Cold War with Russia?

Are us Americans trying to revive the cold war with russia?
	Yes
	Come again?
	Yes, but the Jewish Lobby has taken control of Washington, so it's not really our fault.
	Why would we want to?
	No
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Read this article for some context.

There are some quotes that are gems:

""This surely is the beginning of an arms race in some sense," he said. "Which is all the more unjustified given that Russia has never, not on a single issue, expressed an intention to confront the U.S. or to deter it.""

Iraq? Iran? Well, I guess they haven't said that they want to confront us...but they certainly haven't been even tacitly supporting us on those issues, either.

"We should be aware that Russia has been placed in the group of targeted nations," - Gleb Pavlovsky

He says this to remind us that Russia has increasingly been placed on the lists of "unfree" nations (on many different issues) which the State Department makes. I say, perhaps you're being targeted. Perhaps you're on those lists cause you make stupid decisions. Like, not to elect governors to your territories so that Putin can appoint them himself.

"It is not as much about the [George W.] Bush Administration's self-promotion to boost ratings as it is about [creating] a system of ideological and political pressure on Russia and its allies," - Vasily Likhachev

This quote only makes sense from a Russian propaganda perspective. They know that Bush is unpopular at home, so in their minds that means that whatever he does is done to increase that approval rating. However, it doesn't make sense to me, because I haven't heard the Bush Administration crowing much about it's missile defense system expansions. And, I'm not even sure that would get him many popularity points in our country.

"Ivashov warned that unless it takes countermeasures to neutralize the U.S. threat, the country could be in for a bleak future. "Russia may end up cornered in the north, and it will become a tiny Nordic country.""

Yeah. That might happen.

Propaganda is so much fun, when you can immediately see through it. However, I have to keep reminding myself that to the Russians reading this article, it's the truth because they don't have a baseline to judge against. So, it's not very funny after all.

Read this

If you can read Russian, that is.

This is the article that the recently assassinated Russian journalist (a re-hash from Radio Free Europe, who does great work on Russia and Post-Soviet states, of course) was working on when she was killed. It's suspected that it's part of the reason she was killed, but who knows?

The report(that's an English link) describes incidents of police torturing suspects in Chechnya, and the official hullabaloo that went on around it. It would remind me of something similar in America, but this is real torture, you can see the pictures for yourself.

The whole situation is like a movie. A prominent critic of a dictatorialesque president is murdered by contract killers on said president's birthday. Meanwhile, she is working on exposing yet another incidence of torture. And a few days later (three or four actually, maybe five), said president comes out and condemns her death in relatively strong language. Yet, no senior government officials attended her funeral.