Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

In an election with implications for Hungary, Europe and Putin's war on Ukraine, Hungarian Christofascist Viktor Orban apparently won reelection by a dominating margin:

Hungary's authoritarian leader and longtime Russian ally, Viktor Orban, has declared victory in the country's parliamentary elections, clinching a fourth consecutive term in power.

Orban's Fidesz party had a commanding lead with 71% of the votes counted, Hungary's national elections board said on Sunday evening.

 

The election campaign was dominated by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, which put Orban's lengthy association with Russian President Vladimir Putin under scrutiny. In his victory speech, Orban called Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky one of the "opponents" he had to overcome during the campaign.

 

Hungary is heavily reliant on Russian energy and Orban has dodged opportunities to condemn Putin's assault on its neighboring state, complicating the EU's efforts to present a united front against him.

 

But despite opinion polls forecasting a tighter race, Orban's Fidesz party won comfortably across much of the country. Opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay even failed to win in his own district, where he had served as mayor.

 

"We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it's sure that it can be seen from Brussels," Orban said in his speech on Sunday night, making light of his government's long-running tensions with EU leaders.

Orban has been steadily leading Hungary back in time to its days of Soviet-style repression.  This will only accelerate that movement, to which we can only ask "WTF Hungary?"

Speaking of Putin pals, keep an eye on what's going on in Pakistan with Putin ally Prime Minister Khan:

Pakistan's supreme court is expected to decide the fate of embattled Prime Minister Imran Khan, following a day of political turmoil.

Mr Khan has faced an attempt to oust him from office in recent days.

But in a move that has roiled the country, members of Mr Khan's party on Sunday blocked a vote of no-confidence in the PM and dissolved parliament.

Mr Khan had claimed the vote was part of a US-led conspiracy to remove him, but the US has denied this.

Furious opposition politicians have now filed a petition to the Supreme Court to rule on whether the move to block the vote was constitutional.

The court was initially expected to decide by the end of Monday, but delayed the decision until Tuesday.

Mr Khan was widely regarded as having come to power with the help of Pakistan's army, but they have since fallen out, according to observers.

His political opponents then seized this opportunity to demand a no-confidence vote after persuading a number of his coalition partners to defect to them.

On Sunday, MPs meeting to hold the vote - which Mr Khan was expected to lose - were told of an "an operation for a regime change by a foreign government".

The deputy speaker chairing the session - a close ally of the prime minister - then proceeded to declare the vote unconstitutional.

Shortly afterwards Pakistan's president Arif Alvi - who is from Mr Khan's ruling PTI party - dissolved parliament in a step towards early elections.

Sounds like they took notes from the Malignant Loser's January 6 coup playbook (aside -- BBC sure likes one sentence paragraphs).

What happens when dedicated viewers of Fox "News" are paid to watch CNN instead? This:

The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today. More than a quarter-century after its founding, however, the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?  [snip]

It’s a slightly different question how watching Fox affects someone’s views of the day-to-day controversies of politics. One view is that Fox is such an echo chamber that it can’t possibly be changing minds. Only committed conservatives, the theory goes, would bother to tune in to Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson, so what difference could it make what they say?

A pretty big difference, as it turns out, according to a new study by political scientists David Broockman of Stanford and Joshua Kalla of Yale. The research offers a much more granular look at the impact of Fox on its viewers, thanks to reliance on a resource-intensive experiment, rather than the broad aggregates of that earlier paper.

Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead. (Compliance was enforced with some news quizzes, for which additional compensation was offered.) Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.

The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.

We'll chip in a few bucks to get more Fox "News" addicts to switch -- but given the changes coming at CNN, it might be better to pay them to switch to MSNBC.

In a related story, 

In a forthcoming book, a pair of New York Times reporters and CNN political analysts report that President Joe Biden "assessed" Fox News "as one of the most destructive forces in the United States."

The reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, say that Biden was even more critical of Fox Corp patriarch Rupert Murdoch.

According to the book, Biden told an unnamed associate in mid-2021 that Murdoch was "the most dangerous man in the world."

Finally, please consider a visit over to Infidel 753's link round-up to posts of interest from around the Internet.  Always a stimulating and wide- ranging  selection!