I passed it up on tv so I'm not going to watch it here. Perfectly comfortable with my opinion that Putin is pure scum.
But don't worry Joe, I'm not about to hit the 'Like' button on the "Michelle Obama For President" page on Facebook
Politically, I'm right (and left) where I want to be.
Why is he "pure scum"? This is the type of vacuous response I expect from the libtards, not you.
These interviews have nothing to do with the modern false dichotomy of right vs left. You should watch if only to gain a different perspective from the fake news we are bombarded with.
Putin is an extremely intelligent and informed rational thinker who does not sugarcoat his answers. You'll probably agree with him on many things...except Russia's ban on homosexual propaganda toward minors.
Here's the bottom line on Putin: He does what's in the best interest of RUSSIA, rather than blindly march lockstep to the claque of global-scale plutocratic manipulators, crooks and liars hell bent on controlling everyone and everything.
They can't control him so of course Putin is going to be portrayed as a villain, just like they're doing to Trump.
[h=1]Russia Warns U.S. After Downing of Syrian Warplane[/h]MOSCOW — Russia on Monday condemned the American military’s downing of a Syrian warplane, suspending the use of a military hotline that Washington and Moscow have used to avoid collisions in Syrian airspace and threatening to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies over Syria.
The moves were the most recent example of an intensifying clash of words and interests between the two powers, which support different sides in the yearslong war in Syria.
The Russian military has threatened to halt its use of the hotline in the past — notably after President Trump ordered the launch of missiles against a Syrian air base in April — only to continue and even expand its contacts with the United States military. It was not clear whether the latest suspension would be lasting.
Its announcement came in response to an American F/A-18 jet’s shooting down a Syrian government warplane south of the town of Tabqah on Sunday, after the Syrian aircraft dropped bombs near local ground forces supported by the United States. It was the first time the American military had downed a Syrian plane since the civil war began in the country in 2011.
The Russian Defense Ministry called American attacks against the Syrian forces “military aggression” and announced that it would suspend cooperation with the United States intended to prevent airborne accidents over Syria.
“All flying objects, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected west of the Euphrates, will be followed by Russian air defense systems as targets,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The United States will continue to conduct air operations over Syria, a spokesman for the American-led task force that is fighting the Islamic State said on Monday.
“We are going to continue to conduct operations throughout Syria, providing air support for coalition and partnered forces on the ground,” the spokesman, Col. Ryan Dillon, said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
Colonel Dillon did not provide details on what air operations were underway. After the United States carried out the cruise missile attack in April at a Syrian airfield that was used to mount a nerve-gas attack, the American-led air war command initially sent armed drones in and around Raqqa instead of piloted aircraft. That was done to guard against the risk of retaliation by Syrian and Russian air defenses.
Weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered his country’s military forces to Syria in September 2015 to prop up the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Russia and the United States signed a memorandum on preventing air clashes between the two countries.
Since then, the agreement has been a crucial link that has allowed Moscow and Washington to notify each other about their air operations over Syria, in which Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria, Turkey and the United States with its allies carry out attacks in pursuit of often-competing aims.
But Moscow has tried to use the agreement as a leverage each time the situation has threatened to escalate.
The Russians threatened to stop using the hotline after the April cruise missile strike. But by the next month, the two sides were using it more than ever.
Colonel Dillon said the American-led coalition was also prepared to continue using the hotline, which consists of phone calls between the United States’ Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and a Russian base at Latakia, Syria. An unclassified Gmail account is used as a backup.
“The coalition is always available to deconflict with Russia to ensure the safety of our aircrews and operations,” Colonel Dillon said.
American officials, who declined to be identified because they were discussing internal procedures, said that the two sides had used the hotline on Sunday.
Speaking in Beijing on Monday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, seemed to be unaware of the decision. He called on the United States and all other countries involved in the Syria conflict to “coordinate their actions.”
“We urge everyone to avoid acting unilaterally, to respect the sovereignty of Syria,” he said.
In Moscow, Frants Klintsevich, the deputy chairman of the Russian Senate’s defense committee, called the downing of the Syrian warplane a “blunt act of aggression and provocation.”
“It is Russia that is being provoked most of all,” Mr. Klintsevich wrote in a Facebook post. “It seems that the United States under Donald Trump is the source of danger for the Middle East and the whole world on a qualitatively new level.”
The moves were the most recent example of an intensifying clash of words and interests between the two powers, which support different sides in the yearslong war in Syria.
The Russian military has threatened to halt its use of the hotline in the past — notably after President Trump ordered the launch of missiles against a Syrian air base in April — only to continue and even expand its contacts with the United States military. It was not clear whether the latest suspension would be lasting.
Its announcement came in response to an American F/A-18 jet’s shooting down a Syrian government warplane south of the town of Tabqah on Sunday, after the Syrian aircraft dropped bombs near local ground forces supported by the United States. It was the first time the American military had downed a Syrian plane since the civil war began in the country in 2011.
The Russian Defense Ministry called American attacks against the Syrian forces “military aggression” and announced that it would suspend cooperation with the United States intended to prevent airborne accidents over Syria.
“All flying objects, including planes and drones of the international coalition, detected west of the Euphrates, will be followed by Russian air defense systems as targets,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The United States will continue to conduct air operations over Syria, a spokesman for the American-led task force that is fighting the Islamic State said on Monday.
“We are going to continue to conduct operations throughout Syria, providing air support for coalition and partnered forces on the ground,” the spokesman, Col. Ryan Dillon, said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
Colonel Dillon did not provide details on what air operations were underway. After the United States carried out the cruise missile attack in April at a Syrian airfield that was used to mount a nerve-gas attack, the American-led air war command initially sent armed drones in and around Raqqa instead of piloted aircraft. That was done to guard against the risk of retaliation by Syrian and Russian air defenses.
Weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered his country’s military forces to Syria in September 2015 to prop up the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Russia and the United States signed a memorandum on preventing air clashes between the two countries.
Since then, the agreement has been a crucial link that has allowed Moscow and Washington to notify each other about their air operations over Syria, in which Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria, Turkey and the United States with its allies carry out attacks in pursuit of often-competing aims.
But Moscow has tried to use the agreement as a leverage each time the situation has threatened to escalate.
The Russians threatened to stop using the hotline after the April cruise missile strike. But by the next month, the two sides were using it more than ever.
Colonel Dillon said the American-led coalition was also prepared to continue using the hotline, which consists of phone calls between the United States’ Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and a Russian base at Latakia, Syria. An unclassified Gmail account is used as a backup.
“The coalition is always available to deconflict with Russia to ensure the safety of our aircrews and operations,” Colonel Dillon said.
American officials, who declined to be identified because they were discussing internal procedures, said that the two sides had used the hotline on Sunday.
Speaking in Beijing on Monday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, seemed to be unaware of the decision. He called on the United States and all other countries involved in the Syria conflict to “coordinate their actions.”
“We urge everyone to avoid acting unilaterally, to respect the sovereignty of Syria,” he said.
In Moscow, Frants Klintsevich, the deputy chairman of the Russian Senate’s defense committee, called the downing of the Syrian warplane a “blunt act of aggression and provocation.”
“It is Russia that is being provoked most of all,” Mr. Klintsevich wrote in a Facebook post. “It seems that the United States under Donald Trump is the source of danger for the Middle East and the whole world on a qualitatively new level.”
Not on Youtube yet but another interview with Stone about Vlad The Cold-Blooded Killer can be found here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/vide...one-s-the-putin-interviews-charlie-rose-video
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/vide...one-s-the-putin-interviews-charlie-rose-video
http://www.avclub.com/article/grow-oliver-stone-256873
Grow up, Oliver Stone
Vladimir Putin is not Richard Nixon, and Oliver Stone is not David Frost
By Alex McLevy @alexm247
Jun 16, 2017 12:45 PM
Oliver Stone has always fancied himself a revisionist historian, a bold truth-teller speaking facts to power. Unfortunately, so does every conspiracy theorist who’s ever lived. The producer/director has made a career of colorful interpretations of history, but as he’s progressed from his early, all-Vietnam-all-the-time work, to his more exploratory character studies (Nixon, W.), to his recent turn toward documentary work, he’s never varied from a fascination with the hidden, the secretive, and the off-the-record aspects of the politicized past.
But if The Putin Interviews, Stone’s new four-part series of conversations with the Russian president, often comes across like the filmmaker’s attempt at making his own version of the Frost-Nixon discussions, it also abandons any attempt at getting a straight answer from him. (Not that Stone himself doesn’t still seem to think this is even more important than that famous work.) And it shows why Stone will mostly continue to disappoint those on all sides of the political spectrum.
Stone is a master of the selective deployment of facts, as anyone who’s seen JFK can attest. Sean Wilentz, the left-leaning Princeton historian who reviewed Stone’s 2012 book The Untold History Of The United States for The New York Review Of Books, described Stone as someone who has trouble even framing worthwhile questions about the historical record. “Is there a legitimate argument to be made about the origins of our nuclear diplomacy or the decision to build the H-bomb? Of course there is. But it’s so overloaded with ideological distortion that this question doesn’t get raised in an intelligent way.
And once a question gets raised in an unintelligent way, then you are off in cloud-cuckoo land.” (Wilentz’s review was titled “Cherry-Picking Our History.”) The question of how to frame a topic is an important one—it separates A People’s History Of The United States from Loose Change, for starters. And Stone has always been more showman than rigorous academic. He favors the incendiary over the accurate, as any good agent provocateur should. Which is why his new interviews are dispiriting even as they’re informative. Gone is the muckraking spirit of the dramatist intent on upending conventional wisdom—and in his place is a much less interesting figure, one who sacrifices flash for substance, but ends up getting neither.
What Stone does get in The Putin Interviews is a portrait of a closely guarded figure, one who reveals much more about himself by what’s left unsaid than in any answer to one of his American interlocutor’s queries. The documentary is a depiction of easily missed cultural disparities, embodied in the buttoned-up former KGB head turned ostensible democratic ruler. Stone includes multiple efforts to humanize this man, asking him about grandchildren, likes and dislikes, if he’s proud of his family. But these receive terse, spare replies.
Putin rarely laughs at Stone’s efforts at humor or irony, but he does smile and chuckle at seemingly odd other moments, suggesting a different register for amusement, one not easily translated. In part two, he feeds his horses, and we get a look at a man briefly setting aside his rigor for a small display of affection.
Stone, in his ongoing role as sort-of-journalist, is trying for two conflicting things. He wants to be an impassive, Charlie Rose-esque presence that pulls words from Putin and exposes the real person behind the leader, for good and ill. But he also wants to score his usual political points against U.S. foreign policy, the neoconservative movement, and hawkish mentalities, and he doesn’t seem to much care what other political baggage comes along when he finds someone who will back his worldview. Like South Of The Border, his missed opportunity of a documentary about South American leaders, The Putin Interviews are more a chance to show the generic perspectives of a specific nationalist ideology, spouted by its ideologue-in-chief.
And on that front, Stone does provide a useful platform for those seeking to better understand the broad array of rationalizations, justifications, and outright fabrications that make up the official government platform of Russia. The best of these come in the form of fundamental attitudes about Russia’s past and its current place in the world, expressed in ways that greatly aid in seeing Putin and his supporters as people with a coherent and humane worldview, even if it’s ultimately as hypocritical as that of any other ends-justify-means thug from the right, left, or center.
For example, to Russians, the Cuban missile crisis wasn’t an experience of Russian overreaching, counteracted by U.S. pressure to eventually turn around. To them, as Putin describes it, the Russian effort to place nukes on a Cuban base stemmed from the United States’ prior provocation of putting nukes in Turkey, right by the Russian border. In a Cold War world of bilateral supremacy, there are two sides to every story.
But The Putin Interviews are ultimately more evidence the once-fiery director, who can still deliver trashy fun when needed—as in 2012’s hollow-but-entertaining Savages—has become a bore of a political agitprop wannabe, the left-wing version of your grandpa who forwards you news stories about bank robberies foiled by a gun owner, saying, “See? This proves gun control is a bad idea.” Gone is the spark of someone intent on pushing the conversation further. Instead, he just accepts what Putin says when it suits his ends, and when it doesn’t—as in the case of Putin’s openly ignorant and bigoted stance on homosexuality and queerness—Stone barely even elicits enough to let his subject hang himself with his own words.
Even the format of the documentary feels weirdly out of time, a relic of an earlier era when a talking head was all you needed to provide your infotainment. There are occasional efforts to produce a more compelling work: inserting TV footage of other world leaders contradicting Putin’s statements; montages of Syria, Ukraine, and other hot-button locales; and the occasional gentle exploration of their surroundings during these talks. But mostly, it’s just Stone and Putin, one drily asking semi-leading questions while the other flatly answers them with mostly predictable results. Again, it works for Charlie Rose and his nightly TV show; for a four-part documentary series Stone’s literally had years to work on, it feels like a tremendously wasted opportunity.
If nothing else, Oliver Stone’s doc teaches us that Vladimir Putin is the Eastern European equivalent of a right-wing Republican. He’s absolutely horrible on social issues. He’s antigay, anti-feminist, anti-progressive, and rooted in the kinds of retrograde “family values” ideals that make any open-minded person cringe. He’s a fierce hawk who lies openly and consistently about the security apparatus of his own country, and blames everything on others. (In that last regard, he’s just a normal politician of any stripe.)
But Putin has a bottom-line pragmatism when it comes to his own country’s economy that looks deceptively progressive, because he’s not beholden to special interests. Ergo, he’s done a lot to improve Russia’s jobs situation, tax situation, and largely cleared up much of the calamitous hash Western-inspired deregulation made of the former USSR’s financial system during the ’90s.
Any number of topics that are hopelessly deadlocked here, thanks to the privatization funding of our electoral process, are dealt with in more common-sense ways there (aided by an ease with governmental overreach, to be sure). Everyone knows that Wall Street is basically opposed to the interests of the rest of the country, and yet we allow them to buy our elections, by resisting a publicly financed system. The Putin Interviews highlight that glaring flaw.
So one of the most powerful foreign leaders is an articulate critic of rotten U.S. foreign policy, our appalling surveillance state, and our thinly veiled imperial ambitions. He’s also a tyrannical autocrat who sheds blood behind closed doors. That’s the conundrum, and it’s one that Oliver Stone fails to convey his awareness of in any way, so enamored is he of this thug who just so happens to oppose Western hypocrisy in the same way Oliver Stone does. It’s why Stone couldn’t answer basic questions from Stephen Colbert about Putin’s many dangerous tendencies. He’s thrown in his lot with a human-rights violator, rather than being open about the knotty contradictions of believing that, yes, it’s important to support those standing up to this government of ours when it’s making a mess of things (and spreading its own media-backed disinformation campaigns—Stone isn’t wrong about that), but still refuse to back down when those same men (it’s almost always men) smile, lie, and abuse the basic rights that make the U.S. such an inspiration in its most abstract form.
In sum: Grow up, Oliver Stone. The world needs complex positions, perhaps more than ever in the face of such wanton disregard of them from our highest elected official. It’s important to remind people that there are almost never easy answers to massively complicated and history-laden issues between nations, and certainly not two countries with such a fraught and potentially explosive relationship as that between the U.S. and Russia. We can be thoughtful and critical of our country’s policies while still condemning moral failures on the part of those who seek to challenge those policies on the world stage. This has always been Stone’s problem. He wants the counter-narrative told, but he doesn’t want there to be any problems with it. He just wants something with the force of authority to shatter established narratives in the American media. Someone should tell him those are more effective when they have the ring of truth that comes from admitting no one story is the whole story.
Grow up, Oliver Stone
Vladimir Putin is not Richard Nixon, and Oliver Stone is not David Frost
By Alex McLevy @alexm247
Jun 16, 2017 12:45 PM
Oliver Stone has always fancied himself a revisionist historian, a bold truth-teller speaking facts to power. Unfortunately, so does every conspiracy theorist who’s ever lived. The producer/director has made a career of colorful interpretations of history, but as he’s progressed from his early, all-Vietnam-all-the-time work, to his more exploratory character studies (Nixon, W.), to his recent turn toward documentary work, he’s never varied from a fascination with the hidden, the secretive, and the off-the-record aspects of the politicized past.
But if The Putin Interviews, Stone’s new four-part series of conversations with the Russian president, often comes across like the filmmaker’s attempt at making his own version of the Frost-Nixon discussions, it also abandons any attempt at getting a straight answer from him. (Not that Stone himself doesn’t still seem to think this is even more important than that famous work.) And it shows why Stone will mostly continue to disappoint those on all sides of the political spectrum.
Stone is a master of the selective deployment of facts, as anyone who’s seen JFK can attest. Sean Wilentz, the left-leaning Princeton historian who reviewed Stone’s 2012 book The Untold History Of The United States for The New York Review Of Books, described Stone as someone who has trouble even framing worthwhile questions about the historical record. “Is there a legitimate argument to be made about the origins of our nuclear diplomacy or the decision to build the H-bomb? Of course there is. But it’s so overloaded with ideological distortion that this question doesn’t get raised in an intelligent way.
And once a question gets raised in an unintelligent way, then you are off in cloud-cuckoo land.” (Wilentz’s review was titled “Cherry-Picking Our History.”) The question of how to frame a topic is an important one—it separates A People’s History Of The United States from Loose Change, for starters. And Stone has always been more showman than rigorous academic. He favors the incendiary over the accurate, as any good agent provocateur should. Which is why his new interviews are dispiriting even as they’re informative. Gone is the muckraking spirit of the dramatist intent on upending conventional wisdom—and in his place is a much less interesting figure, one who sacrifices flash for substance, but ends up getting neither.
What Stone does get in The Putin Interviews is a portrait of a closely guarded figure, one who reveals much more about himself by what’s left unsaid than in any answer to one of his American interlocutor’s queries. The documentary is a depiction of easily missed cultural disparities, embodied in the buttoned-up former KGB head turned ostensible democratic ruler. Stone includes multiple efforts to humanize this man, asking him about grandchildren, likes and dislikes, if he’s proud of his family. But these receive terse, spare replies.
Putin rarely laughs at Stone’s efforts at humor or irony, but he does smile and chuckle at seemingly odd other moments, suggesting a different register for amusement, one not easily translated. In part two, he feeds his horses, and we get a look at a man briefly setting aside his rigor for a small display of affection.
Stone, in his ongoing role as sort-of-journalist, is trying for two conflicting things. He wants to be an impassive, Charlie Rose-esque presence that pulls words from Putin and exposes the real person behind the leader, for good and ill. But he also wants to score his usual political points against U.S. foreign policy, the neoconservative movement, and hawkish mentalities, and he doesn’t seem to much care what other political baggage comes along when he finds someone who will back his worldview. Like South Of The Border, his missed opportunity of a documentary about South American leaders, The Putin Interviews are more a chance to show the generic perspectives of a specific nationalist ideology, spouted by its ideologue-in-chief.
And on that front, Stone does provide a useful platform for those seeking to better understand the broad array of rationalizations, justifications, and outright fabrications that make up the official government platform of Russia. The best of these come in the form of fundamental attitudes about Russia’s past and its current place in the world, expressed in ways that greatly aid in seeing Putin and his supporters as people with a coherent and humane worldview, even if it’s ultimately as hypocritical as that of any other ends-justify-means thug from the right, left, or center.
For example, to Russians, the Cuban missile crisis wasn’t an experience of Russian overreaching, counteracted by U.S. pressure to eventually turn around. To them, as Putin describes it, the Russian effort to place nukes on a Cuban base stemmed from the United States’ prior provocation of putting nukes in Turkey, right by the Russian border. In a Cold War world of bilateral supremacy, there are two sides to every story.
But The Putin Interviews are ultimately more evidence the once-fiery director, who can still deliver trashy fun when needed—as in 2012’s hollow-but-entertaining Savages—has become a bore of a political agitprop wannabe, the left-wing version of your grandpa who forwards you news stories about bank robberies foiled by a gun owner, saying, “See? This proves gun control is a bad idea.” Gone is the spark of someone intent on pushing the conversation further. Instead, he just accepts what Putin says when it suits his ends, and when it doesn’t—as in the case of Putin’s openly ignorant and bigoted stance on homosexuality and queerness—Stone barely even elicits enough to let his subject hang himself with his own words.
Even the format of the documentary feels weirdly out of time, a relic of an earlier era when a talking head was all you needed to provide your infotainment. There are occasional efforts to produce a more compelling work: inserting TV footage of other world leaders contradicting Putin’s statements; montages of Syria, Ukraine, and other hot-button locales; and the occasional gentle exploration of their surroundings during these talks. But mostly, it’s just Stone and Putin, one drily asking semi-leading questions while the other flatly answers them with mostly predictable results. Again, it works for Charlie Rose and his nightly TV show; for a four-part documentary series Stone’s literally had years to work on, it feels like a tremendously wasted opportunity.
If nothing else, Oliver Stone’s doc teaches us that Vladimir Putin is the Eastern European equivalent of a right-wing Republican. He’s absolutely horrible on social issues. He’s antigay, anti-feminist, anti-progressive, and rooted in the kinds of retrograde “family values” ideals that make any open-minded person cringe. He’s a fierce hawk who lies openly and consistently about the security apparatus of his own country, and blames everything on others. (In that last regard, he’s just a normal politician of any stripe.)
But Putin has a bottom-line pragmatism when it comes to his own country’s economy that looks deceptively progressive, because he’s not beholden to special interests. Ergo, he’s done a lot to improve Russia’s jobs situation, tax situation, and largely cleared up much of the calamitous hash Western-inspired deregulation made of the former USSR’s financial system during the ’90s.
Any number of topics that are hopelessly deadlocked here, thanks to the privatization funding of our electoral process, are dealt with in more common-sense ways there (aided by an ease with governmental overreach, to be sure). Everyone knows that Wall Street is basically opposed to the interests of the rest of the country, and yet we allow them to buy our elections, by resisting a publicly financed system. The Putin Interviews highlight that glaring flaw.
So one of the most powerful foreign leaders is an articulate critic of rotten U.S. foreign policy, our appalling surveillance state, and our thinly veiled imperial ambitions. He’s also a tyrannical autocrat who sheds blood behind closed doors. That’s the conundrum, and it’s one that Oliver Stone fails to convey his awareness of in any way, so enamored is he of this thug who just so happens to oppose Western hypocrisy in the same way Oliver Stone does. It’s why Stone couldn’t answer basic questions from Stephen Colbert about Putin’s many dangerous tendencies. He’s thrown in his lot with a human-rights violator, rather than being open about the knotty contradictions of believing that, yes, it’s important to support those standing up to this government of ours when it’s making a mess of things (and spreading its own media-backed disinformation campaigns—Stone isn’t wrong about that), but still refuse to back down when those same men (it’s almost always men) smile, lie, and abuse the basic rights that make the U.S. such an inspiration in its most abstract form.
In sum: Grow up, Oliver Stone. The world needs complex positions, perhaps more than ever in the face of such wanton disregard of them from our highest elected official. It’s important to remind people that there are almost never easy answers to massively complicated and history-laden issues between nations, and certainly not two countries with such a fraught and potentially explosive relationship as that between the U.S. and Russia. We can be thoughtful and critical of our country’s policies while still condemning moral failures on the part of those who seek to challenge those policies on the world stage. This has always been Stone’s problem. He wants the counter-narrative told, but he doesn’t want there to be any problems with it. He just wants something with the force of authority to shatter established narratives in the American media. Someone should tell him those are more effective when they have the ring of truth that comes from admitting no one story is the whole story.
Oliver Stone recorded 20 hours of footage over a two year period with Vladimir Putin asking him questions on a whole range of topics but "Alex McLevy" on a laptop in his basement fancies himself a "world player" and simply knows better. 
k:
In other news...
Journalists Drink Too Much, Are Dumber Than Average, Study Finds
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-19/journalists-drink-too-much-are-dumber-average-study-finds
k:In other news...
Journalists Drink Too Much, Are Dumber Than Average, Study Finds
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-19/journalists-drink-too-much-are-dumber-average-study-finds
You have left loon views that I find disturbing. Joe has right loon views I react to the same. But at least I know you smile and laugh more than occasionally and go about your daily life without suffering because America doesn't run exactly the way you want it.
In some deluded minds that makes me a far left loon.
