A FINE ROMANCE – AT 8:31 A.M. ET:  The United States and Russia are heading for disaster.  Any talk of a "reset" in relations with Moscow is long gone.  Putin is now making demands on us, something we never thought we'd see when the old Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War.  From Bloomberg:

The next U.S. administration will inherit the worst relationship with Russia since Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire. Judging from the list of grievances that President Vladimir Putin has laid out, even a relatively Putin-friendly Donald Trump will have a hard time satisfying him.

Putin delivered his message to the future U.S. president Monday, just as the U.S. State Department announced it was suspending negotiations with Russia on a ceasefire in Syria and Russia-backed Syrian troops moved to take more ground in Aleppo. In a bill submitted to parliament, Putin threatened to end a joint U.S.-Russian disarmament program -- in which surplus weapons-grade plutonium is processed into fuel -- unless the U.S. meets certain conditions:

Roll back North Atlantic Treaty Organization infrastructure and reduce NATO personnel to September 2000 levels;

Repeal the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights violations;

Repeal all U.S. sanctions against Russian individuals and businesses;

Compensate Russians for damages incurred by U.S. sanctions and by Russia’s “forced countersanctions”;

Present a “clear plan of irreversible destruction” of U.S. surplus plutonium.

Putin might as well have said the program will resume when hell freezes over. “He asked for too little,” Leonid Volkov, an anti-Putin politician, wrote sarcastically on Facebook. “He should have asked for Alaska back, eternal youth, Elon Musk and a ticket to Disneyland.”

COMMENT:  That Putin would present this list of demands just shows how little he thinks of Barack Obama.  Our president is laughed at and ridiculed.  He always loses, and we really wonder if he ever wants to win.  He is, after all, an old leftist himself.  Obama probably thinks the Cold War was America's fault, especially the fault of those Americans who, as he said, cling to their guns and their religion.

October 6,  2016