Trump-nominated Commissioner Nathan Simington blasted the process

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seemingly approved a deal that would "fast-track" left-wing billionaire George Soros' acquisition of more than 200 Audacy radio stations across America, irking a Republican commissioner who "objected."

The New York Post first reported that the FCC last week "adopted an order to approve Soros' purchase of more than 200 radio stations in 40 markets just weeks before the presidential election," potentially allowing the far-left kingmaker to reach more than 165 million Americans at a critical time.

"The FCC decision came after a partisan vote with the commission's three Democrats voting for the move while the two Republicans voted against it, sources added," Post reporter Lydia Moynihan wrote.

Two key posts - in foreign and defense policy - reveal the militarist and anti-Russia direction of the European Union.

Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission - which works as the executive branch of the European Union - announced her new team of commissioners for the next five years.

Taking over as foreign affairs minister for the 27-nation bloc is Kaja Kallas who is a staunch Russophobe and vigorous supporter of Ukraine. Kallas has called for more EU and NATO military funding for Ukraine to "defeat Russia" and the break up of the Russian Federation.

The former Estonian prime minister has led the movement to destroy Soviet Red Army monuments across the Baltic states. (This is while her investor husband continues to profit from doing business with Russia.)

Working closely alongside Kallas will be another rabid Russophobe, the former Lithuanian prime minister Andrius Kubilius, who is taking up a newly created EU post as defense commissioner. The creation of that post is an alarming sign of how the EU bloc has transitioned from a trade and political union to a military organization.

But what's even more alarming is the assigning of such an anti-Russia hawk as Kubilius to oversee military policy.

At a time when relations between the EU and Russia have become so fraught with tensions, the European bloc is giving politicians from hostile Baltic states a driving seat to push relations even further towards conflict.

Indeed, the first announcement Kubilius made as the prospective new defense commissioner was that the European Union would likely be at war with Russia in the next six to eight years. That assessment is shared by Kaja Kallas.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has slammed US Republican candidate Donald Trump's VP pick for the 2024 presidential election, J.D. Vance, as having "too radical" views on ending Kiev's conflict with Moscow.

Zelensky's comments were published as he arrived in the US, where he is expected to attend the UN General Assembly in New York and meet with President Joe Biden at the White House.

Speaking to The New Yorker, the Ukrainian leader suggested:

"Trump doesn't really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how."

When asked about Trump's vice presidential pick, Zelensky replied:

"He is too radical. His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice. This brings us back to the question of the cost and who shoulders it. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine's expense is unacceptable. This would be an awful idea, if a person were actually going to carry it out, to make Ukraine shoulder the costs of stopping the war by giving up its territories."

He argued that such a concession would not end the fighting, and dismissed the Trump team's promise to end the conflict as "just sloganeering."

"The Democrats are self-immolating on the altar of their own tenuous relationship with common decency."
— Tom Luongo

What could go wrong? Probably more than you might imagine. We have just turned the corner into autumn. Now, things get serious, even gravely dark. America has never been so into dancing skeletons and morbidity. The small-town yards are filling up with inflatable signifiers of hell and death. Don't you wonder what all this signifies besides good old family fun? The zeitgeist maybe having a little sport with us, you think?

We are chiefly preoccupied with our badly dysfunctional self-governance, of course, and the method for periodically revising it, which we call an election. Nobody has confidence in the process, which has acquired so many layers of absurd, needless complexity for the sole purpose of perverting the outcome that every lawyer in the land will have a hefty guaranteed annual income in the probably futile effort to sort it out come November 6. There is your hell-scape, with overtones of death on a pale horse. . . and all. Chaos. . . riots. . . anarchy. . . civil war.

The threat of World War Three may have abated for the moment, but in a peculiar and disconcerting way, viz. a coup in the executive branch. The gadfly Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, long ago chief-of-staff to Sec'y of State Colin Powell, reports that the Pentagon has cancelled "Joe Biden," that is, taken him out of the decision-loop for anything. Well, you ask yourself, how is it possible he had even remained remotely close to any decision-loop this long, in any case, given the problem of his obviously broken brain? But now, it is unofficially official: just eat your mint-chocolate ice-cream and shut up, and let Dr. Jill run those "cabinet meeting" photo ops.

Foreign backers financed only 27% of Kiev's state budget in the first half of 2024, according to Vedomosti.

The flow of Western funds into Ukraine's state budget has almost halved compared to last year, the Russian newspaper Vedomosti has calculated after reviewing data from Kiev's Finance Ministry.

Between January and June this year, the US and its allies, who have been backing Kiev throughout its conflict with Moscow, financed only 27% of the country's budget expenditure, compared to 50% in the first half of 2023, the paper said in an article on Monday.

In monetary terms, Western financial aid to Kiev decreased from $19.1 billion to $10.6 billion, during that period, Vedomosti noted.

According to the article, authorities in Kiev are expected to attract $37 billion in outside loans in 2024 to cover the budget almost entirely, but in the first half of the year they managed to receive only a quarter of that sum.

At the same time, the burden on the Ukrainian budget is increasing, as the cost of servicing previously accrued debt has soared from $900,000 to $5.2 billion this year, the paper said. This is more than total expenditure on education, healthcare and supporting the economy combined, it stressed.

Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty has blamed Israel's "provocative" actions for spiking tensions in the region.

The escalation between Israel and Lebanese armed group Hezbollah could trigger a full-blown regional war, the Egyptian foreign minister has warned, ahead of the annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations headquarters.

Tensions between the Jewish state and Hezbollah have spiked after thousands of electronic devices exploded across Lebanon last week, in a covert attack widely believed to have been orchestrated by Israel. While Hezbollah and Israel had routinely exchanged fire since the onset of the conflict in Gaza, last week marked far heavier airstrikes between the two.

Abdelatty told AFP in an interview published on Friday:

"There is great concern about... the possibility of an escalation in the region leading to an all-out regional war. The recent sharp rise in hostilities has negatively impacted Gaza ceasefire negotiations. Egypt, Qatar, and the US have 'complete determination' to continue their efforts towards brokering a ceasefire and hostage release agreement between Hamas and Israel. All the components of the deal are ready. The problem is the lack of political will on the Israeli side."

Abdelatty blamed "provocative" Israeli policies for the recent spike in violence with Hezbollah, which has vowed support for Palestinians.

Rocket fire has intensified since the Beirut airstrike that killed the group's senior commander.

Dozens of Hezbollah missiles have struck northern Israel, in what the Shia group said was retaliation for Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon that have killed over 250 people.

Months of tensions between Israel and Hezbollah escalated last week, when thousands of pagers and other communications devices used by Hezbollah simultaneously exploded, killing at least 37 people and injuring an estimated 3,000, including children. Israeli jets then bombed Beirut and killed Ibrahim Aqil, a senior Hezbollah commander.

Hezbollah's deputy leader Naim Kassem said at Aqil's funeral on Sunday:

"An open-ended battle of reckoning. We admit that we are pained. We are humans. But as we are pained - you will also be pained."

Later in the day, Hezbollah launched around 100 rockets at Israel, targeting the city of Haifa in the north. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded with a series of airstrikes in southern Lebanon on Monday. The IDF strikes killed at least 274 people, including 21 children and 39 women, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad has said.

For the last half-dozen years, Israeli-born Ronan Bergman has served as a reporter with the New York Times, and I've regularly heard him described as the best-connected American journalist in Israel, with especially close ties to that country's powerful security services such as the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200.

Much of that reputation goes back to the 2018 publication of his book Rise and Kill First, a widely praised and highly authoritative history of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, as well as its sister agencies. As I wrote in early 2020:

The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel's long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman's volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as "hands down" the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.

Sometimes, it's painful to be right. As Russia and her allies prepare for the inevitable military confrontation, we must all hope and pray that people in the West somehow awaken to the truth. NATO cannot win in such a confrontation. All the coming conflicts can end in mutually assured destruction (MAD).

The news that Russian President Vladimir Putin is expanding his nation's army to be the second largest in the world comes at a moment when Russia and others are in deep peril. The Western alliance is ready to green-light the use of long-range missiles by Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia's interior.

To protect his people and prevent the Western elites from destroying Russia, Ukraine must cease to be a base/tool for Washington, London, and Brussels. The writing has been on the wall for over a decade, but the moment of truth is upon us all.

90 Seconds to Midnight

Some months back, Ukraine's President Zelenskyy urged allies to lift restrictions on Western-supplied arms that would enable his NATO proxy army to strike deep inside Russia.

In response, President Putin told the Russian people on state TV that such a move would be disastrous if peace is to be obtained. His exact words in response to the question of whether or not British Storm Shadow and US-produced Army Tactical (ATACMS) missiles could be unleashed deeper into Russia's interior were:

"This would in a significant way change the very nature of the conflict. It would mean that NATO countries, the US, European countries, are at war with Russia."

In a partial victory for free speech, the Irish Government is to drop controversial provisions contained within its new Hate Speech Bill. Those provisions would have made "communication" of material deemed capable of inciting "hatred" punishable by up to five years in prison, and mere "possession" of such material punishable by up to two years.

According to the Irish Times, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee received approval the leaders of the coalition Government over the summer to remove those parts of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill that deal with incitement to violence and hatred - commonly known as the 'hate speech' elements.

Speaking in Athlone, County Westmeath on Saturday, Ms. McEntee confirmed that the incitement to hatred element of the bill "does not have a consensus" - although, ominously, she went on to say that it will be dealt with at a later date.

Separately, a coalition source told The Irish Times:

"While there was significant consensus in the Dáil for hate speech laws, with proposals from the Opposition to expand the law further, that consensus was lost."