Puppet Masters
It happened again. This evening was the third time I've been in a small group session with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. I told the visiting journalists and publishers that they were going to be blown away by this guy, because they're not going to believe how different he is from the way he is portrayed in the Western media. He's sharp, funny, brilliant, and completely confident. He's not hovered over by press aides, and he doesn't guard his words to the point where he says nothing but mush. He's really interesting. As I told the folks I talked to before hand, at the conference, who were invited to meet later with the PM, "You're not going to believe that a world leader is actually like this."
As usual, after the event, there were stunned. Orban spent two hours with us, answering every question -- even particularly tough ones from a Polish journalist -- and was clearly loving it. I was never around Bill Clinton personally, but the things I read about how he was a natural politician -- it's at least as true of Viktor Orban. Last year, I was talking to a Fidesz politician about the PM, and he said there's not another politician in this country who can go from strategizing at the top level, to talking to country people at a farmer's market, and be utterly genuine in both places. I believe it. If he were on TV more in the United States, the view people have of Hungary would be totally different.
Belgium won't back EU ban on Russian diamonds, PM says the sanction is 'pointless unless its global'
The EU is working on its tenth round of sanctions on Russia over Moscow's military operation in Ukraine. Poland and the Baltic nations are pushing to ban Russian diamonds from the bloc's market, as well as other measures like cutting off more banks from the SWIFT payments system and restrictions on nuclear energy cooperation.
"We do not support the ban on supply of diamonds," De Croo told journalists when asked about the proposed embargo.
With nearly all the votes counted, returns showed Pavel prevailing by the emphatic margin of 58.3% to 41.68%, the largest ever recorded in a Czech presidential poll and reflecting an advantage of more than 958,000 votes nationwide.
Pavel's supporters immediately hailed the result as a victory for liberal democracy over oligarchic populism, which they believe Babiš represents.
As the scale of his triumph became clear, Pavel, 61, a former army chief of staff and Nato second-in-command, was greeted by ecstatic chants of "president, president" from champagne-drinking supporters as he mounted the podium at his campaign headquarters in Prague's Karlín district.
Ukraine was never able to achieve economic prosperity despite having a head start due to widespread graft among officials and delusions of being a significant global player, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has suggested.
In an interview with the magazine Krytyka Polityczna on Friday, Sikorski, who has represented Poland in the EU Parliament since 2019, stated that Ukrainian elites "were simply wasting their time." In his view, they were "hiding their corruption and delusions of grandeur behind a story" that they were playing some big game with the US, Russia, Europe, and China.
Comment: Indeed, Zelensky's allegedly cocaine-fueled demands include Russia withdrawing from ALL the territories that have united with it since 2014, including Crimea. There's not a hope in hell of that. There was a small chance in March 2022 that Ukraine could retain most of its territory with the exception of Donetsk and Luhansk, which have voted to rejoin Russia. But newly-turfed British PM Boris Johnson, doing the bidding of his elite masters, scurried off to Kiev to put an end to that idea.
- Did Boris Johnson scuttle the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine?
- UK PM scuttled Kiev-Moscow peace talks - Ukrainian media
- Ukraine reveals pie-in-the-sky negotiation 'end point'
- Russia warns of 'tougher' terms for talks with Ukraine
While both Moscow and Kiev think they will benefit from continued fighting, such a turn of events does not serve Washington's best interests, the Pentagon's think tank RAND Corporation argues in a new report published on Friday.
Authored by Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe, "Avoiding a Long War" accepts the prevailing premises about the conflict, but notes that US interests "often align with but are not synonymous with Ukrainian interests."
According to the authors, the conflict has already inflicted significant economic, military and reputational damage on Russia, so its "further incremental weakening is arguably no longer as significant a benefit for US interests."
The ethics watchdog said in the complaint that the congressman was "clearly using official government video for campaign purposes," violating federal law and the House ethics rules, since "House Members are prohibited from using House and Senate floor video for campaign purposes."
FACT explained the Federal laws and House ethics rules that require there to be a strict divide between campaign and official acts:
Federal law states that "appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law." To enforce this law, the ethics rules prohibit Members from using any official resource for campaign or political purposes. "Official resources" includes anything funded by taxpayers, such as a Member's official website, social media accounts, and photographs and video from the House or Senate floor. To make it abundantly clear, both the House ethics rules and Senate rules specifically identify Congressional video of floor proceedings as official resources that Members are prohibited from using for political purposes.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry moved to release testimony from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) employees Chad Josiah, Rob Schaul, Alex Zaheer, John Stafford and Pierce Lowary, after learning of their participation in the Biden administration's counter-"disinformation" efforts, court documents dated Jan. 19 show. The judge's motion Wednesday could shed light on a "switchboarding" tactic employed during the 2020 election, according to the order.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants, which include the named individuals as well as President Joe Biden and top officials from a variety of federal agencies, "colluded and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms by labeling the content "dis-information," "mis-information," and "mal-formation."
Comment:
- Biden admin held weekly censorship meetings with social media giants to suppress COVID and vaccine speech
- Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020
- Elon Musk slams CISA censorship network as 'propaganda platform'
- How Congress quietly passed CISA, the 'second Patriot Act,' into law
Despite not being marked as classified, the notebooks were taken because they contain writing related to Biden's official business within the Obama administration, including details of diplomatic contacts, the broadcaster reported on Saturday.
The notebooks were a mix of records on personal and official topics, the source said, adding that pages with no sensitive data could also be considered state property under the Presidential Records Act, as they relate to the activities of the government.
Biden had a "large" number of these notebooks, the person said, but could not provide the exact figure.
When addressed about the notebooks, a spokesperson for Biden's personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, said that "consistent with our view of the requirements of our cooperation with Department of Justice in this matter, we will not comment on the accuracy of reports of this nature."
Comment: If the FBI went through his house and all they found was some notebooks, then they must not have looked too hard. See also:
- Tucker: Is Washington Pulling a Watergate on Biden?
- There's no hiding Biden's fright over classified document scandal
- Report: DOJ permitted Biden's personal attorneys to search for classified documents without FBI
- Biden was a national security threat long before his classified docs fiasco
- National Archives refusing to share Biden doc info with House Republicans without DOJ approval
- House Republicans demand access to VISITOR LOGS from Biden's Delaware home to determine who may have had access to classified documents
- Democrats fear Biden's classified documents will be his 'Hillary emails moment'
- Should someone this dumb be the special counsel investigating Biden's stolen classified documents scandal?
Riga said on Monday it was downgrading the level of diplomatic ties, citing Russia's military operation in Ukraine and "solidarity" with neighboring Estonia. Moscow and Tallinn are also mutually expelling ambassadors.
"We have stressed that the justification of this move by some kind of 'solidarity' with other Baltic countries is unacceptable," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
"They have 'solidarity' only in one thing: total Russophobia and the willingness to initiate hostile steps towards Russia that are being encouraged by the US and other unfriendly countries."
Croatia "should in no way help" Ukraine militarily, Milanovic said while visiting the port city of Split. "Do you want us to enter the war?"
Framing the Ukraine conflict as one between Washington and Moscow, he reminded reporters that he was criticized for merely echoing the words of Kiev's defense minister, about the current conflict being a "proxy war" between NATO and Russia.
Comment: Just going off The Guardian's adulation of the new President, one can expect the Czech Republic to join the coterie of Western vassals whose people suffer, ever more, in order to further the establishment agenda.