Look who's back in the good graces of Andrzej Lepper. On Sunday, the leader of Self Defense brought Stanislaw Lyzwinski to a news conference discussing these bizarre IOU's Lepper forced all party members sign to guarantee they won't leave the party.

So what if Lyzwinski is likely to be indicted for sexual assault, intimidation of witnesses and other charges. Lepper had banished his former right hand for a while, but clearly he no longer feels the need to keep the star of a nasty sex scandal behind the curtain. What does Lyzwinski have on Lepper, anyway?

So the geniuses at the neo-socialist Self Defense party have come up with another brilliant idea. They are proposing a new law that would forbid Polish television stations from inserting commercials into movies and other programming without the consent of the author. Sure, nobody's happy that they have to sit through advertising in the middle of another showing of Home Alone (a perennial favorite around the holidays). Self Defense deputy Janusz Maksymiuk, the leader of the anti-commercials movement, says that interrupting programming with those silly ads is not elegant and destroys art.

Self-Defense should really stick to corruption (with another case described on the front page of Gazeta Wyborcza today), leaving television to people who have a clue. How does Mr. Maksymiuk think that programming is paid for on broadcast television? How does he expect "authors" to make money if the television stations don't buy their movies? None of the private stations have the luxury of a "TV tax" enjoyed by the public broadcaster (TVP). How would they get permission from foreign producers or those who passed away?

At first glance this looks like a simple case of pandering to the Polish couch potatoes. But at a second look, it;s more like a heavy-handed attempt to hurt private stations for the benefit of TVP. Just last week the Kaczynski twins put in a trusted crony to run TVP, seemingly taking a lesson from Uncle Vladimir to the east. Are we seeing another push to hurt private television stations or, at the very least, to pressure them to stop being so critical?

Is Self-Defense looking for revenge after being ravaged in the recent months because of the sex scandal? This is certainly not the first time Lepper and Co. have targeted the media.

This silly idea should -- and probably will -- die a quick death. Hopefully nobody will take it too seriously. After all, don't we all need a bathroom break next time Czterej Pancerni i Pies is on?

Four. That's how many women have now come forward accusing the leader of the neo-communist Self-Defense party, Andrzej Lepper, of pressuring them to have sex with him. According to Gazeta Wyborcza, the latest witness is hard to dismiss. She's a wife of a prominent member of the party who advised Lepper on relations with Ukraine. Heck, he even got Lepper a doctorate from a Ukrainian university, along with one for himself.

"Lepper explained that I'm a big girl and that I shouldn't be surprised. I declined," Anna Podgorska was quoted as telling the prosecutors. This was after Lepper told her that this would help her husband's career. He pressured her another time.

So now it's four. And the question becomes, how many women have to come forward before the Kaczynski twins and PiS, or the "Law and Justice" party, do some justice and kick out Lepper, along with the rest of his crooked party, from the government?

Lepper-gate, or Sex-gate, or whatever you call this mess in Poland, looks to be getting even uglier. With "Archbishop Spy" grabbing the headlines in the recent weeks (scandals seem to be coming from all directions in Poland nowadays), Lepper-gate has been mostly pushed into the back pages. But there have been some developments worth mentioning.

According to Gazeta Wyborcza, Deputy Prime Minister Lepper did not only go after the young female members of Self Defense, his party, like his right hand Stanislaw Lyzwinski. Lepper had his eyes on the wives of party members. At least two women testified that De Leader indicated that to help their husband's careers, they might want to consider a "pleasant moment" with him in bed.

On top of this, Lepper is now refusing to provide DNA samples to see whether he, and not Lyzwinski, was the father of a child of Aneta Krawczyk, the woman who was the first one to come out with accusations of wide spread sexual harassment at Self-Defense. Confusing? Yes. Ugly? Definitely.

So quite soon we should see the prosecutor's office coming out with charges against Lyzwinski and, very likely, against Lepper. So far, 110 people have testified in the investigation. Krawczyk's credibility was badly hurt when first DNA tests cleared Lyzwinski, but now at least ten women confirm sex-for-jobs accusations made by Krawczyk and three other women in Gazeta Wyborcza in December. Three of the 10 women accuse De Leader.

This is what the Kaczynski brothers get for brining in the dirtiest party (in more ways than one) into the government just to save the Duck Republic from early elections. But it's not the end just yet. The ruling PiS party is sending out smoke signals that even if Lepper is indicted, the party he created will remain in the cabinet. Lepper will also keep his hands in the pot with a role of the behind-the-scenes-puppeteer.

Hey, wait a minute... Doesn't PiS stand for Law and Justice??? How ironic. How sad.

Self Defence leader Andrzej Lepper with his usual flair for overaggeration and hysterics, has already called it a coup attemp and called for the closure (!) of Gazeta Wyborcza. But is Poland's media at fault here for the sex scandal that has been consuming Lepper's party. Is Lepper right?

The answer, mostly, is no. Wyborcza, no lover of Lepper, has perhaps jumped the gun with its sex scandal story a week ago before investigating all the lose ends. And, from what I had seen, some of its journalists were too eager to sell the story instead of remaining as neutral as possible in the light of imminent accusations from Herr Leader and his posse. But the story itself was well reported and had collaborating evidence from other women and former Self Defense officials. At least one more woman has come forward to speak of work-for-sex set up in the party. Something certainly stinks there and Wyborcza had a duty to expose this sad situation.

And it wasn't just Wyborcza that pushed the story foward. Aneta Krawczyk revealed herself and fresh allegations on TVN's respected news show Now Us, the same one that had only a few weeks ago showed the video tapes by another Self Defense politician being offered political favors for swithching to the Kaczynski brothers' party. Other newspapers and TV channels chimed in with their own charges. It is the duty of news organizations to seek the truth, even if its quite messy.

And closing a leading newspaper? This is not Belarus, no matter how much Lepper and Co. have been trying to take Poland on that path. Last time I checked Krawczyk was on top of Self Defense's electorate list earlier this year and ran the office of the man she later accused of harassing her. So if Self Defense found her that reliable shouldn't Lepper consider closing down his own party now? They groomed her for this.

Polish media doesn't have the cleanest hands in this affair, even as evidenced by the mad scene on the day Krawczyk and her daughter arrived for their DNA testing. There should be some rethinking of some newsgathering tactics. But in the end, most of the media outlets did exactly what they should have -- air out the truth.

All the articles, all the chest beating, all the blogging. Now it turns out that one leaders of Self Defense is not the father of his accuser's child. So, the main accusations against Stanislaw Lyzwinski turn out to be false, casting a shadow on other statements by Aneta Krawczyk.

I thought Krawczyk was a credible witness, but it seems I was wrong. As with many others, her accusations played right into the stereotypes of Self Defense, which I am certainly no fan of. So I thought they are likely true, especially since I had heard in the past of similar practices in other parties.

Still, it is important to note that the child was only part, even if the main part, of wider charges and other women have come out to say that Lyzwinski and others expected sex for jobs. Nonetheless, the air is out of this scandal.

Now the next step. Self Defense goes after the self-righteous press, all too willing to accept uncollaborated charges against a party they desperate want to go away. This will not be pretty.

First, she says she can describe his private parts. Then, there's the photo of the two of them together. Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton? No, this time it's the Polish version: Aneta Krawczyk and Self-Defense leader Andrzej Lepper. Today daily Rzeczpospolita printed a great photo of the two of them together, with Lepper tenderly holding Krawczyk's cheek. If I remember well, Lepper said earlier he barely knew Krawczyk. Sound familiar?

The unfortunate part is that this sex scandal involves several politicians from Self-Defense and a handful of women accusing them of all kinds of sexual improprieties. And this mess is just nasty. It exposes the underbelly of Polish politics, the way things work behind the closed doors. And from what I hear, it's not just Self-Defense. I hope this will scare the crap out of the other parties.

Interesting time to be in Poland, especially to see the growing sex scandal that is quickly engulfing the Self Defense party. The flames got much hotter tonight after the woman accusing two Self-Defense politicians, including Deputy Prime Minister Andrzej Lepper, appeared on private broadcaster TVN. The woman looked quite credible and seems to have proof of some nasty things, including another politician, Stanislaw Lyzwinski, trying to force her to have an abortion and then give the child up for adoption. She fit the part of a reliable witness, signaling more bad times for Lepper and Co. I would not be surprised if this was the death knoll for the already unpopular Self-Defense.

The interview even took on a Clintonesque character when the accuser said she would be able to describe some of Lepper's physical characteristics to prove her story.

No matter what is proven in the end, this is also yet another black eye for the Kaczynski twins and their party. The Duck Republic was supposed to be a break from the scandals of the previous governments. Instead, it is bouncing from one nasty scandal to another, with little time to do any serious governing. If it's not bribe offers to keep the coalition together, then it's youth members of another coalition party hanging out with the neo-Nazis. Now it's jobs for sex. When will the Kaczynski twins decide that their government has lost its mandate to govern?

And one last comment. It's shameful to see female members of the coalition attacking the character of the accuser in this sex scandal, while in the same breath saying that we should not past judgment about the guilt of their leaders. How do they expect victims of rape and sexual harassment to come forward if this is what they'll get? There is already a huge taboo around here against women accusing men of inappropriate sexual advances. Shameful.


Caption: Man with Character...

It's almost pathetic the way the Kaczynski Twins misplayed their hand in Poland's political poker. First, they bring in The Self Defense party and it's mercurial leader Andrzej Lepper (in all his glory in the photo), along with the so-rightwing-they're-wrong party, the League of Polish Families. Then they push Lepper to the wall and he bites back, leaving the coalition. Then our favorite brothers try to buy several Self Defense members to join the coalition without much success. Their whole dirty scheme comes into light when Polish TV station TVN plays exerts of the strong-arm sessions with one of the more colorful members of Self Defense. Got it all?

Well, the kicker is that the Kaczynskis are now trying to bring Self-Defense and Lepper back into government... I don't know if the twins could have wasted any more political capital. Their poll numbers are way down, so they had to come crawling back to Lepper, which will give him a much stronger hand when, as I fear, he comes back into the coalition. And so the Duck Republic continues its flight south, just in time for the winter.

On a different front, perhaps related to all those German kartoffel jokes, Poland's potato production is down this year...