnell's remarks, made to a television station in his home state of Kentucky, came amid mounting pressure for a select committee of Senator and House members to lead a probe into the matter.

Over the weekend, Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) said that having three separate Senate committees conduct investigations would be inefficient and duplicative. The Armed Services, Foreign Relations, and Intelligence committees are set to take up separate investigations beginning next month.

The top Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, also supports the effort, along with Lindsey Graham (Republican-South Carolina) and Jack Reed (Democrat-Rhode Island).

"It's a serious issue, but it doesn't require a select committee. We already have a committee set up to do this," McConnell said in the December 19 interview with Kentucky Educational Television.

Okay, so tonight we have the name of the assassin, it is Mevlut Mert Aydintas, a 22 year old policeman who had been recently fired following the anti-Gulenist crackdown of Erdogan against the forces which had attempted to overthrow him recently. We also have a very useful video of the murder.

That video of the attack also shows something very important: the only shots fired are those fired by the assassin. See for yourself:


What this means is one of two things:

Version 1: there was nobody in charge of security at this exhibition;

Version 2: the room where this murder happened was considered 'safe/sterile' because it was inside an outer security perimeter which we don't see in this video.

I find version 2 far more likely. That would also explain why and how Mevlut Mert Aydintas so easily got in: he simply flashed his police ID and was let through.

When such an event occurs it is also important to ask cui bono - whom does it benefit?

Erdogan? No.

I see absolutely no imaginable reason why Erdogan would want the Russian Ambassador murdered in Ankara, but I can easily imagine a long list of reasons why he would not want that to happen at all.

Some will correctly say that the fall of Aleppo is a humiliating defeat for Turkey and Erdogan, and I agree. But I would remind everybody that Erdogan clearly had a deal going with the Russians and the Iranians when he moved his forces across the border and occupied northern Syria. There is *no way* he would have risked such a move against the will of Moscow and Tehran.

So what was this deal? We will probably never know, but it clearly included a provision which limited Turkey's actions to a narrow strip in the north. If that hypothesis is correct, then Aleppo would have to be considered outside the "Turkish sphere of interest" in Syria, at least by the tripartite Turkish-Iranian-Russian understanding. Did Erdogan know that Aleppo would fall and would fall so fast? Probably not. It appears that Erdogan got outmaneuvered by the Russians and the Iranians. But he most definitely had better options to retaliate against the liberation of Aleppo than to have the Russian Ambassador murdered in Ankara. The fact is that the Turks did precious little when Aleppo was liberated, at most they helped the Russian evacuate part of the "good terrorists".

Never has the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency so blatantly involved itself in an American election. However, the agency has a rich history of interfering in the elections of other nations, including Russia. The conclusions of an undisclosed CIA secret report on alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election has been summarily dismissed by the director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and several retired U.S. intelligence officers as deeply flawed and a propaganda tool concocted by the highly-politicized CIA director John Brennan and his cronies.

Brennan and his clique have upped the ante by claiming, without a shred of evidence, that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed the hacking of computer systems linked to the U.S. election. NBC News, which has a long history of cooperation with the CIA going back to the days of RCA/NBC chairman David Sarnoff and his close friend CIA director Allen Dulles, dutifully reported Brennan's outrageous claims as "news."