From Russia With Love

There is a new link to Russia with our politics, a new Russian connection beside Trump and this time it is with Jill Stein. It seems that Dr. Stein attended the Russian news agency Russia Today’s 10^th Anniversary party with Russian President Putin.

This photo shows her sitting at the table with Putin and Michael Flynn, Trump’s military adviser this past December (You can see the whole video of Russian President Putin speech here).

Those seated around the table as reported by Russian Insider are,

Back row, left to right
Michael Flynn - top US spy chief until 2014  Wikipedia
Vladimir Putin
Serb film director Emir Kusturica
Emir Kusturica's wife
Willy Wimmer - prominent German politician  Wikipedia
Jill Stein - Candidate for President for the American Green Party
Sergei Ivanov - Putin's chief of staff - seen as #2 person in terms of political importance in Russia

Front, left to right
Unrecognized
Alexey Gromov - deputy chief of staff responsible for media

Dr. Stein has a video of her trip to Russia where she talks about peace which you can watch here on Russia Today’s YouTube channel where she talks about her peace initiative at the RT conference in Moscow and about world militarism. What gets me is that she is talking about rein in U.S. exceptionism and she met with the person who invade a country without provocation to cease territory in the Crimean, sponsored a Ukrainian civil war and gave missiles to the rebels who shot down a commercial airliner. She praised the person who wants to reignite the cold war. In addition she talks about human rights in a nation that is persecuting LGBT people and other minorities. As one commenter put it “Praising Russian human rights? Could this woman be any more craven?”

What is Russia Today?

The Columbia Journalism Review writes this about RT,

What Is Russia Today?
The Kremlin's propaganda outlet has an identity crisis

[…]
Russia Today was conceived as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter the anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media. Since its founding in 2005, however, the broadcast outlet has become better known as an extension of former President Vladimir Putin’s confrontational foreign policy. Too often the channel was provocative just for the sake of being provocative. It featured fringe-dwelling “experts,” like the Russian historian who predicted the imminent dissolution of the United States; broadcast bombastic speeches by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; aired ads conflating Barack Obama with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and ran out-of-nowhere reports on the homeless in America. Often, it seemed that Russia Today was just a way to stick it to the U.S. from behind the façade of legitimate newsgathering.
[…]
Just over a month after the speech, the Kremlin announced the solution to its image problem. It would not change its defiant rhetoric of exceptionalism. Instead, it would launch a new international television channel that explained its actions—and its terms—to the rest of the world. It would be in English and would broadcast twenty-four hours a day.

Though the project had roots in the cold war-era “Radio Moscow,” which beamed news from the Soviet Union around the world, it is better explained by Putin’s obsession with television. As a child of the post-World War II generation, Putin, like his Western counterparts, was raised on it. As president, he took tapes of the day’s news broadcasts home to watch and analyze how he was covered. To Putin, television was the only way to get his message across while retaining full control of that message. One of his first moves as president was to force out the oligarchs running the independent television stations and bring their channels under state ownership—and censorship. Soon, the heads of television stations were meeting every Friday with Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s chief political strategist, to set the agenda for the coming week. The instincts of self-censorship took care of the rest.

So Russia Today is the propaganda arm for Putin and it is their anniversary that Dr. Stein celebrated.