[mtrott]

First, I'm a Cruz guy, but have heretofore felt very comfortable with Trump if that is the way it turns out. Joe Scarborough's interview with Trump today is seriously troubling to me, considering Trump may very well end up our President. In case you have not heard, after Trump seemed to praise Putin for "running his country", Scarborough twice challenged Trump over the fact that Putin kills journalists and opponents.

It was Trump's response that really shocked me. After the second time Scarborough challenged Trump with this fact, Trump's response was, "we kill a lot of people too". Geez, is he asserting moral equivalence between Putin's killing his own citizens and the US killing terrorists? This type of response must be explored and challenged in the most urgent manner. We cannot have a President with, apparently, a view that such use of force against citizens by an executive should not even raise an eyebrow. Very scary.

[lewislynn]

The only thing Scarborough was concerned with, really concerned with, was the killing of journalists. Sez it all.

Kill all the lawyers journalists.

[McGruff]

A concern troll is a person who participates in a debate posing as an actual or potential ally who simply has some concerns they need answered before they will ally themselves with a cause. In reality they are a critic.

[DesertRhino]

“challenged Trump over the fact that Putin kills journalists and opponents. “

Never been a one proven, not one. In a country with widespread street crime, with a giant mafia, with oligarchs who were strong enough to physically grab entire industries and who want to operate in a gangster style with government answering to them. With others that want to go legit and have back door deals with EU bankers if they can overthrow the government, and with as many moslems as we have Mexicans, there are a lot of ways to get murdered in Russia. Lots of different toes to step on.

Yet, every murder is blamed on Putin by the opposition, and our homosexualized fascist leaders and media run with it.

I’m beginning to doubt the facts of what is always “known” to be true.

[WilliamIII]

Media hate Putin over the gay thing. All these accusations about thuggery may be true, or may not be. I hear the claims, but I don’t see the proof. Maybe it exists, but the fact mainstream media claims something, doesn’t make it true, it isn’t proof. I don’t believe mainstream media without proof.

This much I know: Russia has lower income taxes than US. in this sense, our tax system is more thuggish than theirs.

[DesertRhino]

And what the hell is a Barnini Chakraborty? When I went to school, I could pronounce every kids name.

[dschapin]

That is concerning. I respect aspects of Putin’s rule - ie, he seems to be patriotic for Russia. However, I would not want him as president and I don’t want Trump to think Putin’s crackdowns on domestic dissent are ok.

[ZULU]

Well,too many journalists over graze their range.

[patq]

“Trump really scaring me”

Maybe you should ask Santa for a fainting couch.

[roses of sharon]

Does Donald Trump have a reputation for killing journalists in NY?

Maybe that should be investigated./

[montanajoe]

The average Russian hates America and Americans, I've been there and seen it.

It seems the average Trump supporter hates Obama more than the Russian Putin who reflects his country's values and wishes to see this country go down.

It the strength of our American system that one can have such burning hatred for a elected leader that they can prefer a foreign enemy sworn to our destruction and still survive.

I can guarantee you that in Putin's Russia your hatred of him will be very short lived as will you...

[TigerClaws]

The REAL issue is: Why are we ‘at work’ with Putin?

That’s a Christian, white, educated nation filled with hot babes.

Why are we fighting on the side of ISIS-allied Turkey and against a Christian nation?

That’s the big issue.

[dforest]

Oh geez, I hate it when people on our side get all shakey. Last thing Trump is is a war monger and a senseless killer.

You should be worried about Obama and Valerie Jarrett, the fact you worry about Trump is ridiculous. Obama and his Islamic bros will get ya before Trump ever would. LOL

[Georgia Girl 2]

Russia isn’t the US. Nothing to be done about it. We need to have a relationship with Russia and attempt to co-exist. Whoever is President will need to deal with Putin. It might as well be a respectful relationship.

“we kill a lot of people too”. He’s not talking about terrorists. Do the names Andrew Breitbart and Michael Hastings ring a bell?

[usconservative]

Scarborough twice challenged Trump over the fact that Putin kills journalists and opponents.

Given the lying, liberal lamestream media is so deeply in bed with the Democrat Party and how they deceive and destroy America with every lie they tell, you'll have to pardon me if I have zero sympathy for Joe Scarborough or anyone else getting their panties in a wad right now.

[libbylu]

Gotta remind you, hardcore trumpees do not care what Trump, says, does, has said or done.
Just in case you hadn’t noticed.
Cruz I trust more than all other politicians.

[ironman]

Why did the article leave this out?

Scarborough: “So I mean, you obviously condemn Vladimir Putin killing journalists and political opponents, right?”

Trump: “Oh sure, absolutely.”

[Mariner]

We have a few journalists in the US that would benefit greatly from some fear.

[ETL]

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?

September 2014

(excerpt from a long, detailed article)

First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.

It was the Soviet Communist Party's tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.

But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.

In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990.

Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, "Blackbird"), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin's KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates - Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) - also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.

Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:

According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.

Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin's cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia.

Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin's Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB. ..."

much more at link

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/19162-putin-defender-of-christian-faith-and-morality

***********************************************************

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts - in Russia and the West - have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..."

(continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[ETL]

"I think that I would probably get along with him [Putin] very well."

--Donald Trump, CBS' Face The Nation, Oct 2015

****************************************************************

TRUMP: Vladimir Putin's praise is 'a great honor'

Business Insider ^ | December 17, 2015 | By Maxwell Tani

Republican US presidential front-runner Donald Trump is apparently "honored" that Russian President Vladimir Putin considers the real-estate magnate a "flamboyant" and "very talented" man.

"It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond," Trump said in a statement, according to Politico.

He continued: "I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect."

(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...