Stephen K. Bannon's Blog, page 772

Russia Has Truly Lost the War

Europe’s Post-Ukraine War Prospects are Good – The Ukraine war is a terrible tragedy. Ukraine is suffering terrible humanitarian and material costs. Russian war crimes rival those of harsh paramilitaries like the Mano Blanca during the Cold War. Russia is being isolated from the world. The economic impact of the war will be felt globally. But there is a bright spot: the war is going about as well as can be hoped for a middle power like Ukraine, and when it ends, Europe will safer and more secure.This is not to say that the West should let up. It should not. We should continue to support the Ukrainians against Putin’s brutality. But the war is going terribly for Russian President Vladimir Putin. That is good for the cause of democracy and liberalism and European security after the war finally ends.Ukraine is Winning, and that is Good
Our knowledge of battlefield events in Ukraine is more limited now than in the early days of the war. At the start, Ukraine pushed out a great deal of information to sway world opinion. Russia’s offensive was also sloppy and undisciplined, unintentionally providing a lot of (negative) information. This tightened up in recent weeks. Russian messaging has improved, and the war has narrowed to one front – Donbas. 
But there is little doubt that Ukraine is winning. Russia lost the battle of Kyiv and withdrew almost entirely from northern Ukraine last month. This means that even if Russian makes limited territorial gains in the east or sout …

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Moscow Anxious Ahead of Victory Day

The post Moscow’s Mood Ahead of Victory Day a Mix of Anxiety and Resilience appeared first on The Bongino Report.

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Army, Marines rush to buy new Javelins

A U.S. Army paratrooper fires an FGM-148 Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank missile during a combined arms live-fire exercise at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, August 21, 2019. (Sgt. Henry Villarama)
WASHINGTON: The Defense Department has transferred almost $1.5 billion to the Army and Marine Corps to replenish Stinger anti-aircraft weapons and Javelin anti-tank missiles that have been delivered to Ukraine, the Pentagon’s top acquisition executive said today.
“We are actively negotiating right now — the Army is — for Stinger and related components, and that’s ongoing,” Bill LaPlante said during a briefing. “Expect to get that awarded by the end of the May. For Javelins, the award is imminent.”
The department shifted $809 million to the Army for Javelin procurement in fiscal 2022 funds, as well as about $674 million for Stinger procurement for both the Army and Marine Corps, according to a May 1 reprogramming notification signed by Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord.
The money for both comes from the Ukraine Replacement Transfer Fund, part of the $13.6 billion in supplemental funding for Ukraine appropriated by Congress in March.
As of late April, the Pentagon said it had sent Ukraine over 1,400 Stinger systems and over 5,500 Javelin systems.
Now that the funds have been transferred and Congress has been notified, Army contracting officials can begin digging in with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin to identify exactly how best to ramp up production of those weapons, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said at the Reagan Institute earlier today.
The department is “trying to understand what is the smartest allocation of funds to get the best output,” she said, and it’s not clear how many Stinger or Javelin systems will be purchased with the $1.5 billion.
For both weapons, increasing production is not as easy as flipping a switch.
The Raytheon-made Stinger has been out of production for the US military for 18 years and is currently only being produced for a single international customer, which the company declined to identify. Because the system’s design is so old, some of its components are obsolete and nearly impossible to source. Last m …

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NKorea Fires Sub-Launched Ballistic

SEOUL—North Korea launched a suspected submarine-launched ballistic missile off its east coast on Saturday, officials in Seoul and Tokyo said, just three days before South Korea’s new president takes office.The missile was fired at 2:07 p.m. local time from the Sinpo area, a central coastal region that is home to a North Korean naval base. It reached an altitude of roughly 31 miles and traveled about 373 miles before falling into the waters between Korea and Japan, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. The missile landed outside of Japan’s exclusive economic zone, he added. South Korea issued a similar assessment. To Read the Full Story

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CCP tightens Shanghai lockdown

By Engen Tham and Eduardo BaptistaSHANGHAI/BEIJING (Reuters) ‑Shanghai authorities were tightening the city-wide COVID lockdown they imposed more than a month ago, prolonging into late May an ordeal that China’s capital Beijing was desperate to avoid by turning mass testing into an almost daily routine.The commercial hub of 25 million was making a fresh push to bring case numbers outside the areas that were facing the strictest curbs to zero by the second half of May, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.The people said movement curbs will generally remain through the month due to fears of a rebound even though case numbers have been falling. Authorities in some districts issued notices ordering people back into their residential compounds after having let them out for brief walks or quick sho …

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Irish Prez: Musk Relaxing Censorship Would Be Bad

Ireland’s President Michael D Higgins has suggested that Elon Musk loosening speech restrictions on Twitter would be “incredible and dangerous narcissism”.
“Is it a great success that a multi-billionaire would be now deciding what is appropriate for people to exchange by way of discourse? I think it can hardly be described as anything other than a manifestation of an incredible and dangerous narcissism,” the 5’3″ octogenarian opined at what was supposed to be a climate change conference at Dublin City University, clearly referring to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter but declining to identify the South African entrepreneur by name.
President Higgins is not known to have complained about the super-rich “deciding what is appropriate for people to exchange by way of discourse” when Twitter was run by censorship-happy Jack Dorsey, who took such radical measures as banning then-sitting U.S. President Donald Trump from the platform while he was in charge and has a net worth estimated at $6.62 billion by Bloomberg.
Current chief executive Parag Agrawal, meanwhile is not quite a “multi-billionaire” — but he was reportedly being bumpe …

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A Father Looks At Mother’s Day

America is grappling with some fundamental disagreements this Mother’s Day. Powerful cultural forces are erasing basic concepts of maternity and femininity. If we cannot affirm a sentence like “Only women can be mothers,” then what exactly are we celebrating?From states like California that are furnishing more support for abortion than for childbirth, to an incoming Supreme Court justice who dared not publicly define the word “woman,” some of our most basic human assumptions are more controverted than ever.And, of course, whoever leaked the draft of theDobbsdecision has poured gasoline on all of those conflicts, as the prospect of the fall ofRoesparks fury and frustration among those less interested in celebrating motherhood than in ensuring the destruction of babies in t …

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Conservatives eye government shutdown to ax Biden DHS ‘disinformation’ board

House Republicans are seeking to defund the Biden administration’s controversial Disinformation Governance Board, and conservative members are eager to threaten a shutdown to do so if necessary.
House GOP Republicans, including the offices of firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert (R‑CO) and Rep. Jim Banks (R‑IN), told the Washington Examiner that Republicans would support using the government’s annual spending bill as a way to remove funding for the Department of Homeland Security’s new disinformation board, which the GOP sees as a vessel to censor conservative speech.

Some Republicans even said they would be willing to shut down the government if Democrats resist.
“We should use the power of the purse to stop this disinformation craziness that the Biden administration is doing,” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop (R‑NC) told the Washington Examiner.
“But we should use that power for other things too, like se …

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Billionaire George Soros dumps $1M into Stacey Abrams campaign

Billionaire George Soros donated $1M to Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign just a few days after she qualified to run in March. He donated the funds through a super PAC. Soros made the donation through Democracy PAC II to One Georgia, Abrams’ leadership PAC. Donating to political candidates got a little complicated this election cycle because of a new law passed by the Georgia Legislature. Last month U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen ruled that Abrams cannot raise money through a leadership committee until she wins the Democrat Party nomination. She is running unopposed.
She and Governor Kemp were both raising money with their leadership PACs before Judge Cohen’s ruling. The ruling tells the candidates that they cannot raise …

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Zero of Top Ten Cities Americans Are Flocking To Are in New York or California

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