i'm a bit surprised this is from vox

but is there any truth to this claim?

you decide

Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia

 

President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.

These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals, something I’ve dubbed the Russiasphere. The mirror image of Breitbart and InfoWars on the right, it focuses nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned, and fever dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.

Twitter is the Russiasphere’s native habitat. Louise Mensch, a former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist, spreads the newest, punchiest, and often most unfounded Russia gossip to her 283,000 followers on Twitter. Mensch is backed up by a handful of allies, including former NSA spook John Schindler (226,000 followers) and DC-area photographer Claude Taylor (159,000 followers).

There’s also a handful of websites, like Palmer Report, that seem devoted nearly exclusively to spreading bizarre assertions like the theory that Ryan and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell funneled Russian money to Trump — a story that spread widely among the site’s 70,000 Facebook fans.

 R_P wrote: 
I actually saw that handoff from Maddow to O'Donnell live.  I had already heard that notion was being put out on MSNBC.  

Schocked ?  No.  Just seeing it happen by chance was enough to make me groan and look for something else to watch.

pathetic ... Fox does not have a monopoly on that quality. 

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Sees a “Russia Connection” Lurking Around Every Corner

One day after her network joined the rest of corporate media in cheering for President Trump’s missile attack on Syria, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was back to regular business: seeing Russian collaboration with Trump at work.

It’s “impossible,” fellow anchor Lawrence O’Donnell told Maddow on April 7, to rule out that “Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week – so that his friend in the White House could have a big night with missiles and all of the praise he’s picked up over the past 24 hours.”

Maddow concurred, suggesting that only the FBI’s ongoing probe into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russian electoral interference will determine the truth. “Maybe eventually we’ll get an answer to that from (FBI Director) Jim Comey,” Maddow said.

The Washington Post noted that the “conspiracy theory” drew “derision from across the political spectrum.” But it was not out of place.

MSNBC, the country’s most prominent liberal media outlet, has played a key role in stoking the frenzy over Trump’s alleged involvement with Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential race — in lock step with the Democratic Party’s most avid partisans. (...)

 R_P wrote: 
unfortunately the political left and right (if that even means anything anymore) have moved to close the horseshoe

what's the difference -because- unhinged zombies

i used to think that they were annoying but harmless

not anymore, they're hell-bent on exacting violence

they want power and they want to punish/extinguish all thought not in alignment with their beliefs

Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives (Taibbi)
Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria

 R_P wrote: 
Forced sterilizations!  What a fantastic idea!

The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate

(...) In other words, there are huge holes in both the evidence and the logic of Schiff’s conspiracy theory. But you wouldn’t know that from watching and reading the fawning commentary about Schiff’s presentation in the mainstream U.S. news media, which has been almost universally hostile to Trump (which is not to say that there aren’t sound reasons to consider the narcissistic, poorly prepared Trump to be unfit to serve as President of the United States).

The journalistic problem is that everyone deserves to get a fair shot from reporters who are supposed to be objective and fair regardless of a person’s popularity or notoriety or what the reporter may personally feel. That standard should apply to everyone, whether you’re a foreign leader despised by the U.S. government or a politician detested for your obnoxious behavior.

There is no professional justification for journalists joining in a TV-and-print lynch mob. We also have seen too often where such wrongheaded attitudes lead, such as to the groupthink that Iraq’s hated dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs, or in an earlier time to the McCarthyism that destroyed the lives of Americans who were smeared as unpatriotic because of their dissident political views.

So, yes, even Donald Trump deserves not to be railroaded by a mainstream media that wants desperately – along with other powerful forces in Official Washington – to see him run out of town on a rail and will use any pretext to do so, even if it means escalating the risks of a nuclear war with Russia.

And, if mainstream media commentators truly want a thorough and independent investigation, they should be demanding that it start by summoning the people who first made the allegations.

seems like a good way to bankrupt an already struggling economy..

Reports now say the woman was the nanny to the 4 year old girl. She waited for the parents to go out before beheading the child and setting the flat ablaze. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/12177508/Woman-detained-in-Moscow-carrying-severed-childs-head-latest.html

 rotekz wrote:  https://www.rt.com/news/333928-woman-severed-head-metro/

There is currently a Muslim woman walking around a Moscow station area shouting Allah Akbah whilst waving around a child's severed head. For real.

Update: She's been arrested. The rest of the child's body has been located in a burnt out flat. It was not the woman's own child.

 RichardPrins wrote: 

Sounds bout right to me.

Forget all our other troubles – the Russians are coming! — RT Op-Edge

(...) As I’ve noted before there is a real disconnect between establishment views on Russia and the views of ordinary people. Compare the bog standard “Putin is a threat to us all” comment pieces and the views of ordinary members of the public in the letters pages.

The most honest assessment of the situation I’ve read was by a letter-writer to the Daily Express newspaper, one Terence Matthews from London, who said “Putin is neither mad nor bad; he is looking after the rights of his people, just as I would expect my government to do…. The US does not want a strong Russia and is paranoid about it.. Let’s get the truth out and not lies”.

In fact if you want the truth on Russia in Britain, you’re generally much better off reading the letters pages, and below-the-line comments than you are reading the opinions of puffed-up pundits in ‘serious’ newspapers and journals who try and outdo one another in their Russophobia.

Laughing at the preposterous “The Russians are coming” brigade really is the best response. Refuse to stand to attention and deferentially tug your forelock when a neo-con or faux-leftist starts to lecture you on “the Russian threat”: Establishment Russophobes hate it when they’re not being taken seriously. And make sure that when you do come across a “The Russians are coming” scaremonger, check out what that person was saying about the Iraqi WMDs ‘threat’ in 2003. It’s usually quite revealing.

We are playing a dangerous game here, the neocons have taken over it seems and are imo completely misreading, underestimating maybe intentionally the Russian government and her people.  All I can say is that in regards to Ukraine, all is not as we are being told from the Western press. I am also wondering whether the pivot to Cuba is part of the overall strategy to bait Russia along with what Saudi America is doing with oil. We are backing Russia into a corner leaving them no recourse.  This is not 1941 and Russia is not imperial Japan:

Obama signs Russia sanctions bill, no plans to use it for now

Russian Paper Apologizes for MH17

They are probably not going to be in business long.

Russia Sues McDonald’s, Questioning Quality of the Food - NYTimes.com

We all know it's really because they hate your freedom fries...

KGB Files Open to All in Cambridge Library | The Moscow Times

KGB files from the famous Mitrokhin archive — described by the FBI as "the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source" — are now open to the public for the first time. From 1972 to 1984, Major Vasily Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB's foreign intelligence archive, with unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of files from a global network of spies and intelligence-gathering operations.

At the same time, having grown disillusioned with the brutal oppression of the Soviet regime, he was taking secret handwritten notes of the material and smuggling them out of the building each evening. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he, his family and his archive were exfiltrated by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.

Now, more than 20 years after his defection to Britain, Mitrokhin's files are being opened by the Churchill Archives Center, where they sit alongside the personal papers of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Professor Christopher Andrew, the only historian to date allowed access to the archive, and author of two global bestsellers with Mitrokhin, said: "There are only two places in the world where you will find material like this. One is the KBG archive — which is not open and very difficult to get into — and the other is here at Churchill College where Mitrokhin's own typescript notes are today being opened for all the world to see.

"Mitrokhin dreamed of making this material public from 1972 until his death; it is now happening in 2014. The inner workings of the KGB, its foreign intelligence operations and the foreign policy of Soviet-era Russia all lie within this extraordinary collection; the scale and nature of which gives unprecedented insight into the KGB's activities throughout much of the Cold War." (...)