Free Republic

Rep. Darrell Issa, saying that “Russia is evil,” said at the California Republican Party convention Saturday in Sacramento that an independent probe of the Trump campaign’s ties to the country is necessary to prevent it from interfering in elections. Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article134995114.html#storylink=cpy

MOSCOW, January 20 (RIA Novosti) – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s electoral rating rose in December, returning to 2000s levels, a new opinion poll by the independent Levada Center showed. Asked whom they would vote for if a presidential election took place next Sunday, 68 percent of respondents said they would vote for Putin, up 10 percent from figures in December 2012. The figures for Putin’s closest possible rival, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, were 11 percent, slightly down from the December 2012 figure of 12 percent.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says Edward Snowden likely received help stealing information from the National Security Agency — and that help may have come from Russian intelligence officials. In a pre-recorded interview for NBC’s “Meet the Press” with David Gregory, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) questioned how the former NSA contractor arranged travel out of the United States before leaking the trove of secret documents and eventually making his way to Russia. “Let me just say this. I believe there’s a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB agent in Moscow,” Rogers...

US journalist David Satter, a longtime critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Monday he had been banned from the country in one of the first such expulsions since the Cold War. Satter, a former Financial Times and Wall Street Journal correspondent who published three books on Russia and the former Soviet Union, had been living and working in the country since September 2013 as an adviser for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The US government-funded broadcaster said that the US Embassy in Moscow has been informed of the move and lodged a formal diplomatic protest. Embassy officials have sought and...

With America clearly in mind, Putin declared, "In many countries today, moral and ethical norms are being reconsidered." "They're now requiring not only the proper acknowledgment of freedom of conscience, political views and private life, but also the mandatory acknowledgment of the equality of good and evil." Translation: While privacy and freedom of thought, religion and speech are cherished rights, to equate traditional marriage and same-sex marriage is to equate good with evil.