Here’s an entertaining scene from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Russia from Tom Lasseter of McClatchey.  I suppose having planted questions like the Putin telethon is a step up from the Obama visit, which was banned from most television. 

Freshman Pavel Yankovsky was among the first to take the microphone:
Nervously, he inquired about the financial crisis and why it started in
the U.S. Like all the students who spoke, his English was good and his
question seemed well rehearsed.

Clinton walked the audience
through an abbreviated history of bad mortgages, derivatives and the
false notion that free markets are infallible.

“It all seemed
like a great idea at the time,” she said, launching into an explanation
of how the need for more checks and balances in the economy reminds one
of the balance of power in the American government.

Afterward,
Yankovsky, a thoughtful 17-year-old in a dark suit, with a bushy
haircut threatening to go wild, didn’t talk about the details of
Clinton’s response so much as the feeling he got listening to her. “It
was brilliant,” he said.

“I think that is the main thing our
countries should work on, moving from the past, Cold War era,” he said.
What about the Soviet propaganda on the stage behind him? Yankovsky
flicked his hand in that direction without looking and said: “I think
that the past we should leave as the past.”

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