In mid-January 2012, just days after Michael McFaul arrived in Moscow to begin his stint as US Ambassador to Russia, Russian opposition leaders lined up outside the US Embassy [Russian] to meet him in a bizarre confab that reeked of both treason and duplicity.
Approached by journalists inquiring as to why they had all come to greet the US Ambassador, their responses ranged from silence to dismissive gibes.

Later, the group of opposition leaders emerged responding only with "Вы сурковская пропаганда," or "you're Surkov's propaganda," meaning the journalists represented government efforts to undermine their work and legitimacy. It is a common response given by Russia's opposition members when media attempts to question them about their increasingly overt ties to Wall Street and London.

When the US government sanctioned the beating and arrest of US citizens for swaying from side to side in the Jefferson Memorial a couple of years ago, it provoked no response from the Western media (and therefore the Western zombie-citizens who rely entirely on the media for their 'opinions'). Yet the Russian government, sorry, 'Putin' (because everyone knows Putin is a dictator, right?) is broadly denounced as a 'tyrant' by these same Western zombies (again because their 'outraged opinion' was deftly inserted into their brains by the Western media) for putting a stop to the ugly spectacle of deranged Russian women sticking chickens up their vaginas in supermarkets, daubing outlines of phalli on bridges, staging 'orgies' in a museum and defiling the peace and tranquility of Russian Orthodox churches as part of their three year long international attack on the Russian government.

Disconnect? For sure, but, like I said, don't expect any logic from the collective mind of the citizens of Western zombie nations. All you can hope to do is understand the psychopathic logic of Western governments and the way it infects the minds and manipulates the emotions of Western citizens.

'Pussy Riot', or 11 Russian women between the ages of 20-33, has received direct moral support from the US State Department and likely indirect financial support, and appears to be one aspect of the US government's decade-long attempt to undermine Russian society and its president, Vladimir Putin.

Yesterday the United States lost the propaganda war on Ukraine. President Obama made a reluctant and senseless statement which Washington Post entitled "There will be costs".

He pronounced standard phrases like "the Ukrainian people deserve the opportunity to determine their own future", proposed Russia to be a "part of an international community's effort to support the stability and success of a united Ukraine", lamented over the alleged "violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity" and assured that "the United States supports his government's efforts and stands for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and democratic future of Ukraine".

Nothing is quite as nauseating as watching the hypocrisy and hubris with which President Obama 'warns' the Russian president not to 'interfere' in Ukraine, telling the Russians there would be 'costs to pay.' It's a surreal move, echoed by his equally creepy and out-of-touch consigliore and chief "diplomat," the morally bankrupt John Kerry. Astonishing in its audacity and lack of regard for history, truth or facts, this bellicose blather seems aimed only at the idiots over whom he presides, the fools and tools in congress and the press, and his bought-and-paid-for lackeys in European capitals.

Outside the bubble, the sabre rattling is alarming and threatening. Having stood the issue completely on its head, No Drama Obama ignores how it looks to Russia, China and anyone with a skeptical mind. It is so jarring that it leaves only two options: is he crazy or does he really want war? That's why the Russian Senate, offended to the core, asked President Putin to recall the US ambassador over Obama's remarks.

Officers of the United States' Central Intelligence Agency operated as consultants to Anatoly Chubais, the Russian deputy prime minister who oversaw the privatization of the country's economy in the early 1990's, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

"In Chubais' entourage, it has now turned out, CIA officers worked as consultants," Putin said at a live Q&A session with the Russian public.

Putin also said "intelligence officers" had been prosecuted in the United States for illegally "enriching" themselves "during the course of privatization in Russia."

He gave no further details.

Putin also said "many mistakes" had been made during the controversial privatization of Russia's post-Soviet economy, but praised Chubais and the other reformers for their "courage" in taking the measures they deemed necessary.

One month before U.S. President Barack Obama pays his first visit to meet Pope Francis at The Vatican, an explosive new report has exposed the seedy side of the Catholic Church.

Secrets of the Vatican - a PBS Frontline exclusive which first aired last Tuesday - is a jaw-dropping piece of work, utterly unflinching in its depiction of the church's ongoing child sexual abuse scandal.

Not only that, it delves extensively into allegations of money laundering on the part of the Vatican Bank -

"It is unbelievable that this documentary was ever produced and shown on American television, much less by the government's PBS network," one source told us in commending it to our attention.

We agree ...

The FrontLine story begins with the story of Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado. Maciel was the Mexican priest who founded the Roman Catholic Church's Legion of Christ, an order which recruited young men for the priesthood.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Mike Billington, with the Executive Intelligence Review, from Leesburg, about US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel calling on Russia to be cautious about its military exercises along Ukraine's border


What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview:

Press TV: Mike Billington, it is pretty apparent that Putin is mad and we have just heard from the US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that it hopes that it is not going to be provocative these military drills and that it would not lead to miscalculations.

Where do you see the situation headed?

Billington: Well it is a disgusting hypocrisy. The problem of course that everyone knows is that it is not the Russians who are intervening in the internal affairs of Ukraine. It was the US and NATO. Everybody heard Victoria Nuland's open discussion with ambassador [Geoffrey] Pyatt about who they want to put in office and who they want to keep out on the street, continue the violent demonstrations that were going on.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has got the go-ahead from parliament to use the country's military in Ukraine in a marked escalation of the crisis.

The Kremlin has already been accused of sending 6,000 troops into Crimea despite calls by Britain and the US for Moscow to back off.

Two Russian anti-submarine warships have also appeared off the Crimea coast, violating an agreement on Moscow's lease of a naval base, Interfax news agency quoted a Ukrainian military source as saying.

The source said the two vessels, part of Russia's Baltic Fleet, had been sighted in a bay at Sevastopol, where Moscow's Black Sea Fleet has a base.

On Friday, US President Barack Obama warned Moscow "there will be costs" if it intervened militarily.

His national security team met on Saturday for an update on the crisis.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is still one of the most powerful lobby organizations in the country, but fortunately, it is starting to lose its iron-clad grip on our policymakers. AIPAC lost the fight to stop Chuck Hagel from being confirmed as Secretary of Defense; it lost the push for the US military to attack Syria, and it is losing its effort to derail nuclear talks with Iran. In the old days, AIPAC bragged that it could, within 24 hours, get the signatures of 70 Senators on a napkin if it really wanted to. This year, AIPAC got stuck at 59 cosponsors for its S.1881 sanctions bill - not enough support to force Senator Harry Reid to bring the bill to the floor or to override a threatened presidential veto.

Another sign of AIPAC's waning influence is the fact that this year, at their March 2-4 Policy Conference in Washington DC, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend but not President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden - both of whom have spoken in past years.

But it's certainly not time to sound the death knell. AIPAC still has a lot of muscle and will keep trying to flex it. Here's what we have to look forward to coming out of AIPAC 2014:

1. AIPAC continues to gun for a military confrontation with Iran. AIPAC has been pushing for increased sanctions during these delicate international nuclear talks, a move that would violate the terms of the agreement, signal to Iran that the US negotiating team cannot deliver on its commitments, divide the US from its international negotiating partners, and embolden Iranian hardliners. AIPAC is still pushing for this, but as a backup is trying to set the conditions for the talks. AIPAC's policy would lead us down a path to yet another disastrous war in the Middle East (AIPAC was a big promoter of the war in Iraq - and look how that one turned out!).

2. AIPAC's call for unconditional support for the Israeli government undermines a possible negotiated solution between the Israelis and Palestinians. AIPAC promotes Israeli policies that are in direct opposition to international law, including the establishment of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian land in its construction of the 26-foot high concrete "separation barrier" running through the West Bank. On February 27 Amnesty International published a report called Trigger Happy providing chilling detail of Israel's use of excessive force in the West Bank. AIPAC's support of these illegal practices is in direct opposition to a negotiated solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. AIPAC has also been pressuring Secretary of State Kerry to keep the political representatives of Palestinians in Gaza - Hamas - completely out of the peace talks. How can you come to a negotiated solution if 40 percent of all Palestinians are not represented?

American exceptionalism has gone into overdrive with stern warnings from US President Barack Obama to Russia to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and to not destabilize the region

By "American exceptionalism" we mean Washington's seemingly unlimited capacity for exceptional arrogance and double think.

Obama has not yet accused Russia outright of "military invasion" in the crisis-torn country, but that was the clear inference from his weekend press conference. In a veiled threat of military confrontation, the American president warned that there would be "costs" for Moscow.

"Any violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity will be deeply destabilizing and the US stands with the international community to affirm that there will be costs [for this violation]," said Obama in a hastily arranged media statement in Washington on Friday.

The White House is obviously rattled by reports of Russian troop movements across Ukraine's southern Crimean Peninsula. Moscow says that its military presence in the autonomous Crimean republic of Ukraine is fully in accord with a long-standing legal agreement to have its soldiers stationed there as part of its Black Sea naval base.