Geopolitical tensions are mounting after state-run North Korean news media released footage of what appears to be the successful test of a devastating missile dropkick. In newly released footage, North Korean President Kim Jong-Un is seen celebrating as missile dropkick collides feet-first with an ocean target, causing a huge “bump.” The missile dropkick was reportedly launched from the country’s Technical Operations Pad for Thermonuclear and Underwater Reconnaissance Networks of Ballistics Used for Catastrophic Kinetic Launching Exercises, or T.O.P. T.U.R.N.B.U.C.K.L.E. International weaponry experts have long known that North Korea is capable of launching a Powerbomb — perhaps even an Exploder Suplex — but the possibility that the country now has a missile dropkick in its arsenal has caused alarm worldwide and throughout the WWE Universe. U.S. President and WWE Hall of Famer Donald Trump has insisted he has “zero tolerance” for North Korea’s missile dropkick tests and will, if necessary, send Bobby Lashley over to “take care of them” before Trump himself shaves Kim Jong-Un’s head. Answer: liked
Major League Baseball, the sport of Jackie Robinson and long ago a touchstone of civil rights, saw its first athlete join the movement started by Colin Kaepernick and inflamed this weekend by President Trump. Oakland Athletics catcher Bruce Maxwell, who hinted at such an action earlier in the day, knelt during the national anthem before Saturday night's game against the Texas Rangers. From the @sfchronicle’s Santiago Mejia, here is A’s rookie Bruce Maxwell becoming the first MLB player to take a knee for the anthem: pic.twitter.com/q8QVY9hW15 Maxwell, a 26-year-old catcher from Alabama, composed several tweets Saturday in the wake of President Trump's comments Friday night to "fire the sons of (expletives)" in the NFL who kneeled for the anthem. Kaepernick's protest was conceived in the wake of social injustices and the shooting of unarmed African Americans by law enforcement. Maxwell's tweets Saturday made it clear that Trump's verbiage took the movement to another level: "This now has gone from just a BlackLives Matter topic to just complete inequality of any man or woman that wants to stand for Their rights!" This now has gone from just a BlackLives Matter topic to just complete inequality of any man or woman that wants to stand for Their rights! In a profane Instagram post, he implored "every single NFL player" to kneel on Sunday, and then he followed up his words with actions before Saturday night's game in Oakland, kneeling in the dirt in front of the A's dugout at the Coliseum. There was immediate support from his organization. Teammate Mark Canha kept a hand on Maxwell's shoulder as he engaged in his protest as the anthem played, and wrapped him in a hug once it concluded. And the A's sent out a message of support moments after the protest. Maxwell has played in 104 career games and has a lifetime .256 batting average. He entered the season as the A's 10th-best prospect, according to Baseball America. Maxwell, like Kaepernick an African American of mixed race, was born in Germany while his father was stationed there in the Army. He was raised in Alabama, site of Trump's Friday night speech during which the president blasted NFL players for kneeling during the anthem and also bemoaned what he seemed to consider an overriding concern within the league for brain injuries. Saturday morning, Trump took umbrage at Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry's reluctance to visit the White House and rescinded any invitation. Trump's speech and morning-after tweets aroused a sports world that had largely let Kaepernick - currently without an NFL job - kneel alone since his protest began in August 2016. As NFL players geared up for what may be a significant day of protest before Sunday's games, and NBA players blasted the president on social media as well, Maxwell's Twitter and Instagram feeds went beyond his usual penchant for Alabama Crimson Tide football. A post shared by bruce_maxwell (@bruce_maxwell) on But until he took a knee before Saturday's game, baseball did not yet have a player join in anthem protests that started with Kaepernick and continued through various NFL players and even to U.S. women's national soccer team star Megan Rapinoe. The NFL and NBA are both majority African American leagues. Major League Baseball's decline in African American participation has been well-documented and this year, just 7.1% of players on opening-day rosters were black, according to a USA TODAY Sports analysis. That's the lowest percentage since 1958. In September 2016, shortly after Kaepernick's protests began, Baltimore Orioles All-Star outfielder Adam Jones told USA TODAY Sportsthat a similar protest in MLB was unlikely because African-American players "already have two strikes against us, so you might as well not kick yourself out of the game. In football, you can’t kick them out. You need those players. In baseball, they don’t need us. “Baseball is a white man’s sport.’’ Saturday night, Maxwell took that risk, inspired to act by what he saw around him and unafraid of any consequences. Answer: liked
— George and Amal Clooney have donated $1 million to Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that strives to put an end to domestic hate groups and extremists, in response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month. “What happened in Charlottesville, and what is happening in communities across our country, demands our collective engagement to stand up to hate,” the actor and humanitarian lawyer said in a joint statement. &gt;&gt; Related: More than 900 active hate groups in the U.S., report says On Aug. 12, a rally in Charlottesville turned violent when a group of white nationalists clashed with counterprotesters. One woman was killed when a car plowed into the crowd at the rally. According to Reuters, the donation comes from the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which the couple created in 2016 to promote justice worldwide in courtrooms and classrooms. Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen released a statement thanking the Clooneys for “standing with (the organization) at this critical moment in our country’s fight against hate.” Answer: liked
Hillary Clinton is beginning to increase her odds of winning Florida in many election forecasts, while other models say that Donald Trump is now likely to capture the state. On November 6th, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting a Donald Trump victory in Florida, giving him a 52.5 percent chance of winning. The state has flipped from red to blue in the past 24 hours; as of November 7th, the FiveThirtyEight model now gives Donald Trump a 48.5 percent chance of winning Florida, with Hillary Clinton having the better odds of 51.6 percent. On their forecast, we can see a clear dip that occurs in the immediate aftermath of the news that the FBI would be looking into new emails relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation, but now her lead is beginning to rise again. FiveThirtyEight is also forecasting that Hillary Clinton will win 48.2 percent of the popular vote in Florida, while Donald Trump will receive 48.0 percent of it. But in The New York Times’ The Upshot, Florida is actually beginning to move in Donald Trump’s direction. On November 6th, the Times’ model gave Hillary Clinton a 70 percent chance of winning the state, but now, this number has gone down to 66 percent. And two weeks ago, before the FBI news was released, Hillary Clinton had an 80 percent chance of winning Florida on The Upshot. The model currently gives Clinton an 84 percent chance of becoming the next president. Clearly, Clinton does not absolutely need Florida to win, while Donald Trump almost certainly can’t reach 270 Electoral College votes without it. On PredictWise, Hillary Clinton now has better odds of winning Florida than she did yesterday. On November 6th, Clinton was given a 73 percent chance of winning Florida by PredictWise, but now that has gone up two points to 75 percent. Surprisingly, PredictWise is actually giving Clinton better odds of winning Florida today than she had prior to the FBI announcement on October 28th. Hours before that news dropped, Clinton’s odds of winning Florida were at 72 percent. In the aftermath of that bombshell, her odds fell all the way down to 58 percent, but she has now more than recovered from it. Nationally, PredictWise gives Clinton an 89 percent chance of winning the election, up two points since yesterday. Meanwhile, a dramatic shift has taken place on The Huffington Post’s forecast. On Sunday, this model gave Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning Florida, and the state was placed in the “probable Clinton” column. Twenty-four hours later, Florida has been moved into the “battleground” column, and her odds of winning the state have dropped down to 89 percent. The Huffington Post has also moved North Carolina from “probable Clinton” into “battleground.” One day ago, Clinton’s projected minimum number of Electoral College votes was 317, but now that has dropped down to 273. Clinton has seen a very slight bump in DailyKos‘ election forecast, though. On November 6th, they gave her a 74 percent chance of winning Florida, but that has now gone up one point to 75 percent. This bump also came as DailyKos released its final election prediction. They expect Hillary Clinton to win 323 Electoral College votes – including that of North Carolina and Florida – and Donald Trump to win 215 votes. It’s easy to see why all these shifts have taken place, as several key Florida polls were released on Monday that show the race to be much tighter than it was just one day ago. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton was ahead in Real Clear Politics’ Florida polling average by 0.9 percentage points, but today, Trump leads by 0.3 percent. No polls have yet been released that reflect the FBI’s recent announcement that they would still not be recommending charges against Hillary Clinton after reviewing the new set of e-mails, so it remains to be seen if Clinton will be able to recover even more of her lead in the aftermath of that news. 6 Comments Answer: liked
By Kathryn Blackhurst, LifeZette: American Spectator Senior Editor John Fund blasted the media for refusing to cover former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s “ravings” claiming that “voter suppression” contributed to her Election Day loss, during an interview Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” Fund, a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online, said both Democrats and the mainstream media ridiculed President Donald Trump for claiming that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally while giving Clinton a complete pass for her claims. Pointing to the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s Monday report proving that more than 5,556 illegal voters were enrolled across 138 of Virginia’s counties and cities, Fund claimed that voter fraud is far more substantiated than Clinton’s claims. “There’s no evidence that voter ID laws prevent people from voting. What really defeated Hillary Clinton was that in every single swing state, including states that don’t have voter ID, African-American turnout went down because African-American voters didn’t particularly like Hillary Clinton,” Fund said. “What we have is the Democrats actively trying to hide the ball on any attempt to find out if there is voter fraud,” Fund continued. “All they do is yell ‘voter suppression!’ But they don’t have any evidence. They don’t have any statistics. They don’t have any of them. All they have are Hillary Clinton’s ravings.” No compatible source was found for this video. Fund referred to Clinton’s recent interview with New York magazine in which she insisted, “I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin. . . . Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win.” Declaring this unsubstantiated claim to be utter nonsense, Fund noted that even liberal organizations such as the fact-checking site Snopes, Vox, and Slate have all “called Hillary’s assertion that she lost because of voter suppression just a fantasy.” “But by the way, how much media coverage did you get?” Fund said. Instead, Trump’s claims of 3 million to 5 million people illegal voters have been getting all the attention. “Trump should have never have said it. It discredits the cause,” Fund conceded. “Having said that, the outrage against Trump was perfectly appropriate. But where’s the outrage at Hillary Clinton coming up with her fantasy about voter suppression with just as little evidence? I don’t know if anyone in the media … has talked about it or heard about it.” Pointing once again to Virginia and its resident “consigliere of the Clinton White House,” Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Fund noted that he has “desperately tried to prevent groups like the Public Interest Legal Foundation to go into voter registration rolls and try to find out who has been removed from the rolls in Virginia because” they were illegally registered to vote when they obtained a driver’s license. “That would be the evidence that there were non-citizens voting in our elections,” Fund said. “Well, McAuliffe sent out a directive to every local election official: Don’t cooperate with these questions. And it turns out they now have the answers from 138 communities in Virginia. Not the whole state, just part of it, [that] 5,500 non-citizens have been removed from the voter registration rolls in the last 5 years. Over a third of them had been voting.” The real issue, Fund insisted, is former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to investigate or illegal voting or allow others to investigate whether the country’s democratic election process had been compromised. “For eight years, state after state asked the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, ‘You have a list of every legal alien in the country, people with green cards, student visas. Please send us the list. All we’ll do with it is match it with out voter-registration rolls and see if some non-citizens are registering and possibly voting,'” Fund said. “For eight years the Obama administration refused to turn over those lists, claiming ‘privacy’ considerations, which were bogus,” Fund added. “The reason why he claimed there is no voter fraud is he’s actively trying to hide it.” The Trump administration has since set up, by executive order, a commission to investigate voter fraud. This article was used with permission from LifeZette. Answer: decreased
Ever since last week’s High Court judgment threw a spanner in the works of the Government’s plan to use the Royal Prerogative to trigger Article 50 there have been all sorts of rumours and suggestions as to how the Government is going to deliver Brexit. Theresa May has already said she will appeal to the Supreme Court. Brexit Secretary David Davis confirmed this in the Commons on Monday. Another suggestion is to bring forward a Bill that specifically rejects the High Court’s ruling and hands the Government the power to act alone. Or there’s the idea of a simple one-line Bill to trigger Article 50 itself. And those are just the more obvious ideas. There seem to be as many different theories and suggestions as there are EU members. The moment we trigger Article 50 the clock starts ticking and we know we will leave the EU 24 months later, deal or no deal. Brexit will mean Brexit Things would be so much better if, as in the joke, we didn’t have to start from here. Or, to put it another way, if Mrs May had done what her predecessor had suggested should happen. Because for all his faults David Cameron got one thing bang on. Back in February, when he was setting out to MPs the details of the pathetic “deal” he had negotiated with the EU, Mr Cameron made clear what he thought would and should happen if we voted for Brexit: “If the British people vote to leave there is only one way to bring that about, namely to trigger Article 50 of the treaties and begin the process of exit and the British people would rightly expect that to start straightaway.” The referendum took place in June. Theresa May’s plan is to trigger Article 50 by the end of March next year. Even if she sticks to that timetable that will have been a nine-month wait. By no stretch of the imagination can that be described as triggering Article 50 “straightaway”. But Mr Cameron was clearly right that the British people would expect the process to have started straightaway. With hindsight it is surely now clear to everyone who isn’t plotting to stop Brexit – and was clear after the referendum to many of us – that Mrs May should have done what Mr Cameron said would happen and triggered Article 50 as soon as she entered Downing Street. Indeed he might even have done so himself. Imagine how different things would now be. Instead of politics being consumed with questions of procedure and timing – almost all of which are fig leaves pushed by Remainers who don’t want us to leave – and instead of the Remainers being handed ever more time to plot how they can frustrate the will of the British people, the path would have been set and the referendum result honoured. Straightaway. The moment we trigger Article 50 the clock starts ticking and we know we will leave the EU 24 months later, deal or no deal. Brexit will mean Brexit. Unless there is a unanimous decision by the rest of the EU to change that timetable nothing can alter that. So that’s what should have happened. But the fact that it didn’t doesn’t mean there aren’t important lessons for the future as to what should now happen and how we can avoid a further mess. Mrs May repeated after the High Court ruling that she still plans to trigger Article 50 by the end of March. The crucial word here is “by”. That doesn’t necessarily mean waiting until March. It means making sure it’s done by March, which could mean acting now. And there are compelling reasons why she should put a stop to the uncertainty and trigger Article 50 now. Most obviously it would destroy the Remainers’ attempts to keep us in. They are playing for time. They have been doing that since the vote and will continue doing so for as long as they can. Their hope is that the longer they delay Article 50 being triggered, the more they can make a case that the referendum result is no longer valid. Make no mistake about this: they will do whatever they can to stop Article 50 coming into force. That’s just one reason why appealing to the Supreme Court carries a huge risk: that the Government might lose. The Remainers who brought the case are using the language of parliamentary scrutiny because it sounds appropriate and modest. But their goal isn’t scrutiny: it’s destruction. They want to destroy the referendum result. And handing them any victory, especially from the Supreme Court, is unnecessary and unwise. Wed, September 14, 2016 On Monday the Brexit Secretary confirmed in the Commons that the Government could introduce a one-line Bill triggering Article 50 now, bypassing any Supreme Court decision. The Remainers would then be put on the spot and their plots exposed. Voting against triggering Article 50 would reveal their real agenda of ignoring the referendum result. They would doubtless seek to amend the Bill and use every parliamentary device at their disposal. But their motives would be obvious and the wiser among them would surely realise the huge risk they were running with democracy itself. They would in reality have no choice but to accept the result of the referendum and implement Article 50 – or risk sticking two fingers up to the very idea of a sovereign people. And even the Remainers, surely, are not that wilful. Answer: decreased
The mainstream media is floating rumors that Trump White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was removed from Air Force One this week and may be resigning. Kelly has been assigned Trump duties the past few months. According to conversations with Steve Bannon John Kelly is not allowing President Trump to receive his news from conservative news outlets. Pajamas Media reported: Bloomberg White House correspondent Jennifer Jacobs reports on Twitter that Trump’s chief of staff, General John Kelly, was originally going to be on the Air Force One flight to Las Vegas but was “pulled off flight” at the last moment. Gen. Kelly was originally going to be on AF1 to Vegas with Trump today but was pulled off flight, I'm told.WH not answering Qs about it. — Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 4, 2017 Although the White House initially refused to answer her questions about this rather akward move, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders eventually said that there’s “nothing to read into here,” explaining: He is basically always on the manifest. Sometimes he travels, and sometimes he doesn’t. An important caveat, of course, but Huckabee’s explanation did not prevent Scott Dworkin from tweeting that not one, not two, but three people have told him that this may very well be General Kelly’s last week as Trump’s chief of staff. I’ve heard from three people from different circles on the Hill that this may be John Kelly’s last week as Trump’s Chief of Staff. #AMJoy https://t.co/T9AGHeGR9y — Scott Dworkin (@funder) October 4, 2017 Sponsored Answer: decreased
There's been a lot of talk this week about President Trump's mental state. Psychiatrists have weighed in calling him a "very sick man." Former associates report that people close to him are "deeply concerned about his mental health.” It's been reported that he's telling people that the person on the "Access Hollywood" tape wasn't really him, and claiming (again) that he actually won the popular vote. But the most vivid and obvious evidence that Trump is becoming even more unbalanced even than before (which is saying something) comes from his Twitter feed, which has been a daily dumpster fire ever since word came down that Michael Flynn had apparently made a deal with Robert Mueller. Trump's Twitter is a window into his mind, and right now it isn't offering an attractive view. He's madly tweeted lies about his tax plan, applauded himself for single-handedly causing the stock market to rise, insulted the media, slandered old friends and condemned some of the famous men who have been fired for sexual harassment. Apparently he is more assured of his omnipotence than ever, since he was rewarded with the presidency while all those other guys have been brought low. He's put on quite a show and all of it has further degraded the presidency and embarrassed the nation before the world. But there was one series of tweets that stood out and it's so bad that it may have actually caused a diplomatic break with our closest ally. On Thursday morning, for some inexplicable reason, the president of the United States retweeted three videos claiming to be Muslim extremists perpetrating violence. One purported to show a group of Muslims pushing a boy off a roof, another claimed to show a Muslim destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary and a third supposedly showed a Muslim immigrant hitting a Dutch boy on crutches. The Dutch embassy clarified that the third video actually of two native-born dutch boys fighting, and did not involve Muslim immigrants at all. The tweets were from a vile British neofascist named Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of a tiny far-right, anti-immigrant group called Britain First. You may recall that prior to the Brexit vote last year a Labour Party member of Parliament named Jo Cox was assassinated by a man who shouted the words "Britain First" before he killed her. According to the Daily Beast: The group had previously struggled to garner mainstream-media coverage of their video stunts, which include mosque “invasions” and “Christian patrols” during which uniformed thugs carrying white crosses attempt to intimidate minority citizens. On Wednesday, Trump catapulted Fransen and the group’s leader Paul Golding, who is also a convicted criminal, into the global conversation. Trump sent those videos out to his millions of followers; hundreds of millions more may have seen them through other social media and mainstream news by now. These anti-Muslim videos are the worst kind of hate propaganda, the kind of thing one expects to find deep in the bowels of the extremist right-wing internet. Needless to say, Fransen was delighted and thanked Trumpfor "sharing the videos with his "44 MILLION FOLLOWERS! GOD BLESS YOU TRUMP! GOD BLESS AMERICA!" The reaction was swift. Prime Minister Theresa May's office rebuked the president in a statement which said that Britain First "divides communities in their use of hateful narratives which pedal lies and stoke tensions. This causes anxieties to law-abiding people. The British people overwhelmingly reject the prejudiced rhetoric of the far right, which is the antithesis of the values that this country represents; decency, tolerance and respect. It is wrong for the President to have done this." Trump himself was not contrite, of course. He responded this way: . @Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2017 The British Parliament did not take this well. In speech after speech members demanded that Trump's invitation for a state visit (already controversial) be rescinded. Labor M.P. Stephen Doughty declared that by sharing those tweets, Trump had shown himself to be "either a racist, incompetent or unthinking — or all three. I love America, it is a country and people of extraordinary generosity, courage, kindness and humanity — but this president represents none of those things.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said May should use "any influence she and her government claim to have with the president” to ask that he “delete these tweets and to apologize to the British people.” None of that is going to happen, of course. Trump's state of mind at the moment is that following his racist instincts are what got him to the most powerful office on earth and following those instincts is the winning formula going forward. We are all well aware of Trump's bond with the old-fashioned American far right. David Duke is a big fan and applauded him for retweeting the videos. Trump thinks that one can be a "very fine person" and still carry a torch and march with Nazis shouting "Jews will not replace us" in American cities. His xenophobic rhetoric toward Mexicans and Muslims, and his barely concealed racism, have been obvious for years and were major selling points during his campaign. Trump has also shown an affinity for the neofascist right in Europe, perhaps under the influence of Steve Bannon, who has developed alliances with such groups for some time through his Breitbart International media venture. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later that Trump did not know who Jayda Fransen was before he retweeted her, and claimed he was trying to "elevate the issue" of extremist violence in Europe. That's not enough. He has been retweeting white supremacists and neofascists for a long time. Quite likely he doesn't know who they all are either, but he obviously likes what they have to say and he's happy to use his platform of tens of millions of followers and the prestige of the White House to spread their message far and wide. May did not rescind the invitation to the state visit. But the British don't seem to be in any hurry to set a date either. Plans for a "working visit" from Trump in January have been dropped, which seems wise. Our president seems to have done something that nobody else has been able to do in Britain lately: He brought left and right together -- in mutual loathing for him. Over the Thanksgiving holiday Trump made a weird, cryptic comment to Coast Guard troops, saying, "You never know about an ally, an ally can turn, you're going to find that out." Maybe he was talking about himself. Answer: decreased
Tucker Carlson said that Hillary Clinton spun a yarn of conspiracy theories about her election loss during a speech on Wednesday. Mike Huckabee joined "Fox &amp; Friends" to discuss Hillary Clinton's return to the public eye with a speech over the weekend in the Poconos. A retired NYPD detective and private investigator running against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio posted a video to Facebook challenging the Democrat to a push-up contest. A professor at a southern California college went on a diatribe against President-elect Donald Trump, and the unnamed student who recorded her may be facing punishment. Answer:
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