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Harvey grew into a hurricane on Thursday and authorities have reinforced their warnings as wind speeds have risen to 125 mph. Harvey could potentially be the fiercest hurricane to hit the United States in years. Such strong gusts are expected to be accompanied by 3 feet of rain and 12-foot storm surges. Forecasters have called Harvey a "life-threatening storm" and say that million of people could be swamped as the storm moves through counties inland. (The Associated Press contributed to this report) The National Hurricane Center has issued an advisory on Thursday, instructing Texas residents along the Gulf of Mexico coast to "rush" their preparations as hurricane Harvey strengthens. The hurricane is forecast to become a Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 80 mph, according to National Hurricane Center. The center reportedThursday afternoon that the tropical storm will make landfall late Friday night or early Saturday morning along the south-central Texas coast. "Harvey has intensified quickly this morning, and is now forecast to be a major hurricane at landfall, bringing life-threatening storm surge, rainfall, and wind hazards to portions of the Texas coast," the center wrote. People residing like coastal cities like Corpus Christi were encouraged to evacuate from their homes on Thursday. The mayor Joe McComb, called for people to leave in the "strongest possible terms." Some are surprised how much the hurricane has strengthened. A hurricane warning was issued for the Texas coast early Thursday, blanketing an area from Port Mansfield to Matagorda. Forecasters indicated that Harvey could become a hurricane after regaining tropical storm strength and began drifting towards the Gulf of Mexico. Harvey’s maximum sustained winds increased to near 60 mph Thursday, re-establishing its status as a tropical storm. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said additional strengthening is expected, resulting in Harvey emerging as a hurricane by the time its expected to reach Texas’s southern coast Friday. Some Twitter users on Thursday voiced alarm over Harvey, while others noted its name’s resemblance to comedian Steve Harvey. Harvey was centered about 335 miles southeast of Port Mansfield around 8 a.m. local time Thursday and heading north-northwest at about 10 mph. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) ordered the State Operations Center to elevate its readiness level, freeing up resources there for possible rescue and recovery maneuvers. The governor also pre-emptively declared a state of disaster for 30 counties on or near the Texas coast to speed the deployment of state resources to those impacted. Texas emergency officials on Wednesday asked residents along the state’s upper coastline to relocate or prepare to head inland. People in low-lying areas were urged to seek higher ground, and individuals elsewhere were instructed to closely follow official announcements. Rice farmers in coastal Matagorda County late Wednesday rushed to harvest their crops as Harvey nears. People on South Padre Island, for their part, filled sandbags that evening to protect exposed businesses and houses from the storm. Other locations in the forecast path, finally, sought out generators, plywood and other goods from hardware stores as a safety precaution. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This week, a Minneapolis mayoral candidate is running on major police reform that involves disarming the city’s police force. Raymond Dehn revealed the radical approach to public safety he’ll be taking should he be elected mayor in an interview with Fox 9 Minneapolis less than two weeks following the death of an Australian national by the name of Justine Damond. Damond, of course, was the woman shot and killed by Officer Mohamed Noor on July 15 while attempting to report the sound of a woman screaming behind her house. No one will ever know for sure whether it was the fireworks taking place in the area that night or if it was the alleged “slapping” of the patrol car by the victim just before the shooting that caused it. The only absolute in this tragic situation is that Justine Damond—a woman who called the police for help—is dead from a bullet shot from an officer’s gun. As is the case with every high-profile (Officer Involved Shooting) OIS, the equation cannot be balanced by departmental explanations that offer no objective truth in the minds of the masses. People are angry. They don’t want explanations. They want action. Dehn, of course, knows this and is attempting to capitalize on it at the polls by painting police with a broad brush as incompetent and unnecessarily armed. Don’t miss the fact that the District 59B representative only wants MPD officers to be restricted from carrying firearms on their hips. If he had it his way, he’d still allow them to keep guns in their vehicles. Therefore, his “solution” doesn’t even attempt to prevent the Justine Damond death from occurring. It’s an empty proposal made at an opportune time. There’s a reason the Justine Damond story has become an international story. It is a statistical anomaly. According to the Washington Post OIS Database, of the 574 civilians killed in officer-involved shootings so far this year, Damond is one of five unarmed women. The other four casualties on this list are Sariah Marie Lane, Ambroshia Fagre, Elena Mondragon, and Alteria Woods. No compatible source was found for this video. Lane, Fagre, and Mondragon were all killed while riding as passengers of fleeing vehicles that had been suspected by police to be stolen, involved in burglaries, and/or armed robberies. All four vehicles were used as deadly weapons by their drivers as they rammed police in attempts to get away. Woods, on the other hand, was used as a human shield by her boyfriend during a SWAT raid targeting him and his father for multiple shootings. While these four women were killed during deadly force encounters in which they were accessories to crimes committed by boyfriends, Damond’s case is entirely unique. The trend continues if we go back a few years. In 2016, three unarmed women were killed by police. Jessica Williams was shot in San Francisco after nearly trapping one officer between a fence and the stolen vehicle she was attempting to flee in. Kelsey Hauser was killed riding as a passenger in a stolen vehicle when her boyfriend attempted to run over officers after leading them on a high-speed pursuit in California. The third was 12-year-old Ciara Meyer, who was struck and killed after a constable’s bullet passed through her father’s arm. Meyer’s father reportedly pointed a rifle at the chest of one constable as he served an eviction order at the apartment. Meyer was set to lose his apartment. Instead, he got his daughter killed. In 2015, three unarmed women were shot and killed by police. India Kager was killed in Virginia while driving a vehicle with a homicide suspect in the passenger seat. When police approached the vehicle in a convenience store parking lot, Kager’s passenger opened fire on police. Both were killed in the shootout. The second was a 55-year old woman named Bettie Jones during a domestic violence call in Chicago. As an officer opened fire on a bat-wielding man in the apartment, Jones was caught in the cross-fire. The third, Autumn Steele, was shot by an officer responding to a domestic violence call in Iowa. Steele and her husband were actively fighting upon the officer’s arrival. After being bitten by the family dog, the officer fell backward while opening fire on the animal. Two rounds hit Steele instead. Each of the eleven officer-involved shootings involving “unarmed” females in the past three years is tragic—but the trend shows that seven of them were killed while engaging in criminal activity with boyfriends with a penchant for violence. Bettie Jones, Ciara Meyer, and Autumn Steel were killed as bystanders in legitimate deadly force encounters where officers feared for their lives. That leaves Justine Damond in a class of her own. Like I said, her death is the anomaly of all anomalies. Politicians like Raymond Dehn are free to use their own history of criminality to bolster their political profile in a society that loves a comeback story. Being a recovering cocaine addict and felon doesn’t preclude anyone from running for mayor, but when a politician takes advantage of tragedies such as Justine Damond’s death to suggest that police officers should place themselves in imminent danger…well, that’s where the line needs to be drawn. Despite advances in proficiency for firearms training over the course of several decades, 27 police officers have already been murdered by gunfire in the line of duty this year. In 2015, the total was 47. In 2016, it was 63. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, we are currently on track to lose around the same number to gunfire this year. Hopefully, we’ll buck the trend. Every officer will tell you that there is a wide spectrum of skill levels as it relates to weapons tactics, handling, and marksmanship. What we’ll also all tell you is that the level of skill a cop possesses matters little if someone is hellbent on killing them. An easy response for anyone telling you Dehn is onto something is to tell them that many of the gunfire-related deaths American police get hit with each year are ambushes. The most self-confident man or woman knows that it doesn’t take much skill to walk up behind them, point a gun to the back of their head, and pull the trigger. Our guns—readily accessible at our hips—are of little use in defending an attack from a gunman who’s got the jump on us. Just last week, Lieutenant Aaron Allan was shot 14 times by the occupant of a rolled-over vehicle on an Indiana roadway. One minute the LT is trying to help people involved in a car accident, and the next he’s getting shot dead by one of them. Earlier this month, New York State Trooper Joel Davis was shot while exiting his vehicle upon arrival at a domestic disturbance. Like Lt. Allen, he hadn’t even gotten the chance to get out of his holster. Four days prior to that, there was Detective Miosotis Familia, who was shot one time in the back of the head in the Bronx while writing in her note pad. Policing in America has become less and less desirable over the years, and the decline in numbers of police patrolling the streets shows it. The city with a major staff shortage will tell you the reason is “a stronger economy” creating more competition for prospective employees. The cop-hating fringe of the public will tell you, “Good. We don’t need them.” The local police union will tell you that it’s because of low pay, dissolving of pensions, lawsuits, etc. The police officer will tell you it’s because the risk is no longer worth it. Many officers feel like this job is punishing whether we do our jobs or we don’t. We’re trained to carry guns to save the lives of others and our own. If we don’t use deadly force when we should, we’re screwed. If we do use it when we should, we’re still screwed. Every now and then, we use it when we’re not supposed to—and that gets twisted to look like it’s the national norm. To pretend that police officers anywhere in America can do the job we do without access to a firearm by our side is to be willfully ignorant of the dangers we face daily in a society armed to the teeth with guns. We are not Great Britain, Ireland, or France. People don’t use machetes to hack at us, or vehicles to run us over. They come at us with guns—and we require our own to stand a chance. Whether it be Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, or Berkeley, mark my words, the progressive metropolis that turns officers into guinea pigs for this social experiment will find itself without a test subject—and without a police force.

The infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Donald Trump brags about his ability to “grab” women with impunity because he’s famous is real, Access Hollywood‘s hosts asserted on Monday—just in case the president had any doubts. In response to a report that Trump was questioning the authenticity of the 2005 hot-mic recording, which captured the former reality TV star saying he could “grab [women] by the pussy,” Access Hollywood host Natalie Morales said on Monday’s show that the tap is, in fact, “very real.” “We wanted to clear something up that has been reported across the media landscape. Let us make this perfectly clear: The tape is very real,” Morales said. “Remember his excuse at the time was ‘locker room talk.’ He said every one of those words.” TRUMP: The "Access Hollywood" tape might be fake After the Washington Post revealed the tape ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Trump apologized and at no time stated that the tape was faked. When CNN’s Anderson Cooper pressed Trump on whether he “understood” that what he said was an admission of sexual assault, Trump pushed back, dismissing his comments as “locker room talk.” “I don’t think you understand what was said,” Trump responded to Cooper during an October 2016 presidential debate. “This was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologized to my family, I apologized to the American people. Certainly, I’m not proud of it, but this was locker room talk.” Following publication of the tape, at least 16 women came forward to say Trump sexually harassed or assaulted them. test test News that Trump reportedly questioned the tape’s veracity—once to a senator and, more recently, once to an adviser, according to the New York Times—brought the tape back to the surface amid an outpouring of allegations against high-profile men across entertainment, politics, and media. During Monday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to address Trump’s reported skepticism of the tape’s legitimacy and characterized the tape as unimportant because Trump won the election. “The president addressed this, this was litigated and certainly answered during the election by the overwhelming support for the president and the fact he’s sitting here in the Oval Office today,” she said.

The slaughter that happened last Sunday evening in Las Vegas, when an American man shot randomly into a crowd of around 22,000 at a music festival, was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. It also continued a pattern of terrorist attacks: all terrorists who have carried out lethal attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 have been citizens or permanent residents. In Trump’s first speech to Congress, he claimed “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” That is a flat-out lie that earned Trump “ four Pinocchios” — the most dishonest rating given by fact checkers at Washington Post. Here’s the truth: 154 people have been murdered by terrorists on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001; according to the New America Foundation, all of these murderers were U.S. citizens or legal residents. This means of course that none of these terrorists came from the countries listed in Trump’s travel ban, even though the United States is supposedly a safer place thanks to the travel ban. In fact, as New America points out: “None of the deadly attackers since 9/11 emigrated or came from a family that emigrated from one of these countries nor were any of the 9/11 attackers from the listed countries. Eight of the lethal attackers were born American citizens.” This is not to deny that there have been deadly attacks since 9/11 that have been inspired by jihadism and foreign terror groups. The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history prior to the Las Vegas killings took place in June 2016, when Omar Mateen, an ISIS-inspired terrorist who was an American-born citizen of Afghan descent, opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, murdering 49 people and injuring another 53. Nor can we ignore the vicious attacks carried out by ISIS militants that have killed or injured hundreds of people in England, France and Canada. Just this week two women were killed in a stabbing attack in Marseille, France, by a man allegedly promoting Islamic extremism. In the U.S. however, more terrorist attacks have been carried out by white American men than jihadists. Here are a few of those attacks, as highlighted by Vox: Reaching back further in time, remember Charleston, South Carolina and Sandy Hook, Connecticut? White American males are the primary terrorist threat in the U.S. While Trump is busy “keeping American citizens safe” by denying innocent Muslims the right to enter the U.S., he is also increasing the number of people the U.S. is guilty of killing worldwide. In the years since 9/11, the U.S. has been responsible for thousands of deaths, including 7,000 of its own soldiers, in the “War on Terror.” Americans troops are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the Taliban going strong, Trump recently announced his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq by the U.S. helped destabilize the entire region and lead to the creation of ISIS, which has been waging its brutal war in the Middle East since then. And let’s not forget the American complicity in the destruction of Yemen. The U.S. has sold billions of dollars worth of deadly weapons to Saudi Arabia, which has used them to attack Yemeni civilians, resulting in the deaths of over 10,000 people. Far from facing this hypocrisy, Trump is now talking about revising export regulations to make it even easier for American arms manufacturers to sell to international buyers. Meanwhile Trump has put in place a travel ban on visitors from mainly Muslim-majority countries, who are fleeing from this deadly chaos. If you agree the Muslim ban is cruel and misguided, please sign this Care2 petition, telling Trump to stand up for American values and abolish the immigration ban. Photo Credit: Robert

Hillary Clinton apparently can't escape the " deep state." The Daily Beast reported Thursday that the Department of Justice has taken an interest in a familiar subject — the infamous email server of the former Democratic presidential candidate and her alleged bungling of classified information. Citing a source close to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, The Daily Beast claims that the Justice Department wants to know how those tasked with investigating Clinton's private email server went about their probe. DOJ officials are also reportedly interested in tallying the classified material contained in her emails and finding out "who put that information into an unclassified environment," The Daily Beast says. Before Clinton was cleared of criminal wrongdoing by the FBI in July 2016, the former secretary of state claimed that many of the emails on her server were classified after the fact or that she was unaware of which "headers" denoted that an email was classified. Clinton's emails are a favorite grievance of President Trump, who has repeatedly called for his erstwhile political rival to be investigated again. As such, people within the DOJ are reportedly concerned that Trump's vocal tweets on the matter could cause the impression that the law enforcement agency is only doing the president's bidding. An unnamed former DOJ official even suggested to The Daily Beast that it was "an open question" if this inquiry would occur "without a political directive from the White House." The Justice Department would not comment on the reported inquiry to The Daily Beast. Read the full story here. Kelly O'Meara Morales

Another day, another uncomfortably shady revelation about Donald Trump's presidential campaign and possible connections to Russia. This time, it's the news that FBI investigators wiretapped Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort not once, but two times before and after the presidential election, per a CNN report. The news source reported on Sept. 18 that the surveillance continued into the early part of 2017, when Manafort had long since left the Trump team but was still in communications with the President. Several sources told CNN that the intelligence which the investigation collected included communications that “sparked concerns… that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign,” though at least two sources specifically added that the evidence wasn't conclusive. Manafort was surveilled under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, which must be backed with information showing suspicion that the subject could be acting as an agent of a foreign power. The warrant must be approved by top officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Notably, there's a big piece of the puzzle missing. CNN reports that the FBI was not surveilling Manafort during the now-infamous meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer with Kremlin connections in June 2016, which then-campaign manager Manafort and Trump's son-in-law and current White House adviser Jared Kushner also attended. But even with the missing pieces, the fact that government investigators were able to get the warrant, with such a high bar for approval, means that things are getting real for the investigation into Trump campaign leaders' dealings with Russia. Manafort was originally investigated for his alleged shady dealings with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was at the head of a pro-Russian party which was driven out in 2014 by civil unrest and street protests. Manafort's firm was accused of lobbying for Yanukovych's interests while failing to register with the U.S. government as a lobbyist for a foreign power. In fact, that accusation is why Manafort left the Trump campaign back in August of 2016, after reports of the connections surfaced. CNN's sources said that the second warrant, the start date of which is unknown, was based on efforts to investigate possible ties between Trump campaign associates and Russian agents. So basically, for the first warrant there needed to be suspicion that Manafort was dealing with the Ukrainians (which, yeah, he was). For the second, investigators needed suspicion he was talking to Russian operatives — which is way more specific, and given Manafort's role in the Trump campaign, could be incredibly damning. On the other hand, the report also gives some near-credibility to Trump's old claim that former President Barack Obama was wiretapping him (and by "credibility," I mean you have to tilt your head and squint to "see" it). Back in March, Trump tweeted an accusation that Obama had wiretapped him at his residence at his eponymous Trump Tower shortly before the 2016 election, calling the former president "sick." Representatives of both Obama and the Department of Justice said that the claims were baseless. While Manafort keeps a residence at Trump Tower, there is still no evidence Trump himself was under surveillance. Which, however, doesn't mean he wasn't picked up by the surveillance on Manafort. CNN notes that Trump and Manafort continued to communicate for months after Manafort left the campaign, even after the FBI investigation into the former campaign manager became public knowledge. The conversations reportedly continued until lawyers for both men "insisted they stop." Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the investigation into Russian interference in the election, reportedly told Manafort in July that the investigation planned to indict him, according to The New York Times. Agents reportedly showed up at Manafort's house with a search warrant, combing through his Virginia home and taking away binders of documents, computer files, and even photos of his wardrobe. A physical search warrant is unusual for someone whose lawyer has already been in touch with the Justice Department, as Manafort's has been — and is an indicator that prosecutors had probable cause to believe that the home contained evidence of a crime, and were concerned about destruction of evidence. As former federal prosecutor Jimmy Gurulé told the Times, “clearly they didn't trust him.” So, it's not looking good for old Paul, here. To say the least.

Police in Georgia say officers have responded to reports of shots fired at a high school and a teacher who may have been barricaded in a classroom is in custody. Police in Dalton tweeted that no children were hurt or were in danger. Police spokesman Bruce Frazier tells The Associated Press that the scene is secure. Police are not immediately saying what happened inside the school. Police say the school has been evacuated and students have been taken to the Northwest Georgia Center. Police are advising parents to go there to pick them up. Repeat: no children hurt, no children in danger. Dalton is about 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Atlanta. The identity of the teacher has not been released. The high school's website says it has 2,000 students. Click/tap here to subscribe to Khaleej Times news alerts on WhatsApp. Make sure you add our number +971545860953 under Contacts on your phone for uninterrupted service.

Setting the tone for the night. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton failed to shake hands at the startof the second presidential debate on Sunday, October 9, bunking tradition and kicking off the evening with two cold shoulders. The presidential candidates took to the stage in St. Louis for their second face-off, with Anderson Cooperand Martha Raddatz at the helm. After the two candidates were introduced, Clinton, 68, and Trump, 70, walked onstage from opposite sides of the floor and retained grim expressions and stiff body language as they greeted one another, pointedly choosing not to shake hands prior to their explosive 90-minute debate. Trump's wife Melania Trump and daughter Ivanka Trump were photographed shaking hands with Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton. The political opponents’ icy demeanor comes just two days after the GOP presidential candidate was caught on newly released 2005 footage bragging about forcibly kissing and groping women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them,” Trump can be heard saying on the controversial audio clip. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p–sy. You can do anything.” Trump’s lewd remarks have had serious repercussions in the subsequent 48 hours, including a string of high-status Republican officials denouncing the real estate moguland the RNC withdrawing their financial support from the candidate. In response to the fall-out, Trump issued a video statement via Twitter on Saturday, October 8. “Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” he says on the video. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” In recent weeks, Trump has come under fire for his numerous misogynistic comments about women in the past, including his most recent Twitter attack on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, whom he once called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.” Despite the GOP leadership’s distancing itself from Trump, however, the former Apprentice host vowed not to drop out of the race. “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly — I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA,” he tweeted prior to the debate. When Cooper, 49, directly asked Trump: "You bragged that you sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?" the Republican presidential candidate once again insisted that his words were just "locker room talk" and tried to deflect attention to ISIS, who are "really bad." Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox! Want stories like these delivered straight to your phone? Download the Us Weekly iPhone app now!

Honestly, at this point in the 2016 presidential election, nothing should surprise you anymore. That includes when a sitting vice president says at a rally that he’s ready for fisticuffs with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. But it’s just another nugget for the late-night shows to feed off of, and that’s what “The Daily Show” did Wednesday night. Host Trevor Noah broke down the situation: Vice President Joe Biden said on the campaign trail for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton that he doesn’t want to debate Trump, and instead he wishes they were in high school so Biden could take Trump “behind the gym.” Trump responded by saying at one of his rallies, “Joe Biden wants to take me to the back of the barn… I’d love that.” Noah, now confused about where the fight is actually going to take place, points out, “This is why you don’t let old guys into Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is remember where Fight Club is.” Watch the complete clip below: Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

From AFP. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News. Iraqi special forces are facing “fierce” resistance as they battle the Islamic State group in southwest Mosul, a commander says.

Deception can destroy confidence. Pamela Myer, the author of “Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception” has made a career developing interview techniques and identifying verbal and non-verbal ques a person trying to lie to you might exhibit. Follow TI: On Facebook Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Trump Jr. allowed Tuesday night in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel that "he has probably met with other people from Russia" but insisted that he did not attempt to coordinate to impact the election or try to damage Hillary Clinton. He repeatedly suggested that the charges of collusion were "ridiculous" and "overplayed" and insisted that his father knew nothing about the June 2016 meeting. "It was such a nothing there was nothing to tell" his father, said Trump Jr. Donald Trump Jr. eagerly accepted help from what was described to him as a Russian government effort to aid his father's campaign with damaging information about Hillary Clinton, according to the emails. The email exchange posted to Twitter by President Donald Trump's eldest son shows him conversing with a music publicist who wanted him to meet with a lawyer from Moscow. The publicist describes the lawyer as a "Russian government attorney" who has dirt on Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." In one response, Trump Jr. says he would "love" to hear more. President Donald Trump says his eldest son is "a high-quality person," and he applauds "his transparency." In a tweet Tuesday night, the president promoted his son's appearance on Fox News and called him a "great person who loves our country." My son, Donald, will be interviewed by @seanhannity tonight at 10:00 P.M. He is a great person who loves our country! White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders read a brief statement from the president Tuesday in response to revelations that Trump Jr. agreed to hear damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government's effort to help his father. Trump Jr., who was deeply involved in his father's presidential campaign, released the emails along with a statement describing the disclosure as an effort "to be totally transparent." The emails with publicist Rob Goldstone show that Trump Jr. was told that the Russian government had information that could "incriminate" Clinton and her dealings with Russia. Here's my statement and the full email chain pic.twitter.com/x050r5n5LQ The messages were the latest disclosure to roil the ongoing investigation into potential coordination between Trump's campaign and Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies have said sought to influence the outcome of the election in Trump's favor. As congressional committees and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, investigate, the emails will almost certainly be reviewed for any signs of potential campaign collusion with the Kremlin, which the White House has repeatedly denied. Mueller spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment on the emails, citing the ongoing investigation. Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints). pic.twitter.com/z1Xi4nr2gq In the emails, Goldstone wrote to Trump Jr. that the information "would be very useful to your father." Goldstone was working to connect Trump Jr. to Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who later met with Trump Jr. in New York at Trump Tower. Veselnitskaya has denied that she ever worked for the Russian government and said on Tuesday that she doesn't represent the Russian government, only herself. She also said she "couldn't have had" information on Hillary Clinton. "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer," Trump Jr. replied to Goldstone in one of a series of email exchanges the younger Trump posted to Twitter. The emails, dated early June, show Goldstone telling Trump that singer Emin Agalarov and his father, Moscow-based developer Aras Agalarov, had "helped along" the Russian government's support for Trump. The elder Agalarov was involved with Trump in hosting the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. The two men also had preliminary discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow that fell through. Trump also appeared in a music video with the younger Agalarov. Goldstone at one point said he could send the information to Trump's father first directly "via Rhona," an apparent reference to the elder Trump's longtime assistant Rhona Graff. The email release followed days of evolving accounts from Trump Jr. about the nature of the meeting and its purpose. The president's son posted the emails only after they were obtained by The New York Times. On Saturday, Trump Jr. described the encounter as being a "short introductory meeting" focused on the disbanded program that had allowed American adoptions of Russian children. Moscow ended the adoptions in response to Magnitsky Act sanctions created in response to alleged human rights violations in Russia. A day later, Trump Jr. changed his account, acknowledging that he was told beforehand that Veselnitskaya might have information "helpful" to the Trump campaign, and was told by her during the meeting that she had something about Clinton. In his third description of what occurred, on Tuesday, Trump Jr. said he had believed the information he would hear about Clinton would be political opposition research. He said that he first wanted to speak by phone, but that when that didn't work out, he was told that the attorney would be in New York "and I decided to take the meeting." "The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official," Trump Jr. said in the Tuesday statement. "And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act." The Trump Organization has confirmed the authenticity of Trump Jr. posts on Twitter releasing the email chain. Associated Press writers Nekesa Mumbi Moody in New York and Julie Bykowicz in Washington contributed to this report.

While President Donald Trump was inside the Pensacola Bay Center auditorium in Florida on Friday night, urging people to vote for Senate candidate Roy Moore, Ivanka Trump’s pointed comment on accusations against the Alabama Republican was plastered on a political ad outside. The giant ad covered the sides of a truck that was parked across the street from the auditorium and then was driven around the rally. The ad featured a giant photo of Ivanka’s face along with her cutting comment about Moore in an Associated Press interview last month. “There’s a special place in hell for those who abuse children,” she said. (She also said in that interview that she had “no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts.”) She criticized Moore just days after The Washington Post reported he had had inappropriate relationships with teens when he was in his 30s. One woman said he removed her clothing and groped her when she was just 14. The ads were arranged for Trump’s Pensacola rally by American Bridge, a liberal group and PAC. “Try as Trump and the Republican Party might, there’s no way to escape the truth about Roy Moore or Ivanka Trump’s own words,” American Bridge spokeswoman Allison Teixeira Sulier said in a statement. “It’s a disgusting new low that the President, the RNC, and the rest of the Republican Party are trying to help send a pedophile to the US Senate, and the American people won’t soon forget it.” The New York Times reported last month that Trump was angry with his daughterfor speaking out against Moore. The president strongly supports the former judge despite multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Related Video:

FBI Director James Comey caused a major shakeup in the presidential election with his letter Friday revealing a review of newly-discovered emails related to the FBI previously-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private server. Here is a rundown of what we know (and what we don't) so far: What emails were discovered? Many things remain vague and unknown about the newly uncovered emails. What we do know is that the FBI believes they are "pertinent" to its investigation into Clinton's use of a private server during her tenure as secretary of State. According to an official close to the investigation, there are thousands of new emails under review. What we don't know is whether they contain any classified material or could have any bearing on the previous investigation. Could the emails lead to criminal charges against Clinton? That is impossible to know at this point. In a speech Friday, Clinton said she is "confident" that the new developments won't change the FBI's recommendation not to prosecute her for improperly handling classified materials. Although Comey could not put a timetable on how long it will take to review the new material, a source tells USA TODAY that is unlikely it will be completed before Election Day. What is the connection to Anthony Weiner? The emails were discovered as part of an investigation into former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, who is suspected of having sexually charged communications with a 15-year-old girl. Investigators came across the emails while looking into devices used by Weiner. Weiner is married to — and currently separated from — longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin who had access to the same device or devices. Why did Comey make the review public? In his letter to lawmakers, informing them of the latest developments, Comey said he thought it was important to update them "in light of my previous testimony," which said the investigation had been concluded. Did Attorney General Loretta Lynch approve of Comey's letter to lawmakers? No. Lynch objected to Comey's decision to notify Congress that the FBI was reviewing newly discovered email, an official familiar with the matter told USA TODAY. Lynch based her objection on a long-held Justice Department policy that federal authorities should not take any action that may interfere with an election. Did Lynch try to stop Comey? Yes. Lynch shared her objections just hours before Comey sent the letter, according to USA TODAY's source. The FBI director weighed the attorney general's advice during a spirited discussion of the matter Thursday and early Friday, but in the end, Comey felt compelled to act. When is the election? Tuesday, November 8.

Arizona Sen. John McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer. McCain was in the hospital to remove a blood clot from above his left eye when a tumor was located. Doctors revealed that McCain has been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer. The statement says the 80-year-old senator and his family are reviewing further treatment, including a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. The doctors say McCain is recovering from his surgery amazingly well and his underlying health is excellent, according to the statement. McCain responded to the "outpouring of support" in seemingly good spirits Thursday, promising over Twitter that "unfortunately for my sparring partners in Congress, I'll be back soon, so stand by!" I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support - unfortunately for my sparring partners in Congress, I'll be back soon, so stand-by! The office of McCain sent a statement that read, "On Friday, July 14, Sen. John McCain underwent a procedure to remove a blood clot from above his left eye at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix. Subsequent tissue pathology revealed that a primary brain tumor known as glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot. Scanning done since the procedure (a minimally invasive craniotomy with an eyebrow incision) shows that the tissue of concern was completely resected by imaging criteria. The senator and his family are reviewing further treatment options with his Mayo Clinic care team. Treatment options include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. The Senator’s doctors say he is recovering from his surgery ‘amazingly well’ and his underlying health is excellent." The statement continued, "Senator McCain appreciates the outpouring of support he has received over the last few days. He is in good spirits as he continues to recover at home with his family in Arizona. He is grateful to the doctors and staff at Mayo Clinic for their outstanding care, and is confident that any future treatment will be effective. Further consultations with Senator McCain’s Mayo Clinic care team will indicate when he will return to the United States Senate." His daughter, Meghan McCain, tweeted out a message, "The news of my father's illness has affected every one of us in the McCain family. My grandmother, mother, brothers, sister and I have all endured the shock of the news, and now we live with the anxiety about what comes next." John McCain's wife Cindy posted a message on Instagram reading: "Thank all of you for the wonderful thoughts. @senjohnmccain is doing well. We as a family will face the next hurdle together. One thing I do know is he is the toughest person I know. He is my hero and I love him with all my heart." McCain was the GOP's presidential nominee in 2008. A Navy pilot, he was shot down over Vietnam and held as a prisoner for 5 ½ years. The Associated Press has contributed to this report.

Although he attended the 2004 Republican National Convention, and supported the GOP’s former gubernatorial candidate for New York state in 2002, the Bay Shore, NY native told Piers Morgan earlier this year that he’s actually an Independent. WWE superstar Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is a registered Republican, and was reportedly invited to speak at the 2000 Republican National Convention. "I realize that the majority of people in the entertainment business happen to be Democrats," Doherty has said about her conservative views. "I have no problem with that. And they should have no problem with the fact that I'm a Republican." The Hills pot-stirrers were big McCain-Palin supporters in 2008. "I'm voting for John McCain," Montag told Us Weekly in 2008. "I'm a Republican and McCain has a lot of experience." Still, the pair weren't going to let their candidate's defeat by Barack Obama bring them down. "We're behind America and America's decision," Pratt told MTV News. "You win some, you lose some." Performing at GOP fundraisers does not a Republican make, according to Rimes. When asked via Twitter last year why she agreed to participate in a Republican fundraiser in Washington, D.C., she replied, "It's a job! I'm entertainment, not making a political stance," and added that she performed at the Democratic convention years ago and for Clinton "several times." The former Melrose Place scene-stealer is a registered member of the Republican party.

How many disasters must Puerto Rico suffer? After Hurricane Maria tore through the Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump was extremely slow to acknowledge that the U.S. territory was in dire need of aid. When Trump finally decided it was time to visit these Americans in need, his trip was a disaster in itself. Here are some of the shockingly insensitive, incompetent and tone-deaf things Trump said during his trip to Puerto Rico: Despite criticism from Puerto Rican leaders and the fact that only 32 percent of Americans approve of how he’s handled the disaster, Trump has spent much of his time on the island insisting that everything has been going terrifically! “I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done,” he said. “In Texas and in Florida, we get an A+, and I’ll tell you what: I think we’ve done just as good in Puerto Rico.” “We only heard thank yous from the people of Puerto Rico,” he told another reporter. Here’s an idea: rather than telling people what a great job he’s done, Trump should actually just do a great job, and then the people of Puerto Rico will do the complimenting for him. Trump played upon an old, terrible stereotype of Latino laziness when he alleged that Puerto Ricans “ want everything to be done for them.” According to Trump in the same tweet, the leadership of Puerto Rico was ineffective and they couldn’t manage to get their own people to participate in the relief work. This comment is as dog whistle-y as racist dog whistles get, which is why it’s entirely fair that internet commenters started sharing this photo en masse to remind Trump who exactly likes to have everything to be done for him: While handing out flashlights to hurricane survivors, Trump couldn’t help but comment on the supposed pointlessness of the exercise. “Flashlights?” he said aloud. “You don’t need ‘em anymore. You don’t need ‘em.” Why Trump felt the need to say that is unclear, especially since at that point 95 percent of Puerto Rico was still without electricity. Maybe Trump was being taken to places with power, but the vast majority of Puerto Ricans could really use those flashlights to, you know, see at night. At least he wasn’t physically throwing the flashlights at the people of Puerto Rico. During another moment, Trump began tossing paper towel rolls one at a time to the crowd. It’s not only an inefficient manner of distributing supplies to people in need of resources, it’s a pretty degrading one. As much as Trump may fancy himself some sort of rock star, these aren’t fans attending a concert looking for free merchandise. Technically, Trump didn’t say anything in this instance, but the disrespect spoke volumes in his actions alone. The nerve of Puerto Rico to have a hurricane – don’t they know how expensive recovery efforts are? Trump made sure they were well aware at a press briefing on the island. “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you threw our budget a little out of whack,” he said. Hahaha, what a funny joke, right? The president didn’t make residents of Texas or Florida feel like they were a waste of money, so it seems extra suspect for the president to say something like this after already treating Puerto Ricans as lesser American citizens. In the face of his initial inaction, Trump has repeatedly tried to downplay the scale of Hurricane Maria. While speaking to Puerto Rican officials he said, “If you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds of people that died…” Trump said. Sorry, there’s no need to finish that sentence, did Trump just really suggest a place experiencing massive devastation was not a “real catastrophe”? It’s true that the death count in Puerto Rico is significantly lower than that of Hurricane Katrina, but if that’s enough to make Trump “proud” (his own words) of how he’s handled this crisis, he’s completely off base. In an interview on Tuesday, Trump told Fox News that to help Puerto Rico, he was going to “wipe out” their existing debt. “You can wave goodbye to that,” he said. Honestly, it was one of the most productive ideas to come out of the Trump administration throughout the disaster… too bad it seems that Trump was babbling without having consulted with his staff who are not on board with this idea. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney backtracked on the president’s comments saying, “I wouldn’t take it word for word with that,” insisting that the White House would instead focus on providing disaster relief. Way to get Puerto Rico’s hopes up!

Nigerian Police personnel of the Kaduna State Police Command are presently carrying out a peaceful protest against the non-payment of their August and September salaries. Eight Police commands namely: Kaduna, Kebbi Gombe, Nasarawa, Ekiti ,Bayelsa, Imo and Ogun are reportedly owing August and September salaries, PREMIUM TIMES learnt. The protest, which cuts across the rank and file of the command, has over 2000 protesters who are gathered in front of the Salaries Office inside the command headquarters. Cyril Abeh, the state commissioner of police, who said the delay in payment was from the finance ministry’s IPPS office and not the fault of the police, appealed for restraint. “They are police officers operating under the law, if they misbehave, we will deal with them according to the law. This is mutiny. I am in the field attending to a very important security matter, but will be on my way back to headquarters to address them now,” he said. Some of the protesting officers accused the minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun of refusing to allow President Muhammadu Buhari to know the ”exact situation regarding the non payment of the police salaries.” “She already lied to Mr President that all is well. How can you fight corruption and you don’t pay police their two months salaries,” an officer said.

President Donald Trump on Sunday strongly condemned what he described in tweets as a "mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria" that allegedly left women and children dead. He laid the blame squarely at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russia and Iran for backing resident Bashar al-Assad, who he called an "animal." Trump also warned, "Big price to pay." "Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!" the president wrote. In the third of a series of tweets, he faulted former President Barack Obama for not intervening in Syria during his time in office. In April of last year, Trump ordered a Tomahawk missile strike against a Syrian airbase for a similar chemical attack. Sunday's posts left many wondering if Trump would potentially retaliate against the Syrian government, which is backed by Russia. The criticism of Putin is arguably his strongest critique of Russia since he took office 442 days ago. Syrian aid groups and activists allege that dozens of people died in a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma, the last rebel stronghold in eastern Ghouta where Assad has pursued an intensive bombing campaign. The Syrian American Medical Society said that more than 500 cases, mostly women and children, suffered symptoms “indicative of exposure to a chemical agent” and 42 were reported dead. Both Syria and Russia deny involvement in Sunday’s alleged chemical attack. Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that the White House is considering how to respond. He added that the national security team had been speaking to the president “all throughout the evening and the morning.” “I wouldn’t take anything off the table,” he said. The State Department, meanwhile, provided a full-throated critique of Russia in a statement on Saturday night that claimed that the nation had “breached its commitments to the United Nations” and called “into question [Russia’s] commitment to resolve the overall crisis and to larger non-proliferation priorities.” “Russia, with its unwavering support for the [Assad] regime, ultimately bears responsibility for these brutal attacks, targeting of countless civilians, and the suffocation of Syria’s most vulnerable communities with chemical weapons,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said. Last week, Trump reluctantly agreed to keep U.S. troops in Syria, though he stressed to his national security team his desire to end U.S. involvement in the conflict as soon as possible. Republican and Democrat leaders decried the alleged chemical attack on Sunday, calling for the U.S. to hold the Assad government accountable. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who serves on the Armed Services Committee called on the White House to act. “If [the president] doesn’t follow through and live up to that tweet, he’s going to look weak in the eyes of Russia and Iran,” Graham said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “This is a defining moment.” Others from the president's own party piled on. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said on CNN's "State of the Union" that Trump should rethink his plans for an early withdrawal from Syria and consider another targeted attack on Syria's military facilities, such as the one he ordered a year ago. "That may be an option that we should consider now," she said. "But it is further reason why it is so important that the president ramp up the pressure and the sanctions on the Russian government, because, without the support of Russia, I do not believe that Assad would still be in office." Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., also blasted the president, as he said Trump signaling last week that the U.S. would withdraw from Syria only served to embolden Assad, Russia and Iran to conduct the attack. While McCain said it was good that Trump criticized all three parties on Twitter, he said social media posts meant little in this situation. "The question now is whether he will do anything about it," he said. "The President responded decisively when Assad used chemical weapons last year. He should do so again, and demonstrate that Assad will pay a price for his war crimes." In the House, Republicans were also riled up and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said that the United States should continue to lead in holding Assad and Russia accountable. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who serves as chair of the House Homeland Security Committee voiced his agreement on Fox News and called for military action. “We’re not going to occupy countries anymore, but this cannot stand in the civilized world,” McCaul said. “This needs to be responded to in a very firm and strong way. I think we need to deal also with Russia and Iran’s involvement in this. I think they are complicit.” Democrats also called for the White House to act and coordinate an international response. Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that "President Assad needs to be held accountable for his war crimes." "We need to make sure that there is a proceeding started by the international community to hold him accountable," said Cardin, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "This is not the first use of chemical weapons." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Putin needed to be held accountable for the alleged attack as he had enabled "these war crimes." But how to do that rests with the White House, she added. “Members of Congress expect a comprehensive intelligence briefing on this attack as soon as possible," she said in a statement. "The Trump Administration must finally provide a smart, strong and consistent strategy in Syria.” Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said it could affect Mike Pompeo, who Trump nominated to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, as he enters Senate confirmation hearings this week. “The United States must not waiver in our utter rejection of the use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world, by anyone, for any reason," Menedez said in a statement. "During his upcoming hearing, I expect Secretary of State-nominee Pompeo to articulate an actual policy for Syria.”

This is now bigger than who becomes the next president. Trump is a threat to our democracy.

GOP congressional candidate Paul Nehlen has drawn on anti-Semitic sympathy to rally support for his fledgling campaign, BuzzFeed News reported Friday. Nehlen — who is running against House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) in a Republican primary this summer — ran a Twitter group chat where he rallied white nationalists to attack his opponents, BuzzFeed News reported. One of Nehlen's stated adversaries was the "Jewish media," who he believed had "coordinated" to smear him after he lost the support of Breitbart News for sending tweets about white pride. Nehlen's list of targets included conservative personality John Cardillo, author Kurt Schlichter, and former Boston Red Sox pitcher turned Breitbart radio host Curt Schilling. All three men, BuzzFeed News notes, are conservatives who distanced themselves from Nehlen. The candidate turned to his Twitter group to ask for some backup, writing, "Cardillo and others like him are working for Jewish media. Then, there are the fake conservatives who happen to be Jewish." Per screenshots published by BuzzFeed News, Nehlen then added: "I'm going to decimate them all. And y'all are gonna help me." Sources who spoke to BuzzFeed News said that "such requests were common" from Nehlen. One of the group chat's most notable participants is Richard Spencer ally Eli Mosley, who heads a white nationalist group of his own called Identify Evropa, BuzzFeed News points out. Mosley is a polarizing figure even among white nationalists, as many reportedly think he sparked the violence at last year's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was killed by a white nationalist. Read more about Nehlen's group chat at BuzzFeed News. Kelly O'Meara Morales

This past weekend, Americans watched in shock as “alt-right” members, neo-Nazis and white nationalists descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, attempting to spread their message of hate and intolerance. Clashes between white nationalists and counter-protesters were numerous. One counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed when a man rammed his car into several counter-protesters. The man, 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr., was later charged with second-degree murder. Earlier that day, he was photographed displaying the symbols of a white nationalist group called Vanguard America, which later denied he was a member. That weekend journalist Shaun King posted a video of several men beating a 20-year-old man named Deandre Harris. King, who was attempting to confirm the identities of the men behind the beating, found that one of the men, Alex Michael Ramos, identifies as Latino. A group called the Atlanta Antifascists then tweeted that Ramos was affiliated with the Atlanta chapter of the far-right organization Proud Boys and the far-right militia called the Georgia Security Force. When a viewer asked why he marched with racists, Ramos said, “I stood by racist people but they weren’t racist to me.” Ramos’ assertion that his Puerto Rican roots meant he couldn’t be racist is a prime example of Latinos who are completely ignorant of their ability to perpetuate white supremacy. Guess what? Latinos, both here and in Latin America, do and say plenty of things that promote anti-blackness — and most of the time we don’t even blink an eye when it happens. When it comes to discussing racism, we often subscribe to the black vs. white binary that we often see in the United States. If our views aren’t extreme, if we’re not a “full-blown racist,” then we’re completely absolved of perpetuating anti-blackness, right? Wrong. When we think like that, we tend to ignore the colorism — often subtle — that permeates through much of Latin America. It’s a difficult thing to confront, but if we don’t address it within our own community, we can’t expect it to magically resolve itself. Pulitzer prize-winning Dominican-American author Junot Diaz once said, “White supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that it exists always in other people, never in us.” Don’t believe him? When he was fired over the comments, Figueroa wrote an open letter to Michelle Obama saying he isn’t racist because he comes from a bi-racial family. Meanwhile, in Mexican print media… ?? pic.twitter.com/xwyW0QWfJc — Laura Martínez® (@miblogestublog) August 17, 2017 Yes, Real Madrid are nicknamed “Los Blancos,” but the joke is clearly rooted in the idea that “white supremacy” is a problem “over there” in the U.S. and not in Mexico, where they released a stamp celebrating a cartoon character that is a racist stereotype. Right now would be a good time for us to revisit that and not just stop there, but continue to educate ourselves on how we can make sure we’re not promoting white supremacy.

A lady identified as Monisola (@Monaayy), has taken to the social networking platform to talk down on women who are in the habit of broke-shaming men. There is a mentality in this part of the world which has led to a lot of unrealistic expectations from women who believe it is their entitlement to be taken care of and to be with a wealthy men and as a result of this, they tend to look down on struggling men. The lady who appears to be fed up with this mentality, took to the online platform to share her opinion concerning the issue. She wrote:“I’m sick of broke shaming. It is obnoxious and cruel. To expect a man to be financially buoyant simply because he’s a man is just as offensive as expecting a woman to cook and clean simply because she’s a woman. Not every man has deep pockets .” “If we’re kicking against patriarchal norms then we can’t *expect* men to be rich because they’re men, especially if you as a woman don’t even have your own money! That’s a disgraceful double standard. If you don’t want the validity of your womanhood to be evaluated based on your domestic prowess, then stop devaluing men for being “broke”. “Everyone is on their personal journey. He’ll get there when he gets there. If you don’t want to date a man without money, fine, you have every right to make that choice. But don’t shame him for his financial status. “That is cruel. Money does not grow on trees. I even see women shaming men for being in the exact same financial position as them and honestly I’m embarrassed. Don’t be hungry please.” The post which went viral on social media, received several reactions from people who seemed to be in agreement with her post. Read the thread in full below; Stay updated with the latest Nigerian news from Information Nigeria

A woman is facing charges as part an investigation by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office to crack down on illegal slot machines. Phalla Colman, 54, was arrested Thursday and charged with operating an illegal gambling establishment, operating an illegal lottery and possession of slot machines, according to a news release. Detectives began investigating Colman’s business at 3325 15 St. E., Bradenton, several weeks ago after she was suspected of running an illegal internet café or gambling establishment. Detectives were able to develop the case and obtain warrants for Colman’s arrest and the search the establishment, the release said. On Thursday, they searched her business and arrested her. Detectives seized 111 computer monitors, 79 computer towers and $3,415 in currency. Be the first to know when big news breaks Recaptcha requires verification. protected by reCAPTCHA Privacy - Terms Privacy - Terms Jessica De Leon: 941-745-7049, @JDeLeon1012

CHANDLER, AZ - The Chandler Unified School District says an off-duty Phoenix officer left a gun at Hamilton High School on Friday. The gun was reportedly found by a student in a restroom at the Hamilton library. The school district says the Phoenix officer was on campus at the time and left the gun in the restroom in a holster. That officer is being questioned and has not been arrested at this time, according to the district. We've reached out to Chandler police for more information and are awaiting a response. A statement was sent Friday afternoon to parents by the school’s principal: Dear parents and guardians, I am writing to you to let you know that a student found a loaded handgun in a holster on a handicap rail in the stall of a restroom in the Hamilton Public Library this afternoon (the library on the Hamilton campus). The student reported the gun to city library staff immediately, it was retrieved and secured by the Chandler Police School Resource Officer and students are safe. The adult community member who was visiting the Chandler Public Library and left his gun in the bathroom stall, returned for his gun and has been identified by the Chandler Police Department. Police investigated and determined that no crime had been committed. Sincerely, Chris Farabee Acting Principal, Hamilton High

The Islamic State has released an official statement via its Amaq News agency regarding the July 14, Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice, France, carried out by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel. Police have identified Bouhlel as responsible for murdering up to 84 people by ramming into them with a truck and shooting at them at a Bastille Day celebration. The 31-year-old French-Tunisian attacker told police he was delivering ice cream in order to get on the promenade, which was closed to traffic for the celebration, The Daily Mail reports. ISIS released a statement about the attack this morning citing an “insider source.” Read it below: The attack followed the orders of a previous video purportedly released by the Islamic State, in which it told its jihadists in France who could not make it to Iraq or Syria to use cars or trucks as weapons. Join over 240,000 people who get the most important news stories and the best shopping deals from Heavy – Delivered right to your inbox.

When you’re caught in a lie, it can be difficult to know what to do. As much as it may be morally correct to admit your wrongdoing, that’s too embarrassing and shameful for some individuals to handle. Unfortunately, that’s why many people find themselves only getting deeper and deeper into their lies. In order to cover up for themselves, they just keep making up more and more details until their story spirals out of control. One group of people that tend to know how to deal with liars easily are legal professionals. So when this cop tried to make up a law right to an attorney, you can imagine that things quickly got out of hand! Like many people looking to make a few extra dollars these days, Wilmington, North Carolina resident Jesse Bright had been using some of his spare time to serve as a driver for the ride-sharing app Uber. However, he also had a day job—one that would come in handy later. Soon enough, Jesse was surrounded by officers. He thought that the whole situation seemed suspicious, to the point that he was afraid that one of the cops may have slipped something onto his passenger seat.

Almost a half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart. The Vietnam War, a bitter and close presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, political assassinations, terrorism and a recession looming on the horizon left the country divided between a loud radical minority and a silent conservative majority. The United States avoided a civil war. But America suffered a collective psychological depression, civil unrest, defeat in Vietnam and assorted disasters for the next decade -- until the election of a once-polarizing Ronald Reagan ushered in five consecutive presidential terms of relative bipartisan calm and prosperity from 1981 to 2001. It appears as if 2017 might be another 1968. Recent traumatic hurricanes seem to reflect the country's human turmoil. After the polarizing Obama presidency and the contested election of Donald Trump, the country is once again split in two. But this time the divide is far deeper, both ideologically and geographically -- and more 50/50, with the two liberal coasts pitted against red-state America in between. Century-old mute stone statues are torn down in the dead of night, apparently on the theory that by attacking the Confederate dead, the lives of the living might improve. All the old standbys of American life seem to be eroding. The National Football League is imploding as it devolves into a political circus. Multimillionaire players refuse to stand for the national anthem, turning off millions of fans whose former loyalties paid their salaries. Politics -- or rather a progressive hatred of the provocative Donald Trump -- permeates almost every nook and cranny of popular culture. The new allegiance of the media, late-night television, stand-up comedy, Hollywood, professional sports and universities is committed to liberal sermonizing. Politically correct obscenity and vulgarity among celebrities and entertainers is a substitute for talent, even as Hollywood is wracked by sexual harassment scandals and other perversities. The smears "racist," "fascist," "white privilege" and "Nazi" -- like "commie" of the 1950s -- are so overused as to become meaningless. There is now less free speech on campus than during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. As was the case in 1968, the world abroad is also falling apart. The European Union, model of the future, is unraveling. The EU has been paralyzed by the exit of Great Britain, the divide between Spain and Catalonia, the bankruptcy of Mediterranean nation members, insidious terrorist attacks in major European cities and the onslaught of millions of immigrants -- mostly young, male and Muslim -- from the war-torn Middle East. Germany is once again becoming imperious, but this time insidiously by means other than arms. The failed state of North Korea claims that it has nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching America's West Coast -- and apparently wants some sort of bribe not to launch them. Iran is likely to follow the North Korea nuclear trajectory. In the meantime, its new Shiite hegemony in the Middle East is feeding on the carcasses of Syria and Iraq. Is the chaos of 2017 a catharsis -- a necessary and long overdue purge of dangerous and neglected pathologies? Will the bedlam within the United States descend into more nihilism, or offer a remedy to the status quo that had divided and nearly bankrupted the country? Is the problem too much democracy, as the volatile and fickle mob runs roughshod over establishment experts and experienced bureaucrats? Or is the crisis too little democracy, as populists strive to dethrone a scandal-plagued, anti-democratic, incompetent and overrated entrenched elite? Neither traditional political party has any answers. Democrats are being overwhelmed by the identity politics and socialism of progressives. Republicans are torn asunder between upstart populist nationalists and the calcified establishment status quo. Yet for all the social instability and media hysteria, life in the United States quietly seems to be getting better. The economy is growing. Unemployment and inflation remain low. The stock market and middle-class incomes are up. Business and consumer confidence are high. Corporate profits are up. Energy production has expanded. The border with Mexico is being enforced. Is the instability less a symptom that America is falling apart and more a sign that the loud conventional wisdom of the past -- about the benefits of a globalized economy, the insignificance of national borders and the importance of identity politics -- is drawing to a close, along with the careers of those who profited from it? In the past, any crisis that did not destroy the United States ended up making it stronger. But for now, the fight grows over which is more toxic -- the chronic statist malady that was eating away the country, or the new populist medicine deemed necessary to cure it. (C) 2017 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

A photograph shows a black police officer protecting participants in a white supremacist protest in Charlottesville. On 12 August 2017, just after the occurrence of violent and tragic events at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, left multiple people dead, an image was widely circulated via social media seemingly showing a black police officer calmly standing guard to protect a group of racist protesters carrying Confederate flags, wearing Ku Klux Klan garb, and issuing Nazi salutes: Although this photograph was genuine, it was not — as was widely assumed (or stated) in social media posts — a picture snapped at the 12 August 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. The image had been posted online well over a month earlier, as shown in this 9 July 2017 tweet from Tucson, Arizona, police chief Chris Magnus: Photo says it all. Police around nation called upon w/regularity to protect 1st Amend rights no matter how heinous they may find the speech. pic.twitter.com/3keTS7bdX2 It was also posted on Facebook at that time by Kimberly Payne Hawk, who described the pictured policeman as “Charlottesville Police Officer Nash”: A few days later, Frank Somerville of Oakland television station KTVU wrote of the latter posting that: Kimberly’s post went viral. But there were also a number of really nasty comments. And Kimberly later posted this in response: “On Monday I saw a photo from the KKK rally that moved me and I posted it. Now it has gone viral and mean, angry people are coming out of the woodwork. I do not care about the rude comments towards me but I am becoming quite irritated at the attacks on our local police officer. He is getting attacked for being an African American police officer who was protecting the free speech rights of the klan and I am getting accused of being a supporter of racism because my sister is a police officer. It must be a horrible way to live to be so defensive and angry all the time. I hope these people can find some happiness and peace at some point in their lives.” I’m dumbfounded that anyone could criticize this officer and what he’s doing. Thank you Officer Nash for your service. And thank you Kimberly Payne Hawk for posting this. The image originated with a Ku Klux Klan rally held in downtown Charlottesville on 8 July 2017: The photograph was snapped by during that protest by Jill Mumie, one of several shots she captured on her iPhone: That afternoon, she positioned herself near an area that had been cordoned off “in anticipation of what might unfold.” She purposefully stayed in front of the officer, waiting for what she felt was the right moment that captured the “bizarre” scene that was unfolding. Once the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan arrived, she recalled “a huge surge of people behind me.” And so with her iPhone, Mumie tried a few different shots. In one outtake, a girl stands beside the officer, snapping a picture of the commotion as the officer stares elsewhere. The angle of his chin, the tilt of his head, something felt off. In another outtake, the attention is focused on a man behind the officer who displays a middle finger in Mumie’s direction. The officer pictured in the image was a Charlottesville High School school resource officer named Darius Nash, who said, “I don’t feel like I’m a hero for it. I swore to protect my city and that’s what I was there to do. I don’t think it makes me a hero, just doing what I believe in.” Snopes.com has long been engaged in the battle against misinformation, an effort we could not sustain without the support of our readers. If you'd like to learn more about how you can support us, click here.

Tionne ‘T-Boz’ Watkins recently revealed that a family member was killed at the hands of an itchy trigger-fingered cop. Watkins hit the the net with her heartbreaking story about her cousin, 25-year-old Eddie Russell, Jr., who was shot multiple times and killed by police in Peoria, Illinois. The department is investigating the fatal shooting death, however T-Boz and her family are disputing the officer’s account of what happened. T-Boz posted the tweets above with the following caption: My Cousin Was Shot 18 Times Including the Face and Back of His Head! He Harmed NO ONE EVER! He Had Mental Health Issues AND THE COPS KNEW THAT! Anything he’s ever Done Was minor and NON VIOLENT! Eddie Russell Jr -A Human-Being -A Son- Brother-Friend-Nephew – Cousin-HUMAN! The cops told his mother to call him out on a bullhorn USED her saying “WE WILL GIVE HIM THE HELP HE NEEDS” and He Came Out Because He Heard His Mother and They used beyond excessive force to gun him down also with heavy artillery used in warfare! 18 times? Shot eighteen times??? IF THEIR GOING ON WHAT HES HOLDING AT THE BANK THAT ISN’T A GUN! (Picture Is Posted)They Keep saying he had a gun! I don’t see a gun in his hand at the bank they say he tried to rob! That’s NOT A GUN! They blocked everyone off including neighbors at a 4 block radius including his mother and father and family!People could NOT go home! So no camera phones accessible is that why? COPS DIDN’T HAVE ON BODY CAMS now isn’t that convenient! They Lied and told family members Eddie Jr was at the hospital to get them away from the house knowing he was dead outside the house where they killed him! They kept his BODY OUTSIDE ON THE GROUND FOR MANY MANY HOURS! First they reported he ran out shooting =LIES! Then one cop shot =LIES! Then 5-6 shots =LIES! Then 5-6 cops shot YEAH CLEARLY! But why SO MANY TIMES? Why THE AR15? They didn’t even wait for the negotiator to arrive or is it that the negotiator took his time getting there? They haven’t Even Gave my cousin the RESPECT of trying to call and explain WHAT HAPPENED IN DETAIL TO HER CHILD! He needs JUSTICE! His Mother and Father and Family need JUSTICE!!!! This wasn’t a hostage situation! He didn’t threaten anyone’s life! This was a mentally iLL young man who needed help and should have received just that! PLEASE HELP HIS MOTHER AND SPREAD HER STORY SO SHE CAN GET THE HELP SHE NEEDS AND JUSTICE FOR HER SON!!!! His Mother Has Tried For Many Years To Get Her Son Mental Health Counseling He Needed! The system Failed Him and Her! #AmericaIsTainted #TrumpIsAChump #TakeAKnee #BendAKnee #JusticeForEddieJr #Shot18Times #tboz #tlc #tbeezy #tlcarmy #justice #peoriaillinois #EddieRussell Eddie Russell, Jr., who suffers from mental illness, was named as a suspect in an armed robbery. Officers claim he robbed the First Mid-Illinois Bank and Trust before returning home where an hours-long police stand-off ensued. Officers reportedly fired their weapons after Russell, Jr. emerged from his home. According to police accounts, Russell, Jr. exited the home in an “aggressive” manner and the officers stated they believed he was holding the same handgun used in the robbery. Eddie Russell, Jr. was pronounced dead at the scene on Wednesday, September 20. Condolences to T-Boz and her family. Hopefully they will find the answers they seek in this horrible tragedy.

Turns Out The Uxbridge Fresh Prince Of Bad Hair Is 19, Still In High School, And Put Uxbridge High On Lockdown After A Gun Incident On Snapchat Want to advertise with Turtleboy? Email us at Turtleboysports@gmail.com for more information. Earlier today we blogged about the Uxbridge Fresh Prince of Bad Hair, who thought it would be wise to shoot a cop car with a BB gun, and then shoot an autistic man the next day. We couldn’t find his Facebook page, but within an hour we had a million people pointing us to his Uxbridge street name – Tre Patterson: As you can see, we’re dealing with a real winner here. Turns out this 19 year old is STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL!! I shit you not. That’s why the two others he was with aren’t having their names released – because they’re his minor friends from high school. He tells kids in his peer group what things were like “back in my day.” This year Tre, who recently moved here from “down south,” and claims to have enrolled at Uxbridge High School because the coach at UConn told him it would help him get recruited, was suspended multiple times. One of the incidents happened when he got the school put on lock down because he had beef with kids from another school on snapchat, and he claimed he had a gun on snapchat, DURING SCHOOL HOURS, and the other kids were coming to UHS with more guns. After being uncooperative with the principals AND the cops about it, he was escorted off the premises and suspended. Not expelled- just suspended. Because I’m sure when he came back he had a newfound thirst for knowledge and a desire to follow school rules. He also was on the basketball and football teams, but hardly ever played because his grades weren’t good enough. It’s hard passing college prep math when you’re only 19 years old. So much for UConn. Here he is all dolled up for the first of many junior proms to come for Tre-Tre: Of course he’s the cool kid because he can legally buy booze in Canada and no one else can: Don’t worry though, the fam is holding it down on Facebook and has gone full free my boi! Apparently his response to the cops after he shot the autistic man was that he “didn’t know he had autism.” Because it’s OK to shoot people with BB guns in public as long as they’re not autistic. Oh, and autistic people all have tattoos on their forehead that let them know they’re autistic. That’s literally the though process of this nudnik. Anyway, this is yet another example of the failed educational policies from our state and federal government. This is what happens when administrators value their graduation rates more than the well-being of the entire school – they keep shitheads like this in school instead of expelling them. Because it looks better on a chart if they have less dropouts. Oh, and don’t forget that schools all have mandates from the federal government, due to Arne Duncan’s reign of terror, to reduce suspension rates, particularly for students of color. So now schools like Uxbridge are forced to keep morons like this, who obviously have no intention of learning, enrolled in schools. They make it impossible for teachers to do their job and they poison the rest of the student body with their bullshit. Uxbridge High School lost an entire day of learning because of him. If somehow he graduates this year he’ll be 20 when he does so. And it will only be the result of social promotion, fueled by a desire for better charts. We urge you to support the following local businesses.

Last Sunday, a frightfully organized lone gunman opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. In his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, he had 23 guns, some of which were outfitted with bump stocks (devices which allow semi-automatic weapons the capability to mimic the gunfire of automatic weapons). He killed 58 people and injured 527 before being discovered, killing himself before police could apprehend him. In the wake of the worst mass shooting in modern United States history, the NRA CEO's response to the Las Vegas shooting was defiant, belligerent, and utterly tone deaf. Romper has reached out to the NRA and is awaiting a reply. NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, normally a man who keeps a low profile, offered a rare interview with Fox News on Thursday. While he did call the Las Vegas shooting an "unimaginable tragedy" during his interview, LaPierre insisted that stricter gun laws would not change mass shootings: LaPierre went on to quickly accuse the "other side" of the tragedy; notably Democrats and celebrities who have been vehemently calling for gun control legislation. The NRA CEO lashed out and accused them of trying to politicize a tragedy, and attempting “to piggyback their whole agenda to ban guns, restrict law abiding people for the last 20 years, this circus, on the back of this tragedy.” The CEO became especially agitated when discussing what he believes to be the double standard coming out of Hollywood: Of course, LaPierre doesn't have actual facts to back up those claims, and it's important to remember that he is talking about fictional depictions in action movies. When LaPierre accused those unnamed "Hollywood elites" of "protecting themselves with guns," while supposedly wanting to get rid of guns, he has clearly forgotten that few people who have weighed in on stricter gun control have not called for an outright ban of firearms, according to Salon. His interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity was terribly off the mark, focused on Hollywood, rather than the "unimaginable tragedy" he referenced at first and then appeared to quickly forget. Movies in Hollywood do depict deaths, but not actual deaths caused by real guns. Here are a few real-life statistics about gun use in America: However badly LaPierre would like to shift the focus from the Las Vegas shooting victims to his personal vendetta against Hollywood action films, it can't happen. The reality is, the families of those victims need a real, informed, empathetic response to the mass shooting. Not a distraction. Because they are real people who lost real loved ones at the hands of a man with real guns. This isn't a movie. It's real life.

Internet censorship is hurting conservative websites like DC Clothesline. If you enjoy our articles please consider making a small donation today. Thank YOU! ******************************************************************************** If you recall, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was one that was always talking about money in politics while hypocritically soliciting donations from some of the world’s most corrupt people and organizations. Now, it’s come to light that Clinton apparently funneled over $800,000 from her campaign money to her new political PAC, Onward Together, which is backing several groups of resistance against the current administration, including ANTIFA. The Daily Caller reports: As a presidential candidate, Clinton railed against “dark money” groups like Onward Together. Clinton transferred$800,000 from her failed 2016 presidential campaign to Onward Together shortly before announcing the group’s launch in May, documents the campaign filed with the FEC reveal. Clinton doesn’t even deny that she is supporting such groups. In an email signed by her that went out last week asking for money, Clinton wrote, “You may not have heard much about the work we’re doing at Onward Together,” Clinton wrote. “That’s because we’re working behind the scene to fund, support, and amplify the work of the groups we’re supporting. We’re not the story: they are.” Each of five political groups that were mentioned were contacted by The Daily Caller and asked if they were being funded and supported by Onward Together. Out of those five, only one group, the Soros-backed Indivisible, responded. “Onward Together has not given any financial support to us,” Helen Kalla, an Indivisible spokesperson, wrote in an email. Kalla added that Clinton’s group has “been amplifying and highlighting our work through their digital networks,” which she explained has consisted of “retweeting [Indivisible], and they’ve highlighted our work via their emails to their list too.” Onward Together is not required to reveal donors’ identity as a 501(c)4 “social welfare” organization. The group also will not be revealing those identities, something that is only occurring to protect the guilty. Meanwhile, because the Trump administration did not keep its promise to investigate and seek prosecution of Mrs. Clinton, she is freely promoting her blame book, What Happened, and now she is funding the little Communists known as ANTIFA, which are working against the administration and against the very heart and soul of American culture and history. But we can’t do anything about the Clintons because they are really good people, right Mr. President? Courtesy of Freedom Outpost Tim Brown is an author and Editor at FreedomOutpost.com, SonsOfLibertyMedia.com, GunsInTheNews.com and TheWashingtonStandard.com. He is husband to his “more precious than rubies” wife, father of 10 “mighty arrows”, jack of all trades, Christian and lover of liberty. He resides in the U.S. occupied Great State of South Carolina. Tim is also an affiliate for the Joshua Mark 5 AR/AK hybrid semi-automatic rifle. Follow Tim on Twitter.

Permission Details DMCA The Labor Day parades are over. The bands have packed up. The muscular speeches celebrating workers are finished. The trash is getting collected from parks across the country. And now conservative politicians from Trump on down will revive their systematic efforts to weaken unions and undermine workers. Trump -- despite all the populist bunting that decorates his speeches -- sustains the deeply entrenched Republican antipathy to organized workers. Their attack is relentless. Trump's budget calls for deep cuts in the Labor Department, eviscerating job training programs and cutting -- by 40 percent -- the agency that does research on workplace safety. It would eliminate the program that funds education of workers on how to avoid workplace hazards. It even savages money for mine safety enforcement for the miners Trump claims to love. Trump is systematically reversing any Obama rule that aided workers. He signed legislation scrapping the rule that required federal contractors to disclose violations of workplace safety and employment and anti-discrimination laws. His Labor Secretary has announced his intention to strip millions of workers of the overtime pay they would have received under Obama DOL regulations. Trump is creating a pro-business majority at the National Labor Relations Board, which will roll back Obama's efforts to make it easier for workers to organize, and make it possible to hold home companies responsible for the employment practices of their franchisees. The GOP's Anti-Union Strategy This is simply standard operating procedure for today's Republican party. Long ago, Republicans realized that organized labor was a central "pillar," as Grover Norquist described it, of Democratic Party strength. Now Republican office holders at every level -- from county officials to statehouses to judges -- know that their job is to weaken labor unions. From right to work laws to administrative regulations to court challenges, Republicans sustain an unrelenting attack. And aided by our perverse globalization strategies, they've been remarkably successful. Unions are down to about 7 percent of the private workforce. Public employee unions, a relative stronghold, are facing court challenges -- essentially allowing workers to enjoy the benefits of union negotiations without paying dues -- that will decimate their membership. True conservatives would embrace unions. They are a classic "mediating institution," a voluntary civic organization between government and the individual. Unions increase the voice and power of workers in the workplace, helping to keep executive accountable, and to protect workers from abuse. They also educate their members, teach democracy, and are central to community volunteer and service efforts. They teach and practice democratic citizenship. The modern Republican Party, of course, is the party of big business and big money. It isn't conservative; it is partisan. And weakening unions is a constant target. While Republicans understand how important unions are to Democrats and to workers, Democrats don't seem to get it. Sure, they line up to get union donations; most will vote to defend unions and worker programs. But as the money in politics has gotten bigger and the unions have gotten weaker, the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party has become more powerful. The result is clear. When Republicans get control, they attack unions relentlessly. When Democrats gain control, as they did in 2012 with the election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both houses, labor law reform, empowering workers to organize is not a priority. Obama essentially told unions that if they could get the votes, he'd sign the law, but he wasn't leading the charge. And so as under Carter and Clinton, changing the law to make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively didn't happen. Unions Under Siege Now unions are under siege. Yet it is hard to imagine how a small "d" democracy can be robust, or a large "D" Democratic Party can regain its mojo without a revived movement of workers. It's time for Democrats at every level to realize: strengthening workers and their unions isn't an elective; it's a requirement and a first priority. The loop works like this: Unions are in decline. As a result, unions lose influence inside the Democratic Party. The Democrats then feel no pressure to stem unions' decline, and the economically disadvantaged lose what was once their most powerful advocate. Then the cycle continues. We cannot revive unions, and we have no template for egalitarian politics without them. Unions aren't simply economic actors. They're political actors. Labor still needs the Democrats. The Democrats, more than they realize, still need labor. But most of all, all those who want to build a fairer society need their partnership. Republican elites understand the doom loop. Big business, small business, and Tea Party alike have pushed hard against unions. As the parties have polarized, Republicans have taken the gloves off, risking the votes of the 40 percent of union members who back Republicans in order to crush a pillar of the Democratic coalition. Even President Bernie Sanders would have real trouble rebuilding unions in the face of a Republican Congress and a federal judiciary eager to swat down pro-labor executive action. Even without Republican politicians digging their graves, labor unions face deep challenges. In the private sector, unions must sign contracts workplace by workplace. Gawker writers here and home-care workers there will continue to organize their workplaces, but the barriers remain dauntingly high. In the public sector, unions have stood steady. But cops and teachers alike face blowback for putting their own prerogatives above the public interest. And if the Supreme Court bans the collection of agency fees in the public sector (thus imposing "right to work"), public-sector union membership could halve in a decade. Permission Details DMCA The Labor Day parades are over. The bands have packed up. The muscular speeches celebrating workers are finished. The trash is getting collected from parks across the country. And now conservative politicians from Trump on down will revive their systematic efforts to weaken unions and undermine workers. Trump -- despite all the populist bunting that decorates his speeches -- sustains the deeply entrenched Republican antipathy to organized workers. Their attack is relentless. Trump's budget calls for deep cuts in the Labor Department, eviscerating job training programs and cutting -- by 40 percent -- the agency that does research on workplace safety. It would eliminate the program that funds education of workers on how to avoid workplace hazards. It even savages money for mine safety enforcement for the miners Trump claims to love. Trump is systematically reversing any Obama rule that aided workers. He signed legislation scrapping the rule that required federal contractors to disclose violations of workplace safety and employment and anti-discrimination laws. His Labor Secretary has announced his intention to strip millions of workers of the overtime pay they would have received under Obama DOL regulations. Trump is creating a pro-business majority at the National Labor Relations Board, which will roll back Obama's efforts to make it easier for workers to organize, and make it possible to hold home companies responsible for the employment practices of their franchisees. The GOP's Anti-Union Strategy This is simply standard operating procedure for today's Republican party. Long ago, Republicans realized that organized labor was a central "pillar," as Grover Norquist described it, of Democratic Party strength. Now Republican office holders at every level -- from county officials to statehouses to judges -- know that their job is to weaken labor unions. From right to work laws to administrative regulations to court challenges, Republicans sustain an unrelenting attack. And aided by our perverse globalization strategies, they've been remarkably successful. Unions are down to about 7 percent of the private workforce. Public employee unions, a relative stronghold, are facing court challenges -- essentially allowing workers to enjoy the benefits of union negotiations without paying dues -- that will decimate their membership. True conservatives would embrace unions. They are a classic "mediating institution," a voluntary civic organization between government and the individual. Unions increase the voice and power of workers in the workplace, helping to keep executive accountable, and to protect workers from abuse. They also educate their members, teach democracy, and are central to community volunteer and service efforts. They teach and practice democratic citizenship. The modern Republican Party, of course, is the party of big business and big money. It isn't conservative; it is partisan. And weakening unions is a constant target. While Republicans understand how important unions are to Democrats and to workers, Democrats don't seem to get it. Sure, they line up to get union donations; most will vote to defend unions and worker programs. But as the money in politics has gotten bigger and the unions have gotten weaker, the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party has become more powerful. The result is clear. When Republicans get control, they attack unions relentlessly. When Democrats gain control, as they did in 2012 with the election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both houses, labor law reform, empowering workers to organize is not a priority. Obama essentially told unions that if they could get the votes, he'd sign the law, but he wasn't leading the charge. And so as under Carter and Clinton, changing the law to make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively didn't happen. Unions Under Siege Now unions are under siege. Yet it is hard to imagine how a small "d" democracy can be robust, or a large "D" Democratic Party can regain its mojo without a revived movement of workers. It's time for Democrats at every level to realize: strengthening workers and their unions isn't an elective; it's a requirement and a first priority. The loop works like this: Unions are in decline. As a result, unions lose influence inside the Democratic Party. The Democrats then feel no pressure to stem unions' decline, and the economically disadvantaged lose what was once their most powerful advocate. Then the cycle continues. We cannot revive unions, and we have no template for egalitarian politics without them. Unions aren't simply economic actors. They're political actors. Labor still needs the Democrats. The Democrats, more than they realize, still need labor. But most of all, all those who want to build a fairer society need their partnership.

When the Graham-Cassidy bill failed to reach the Senate floor last week, the media wanted to put a stake in the heart of the administration’s agenda, declaring all Obamacare repeal efforts to be dead. For the millions of Americans struggling under the Affordable Care Act regime, however, the fight to make lemonade out of lemons must continue this fall. Luckily, conservatives in Congress who want to see the end of Obamacare and understand the perils of inaction are not giving up. Earlier this week, America Rising Squared, a conservative policy organization which I lead, issued a path forward. We outline five popular conservative actions Congress and the president can take by the end of the year to protect taxpayers and those disproportionately harmed by the ACA while the larger repeal effort remains delayed until next year. The first step is to protect them from new Obamacare taxes coming in January. Americans should be encouraged to know that conservatives in the Senate have introduced legislation to stop the health insurance tax and the medical device tax. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and 10 fellow conservative senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), introduced legislation last week to stop the insurance tax. In the House, a bipartisan effort is underway to do the same, led by Republican Rep. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These members of Congress understand that Obamacare taxes will harm Americans of all walks of life, and will disproportionately harm seniors and small businesses. In all, if Congress fails to act, the health insurance tax would amount to a new annual $14.3 billion tax increase. Republicans don’t want to see a tax hike go into effect on their watch, and Democrats don’t want to put more of a burden on vulnerable Americans, so action is required now. Second, there should be no bailouts for Obamacare. While bipartisanship is a key to success in getting legislation passed, the president and conservatives in Congress ought to fight back against all efforts to bail out this law. When House Republicans sued President Obama in 2014 over the health-care act's cost-sharing subsidies, a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs, deeming these bailouts unconstitutional. The Obama administration appealed, so today President Trump can easily drop that appeal and end unconstitutional Obamacare cronyism. Liberals in the Senate want new bailouts, but conservatives such as Cruz have warned colleagues that they must oppose any such efforts. The third step needed to cripple the health care law and protect Americans is for President Trump to direct the IRS to weaken the individual mandate and expand the hardship exemptions. The individual mandate has forced many Americans to purchase coverage they do not want and cannot afford, and even candidate Obama admitted in 2008 that under Massachusetts' plan, “there are people who are paying fines and still can’t afford [health insurance], so now they’re worse off than they were.” He was right, and President Trump can give these Americans relief from fines easily by directing the IRS to ease the mandate. The two final steps the president and Republicans in Congress can take before the end of the year is to fully implement 90 percent cuts to Obamacare marketing, which would save the federal government some $90 million, and fully protect American seniors from new taxes on Medicare plans. Among the taxes going into effect next year, those enrolled in Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D will see taxes increased nearly $3,000 each over the next decade if Congress fails to act. Time is running out, and President Trump and Republicans in Congress must act now to stop new Obamacare taxes, end the cronyism of bailouts, free Americans from burdensome federal mandates, cut wasteful ACA marketing, and protect America’s seniors. President Trump and conservatives have it within their power today to stop the most harmful aspects of the health care law, but time is short; the time to act is now.

Internet censorship is hurting conservative websites like DC Clothesline. If you enjoy our articles please consider making a small donation today. Thank YOU! ******************************************************************************** ( Natural News) A stunning new science paper authored by climate change alarmists and published in the science journal Nature Geoscience has just broken the back of the climate change hoax. The paper, authored by Myles R. Allen, Richard J. Millar and others, reveals that global warming climate models are flat wrong, having been deceptively biased toward “worst case” warming predictions that now turn out to be paranoid scare mongering. The paper, entitled, “ Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C,” concludes that the global warming long feared and hyped by everyone from Al Gore to CNN talking heads was based on faulty software models that don’t stand up to actual measured temperatures in the real world. In technical jargon, the paper explains, “We show that limiting cumulative post-2015 CO2 emissions to about 200 GtC would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °C in 66% of Earth system model members.” In effect, the current global warming software models used by the IPCC and cited by the media wildly over-estimate the warming effects of CO2 emissions. How much do they over-estimate warming? By about 50%. Where the software models predicted a 1.3 C rise in average global temperatures, only a rise of about 0.9 C has actually been recorded (and many data points in that average have, of course, been fabricated by climate change scientists to push a political narrative). In other words, carbon dioxide emissions don’t produce the warming effects that have been blindly claimed by climate change alarmists. “Climate change poses less of an immediate threat to the planet than previously thought because scientists got their modelling wrong,” reports the UK Telegraph. “New research by British scientists reveals the world is being polluted and warming up less quickly than 10-year-old forecasts predicted, giving countries more time to get a grip on their carbon output.” In other words, the climate change threat has been wildly overstated. The fear mongering of Al Gore and the government-funded science community can truly only be described as a “junk science hoax.” “The paper … concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true,” writes James Delingpole. He goes on to say: One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications. He’s right. The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget. In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp. Are we about to see climate change alarmists owning up to the fact that real-world data show their software models to be rooted in junk science? The unraveling has begun, but there is so much political capital already invested in the false climate change narrative that it will take years to fully expose the depth of scientific fraud and political dishonesty underpinning the global warming hoax. What’s clear from all this is that IPCC software models were deliberately biased in favor of the worst-case “doomsday” predictions in order to terrorize the world with a fake climate change hoax. But now the fake science is catching up to them, and they’re getting caught in their own lies. The software models, by the way, were fraudulently programmed with dishonest model “weights” to produce alarming warming predictions no matter what temperature data points were entered into the system. This is best explained in this Natural News article which goes into great detail, covering the IPCC global warming software modeling hoax: The same left-wing media outlets that fabricated the “Russian hacking” conspiracy, curiously, have remained totally silent about a real, legitimate hacking that took place almost two decades earlier. The IPCC “global warming” software models, we now know, were “hacked” from the very beginning, programmed to falsely produce “hockey stick” visuals from almost any data set… include “random noise” data. What follows are selected paragraphs from a fascinating book that investigated this vast political and scientific fraud: The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker(Continuum, 2009). This book is also available as an audio book from Audible.com, so if you enjoy audio books, download a copy there. Here’s what Booker found when he investigated the “hacking” of the temperature data computer models: From “The Real Global Warming Disaster” by Christopher Booker: (bold emphasis added) Nothing alerted us more to the curious nature of the global warming scare than the peculiar tactics used by the IPCC to promote its orthodoxy, brooking no dissent. More than once in its series of mammoth reports, the IPCC had been caught out in very serious attempts to rewrite the scientific evidence. The most notorious instance of this was the extraordinary prominence it gave in 2001 to the so-called ‘hockey stick’ graph, mysteriously produced by a relatively unknown young US scientist, which completely redrew the accepted historical record by purporting to show temperatures in the late twentieth century having shot upwards to a level far higher than had ever been known before. Although the ‘hockey stick’ was instantly made the central icon of the IPCC’s cause, it was within a few years to become one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science. Similarly called into serious doubt was the reliability of some of the other temperature figures on which the IPCC based its case. Most notably these included those provided by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Dr James Hansen, A1 Gore’s closest scientific ally, which were one of the four official sources of temperature data on which the IPCC relied. These were shown to have been repeatedly ‘adjusted’, to suggest that temperatures had risen further and more steeply than was indicated by any of the other three main data-sources. …Out of the blue in 1998 Britain’s leading science journal Nature, long supportive of the warming orthodoxy, published a new paper on global temperature changes over the previous 600 years, back to 1400. Its chief author was Michael Mann, a young physicist-turned-climate scientist at the University of Massachusetts, who had only completed his PhD two years before. In 1999 he and his colleagues published a further paper, based only on North America but extending their original findings over 1000 years. Their computer model had enabled them to produce a new temperature graph quite unlike anything seen before. Instead of the previously familiar rises and falls, this showed the trend of average temperatures having gently declined through nine centuries, but then suddenly shooting up in the twentieth century to a level that was quite unprecedented. In Mann’s graph such familiar features as the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age had simply vanished. All those awkward anomalies were shown as having been illusory. The only real anomaly which emerged from their studies was that sudden exponential rise appearing in the twentieth century, culminating in the ‘warmest year of the millennium’, 1998. As would eventually emerge, there were several very odd features about Mann’s new graph, soon to be known as the ‘hockey stick’ because its shape, a long flattish line curving up sharply at the end, was reminiscent of the stick used in ice hockey. But initially none might have seemed odder than the speed with which this obscure study by a comparatively unknown young scientist came to be taken up as the new ‘orthodoxy’. So radically did the ‘hockey stick’ rewrite all the accepted versions of climate history that initially it carried all before it, leaving knowledgeable experts stunned. It was not yet clear quite how Mann had arrived at his remarkable conclusions, precisely what data he had used or what methods the IPCC had used to verify his findings. The sensational new graph which the IPCC made the centrepiece of its report had been sprung on the world out of left field. …Yet when, over the years that followed, a number of experts from different fields began to subject Mann’s two papers to careful analysis, some rather serious questions came to be asked about the basis for his study. For a start, although Mann and his colleagues had cited other evidence for their computer modelling of historical temperatures, it became apparent that they had leaned particularly heavily on ‘proxy data’ provided by a study five years earlier of tree-rings in ancient bristlecone pine trees growing on the slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. ‘Proxies’ used to calculate temperature consist of data other than direct measurement, such as tree rings, stalactites, ice cores or lake sediments. According to the 1993 paper used by Mann, these bristlecone pines had shown significantly accelerated growth in the years after 1900. But the purpose of this original study had not been to research into past temperatures. As was made clear by its title – ‘Detecting the aerial fertilisation effect of atmospheric C02 enrichment in tree-ring chronologies’ – it had been to measure the effect on the trees’ growth rate of the twentieth-century increase in C02 levels. Tree rings are a notoriously unreliable reflector of temperature changes, because they are chiefly formed during only one short period of the year, and cannot therefore give a full picture. This 1993 study of one group of trees in one untypical corner of the US seemed a remarkably flimsy basis on which to base an estimate of global temperatures going back 1000 years. Then it transpired that, in order to show the twentieth-century section of the graph, the terrifying upward flick of temperatures at the end of the ‘hockey stick’, spliced in with the tree-ring data had been a set of twentieth-century temperature readings, as recorded by more than 2,000 weather stations across the earth’s surface. It was these which more than anything helped to confirm the most dramatic conclusion of the study, that temperatures in the closing decades of the twentieth century had been shooting up to levels unprecedented in the history of the last 1,000 years, culminating in the ‘warmest year of the millennium’, 1998. Not only was it far from clear that, for this all-important part of the graph, two quite different sets of data had been used. Also accepted without qualification was the accuracy of these twentieth-century surface temperature readings. But the picture given by these was already being questioned by many expert scientists who pointed to evidence that readings from surface weather stations could become seriously distorted by what was known as the ‘urban heat island effect’. The majority of the thermometers in such stations were in the proximity of large and increasingly built-up population centres. It was well-established that these heated up the atmosphere around them to a significantly higher level than in more isolated locations. Nowhere was this better illustrated than by contrasting the temperature readings taken on the earth’s surface with those which, since 1979, had been taken by NASA satellites and weather balloons, using a method developed by Dr Roy Spencer, responsible for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Centre, and Dr John Christie of the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Surprisingly, these atmospheric measurements showed that, far from warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century, global temperatures had in fact slightly cooled. As Spencer was at pains to point out, these avoided the distortions created in surface readings by the urban heat island effect. The reluctance of the IPCC to take proper account of this, he observed, confirmed the suspicion of ‘many scientists involved in the process’ that the IPCC’s stance on global warming was ‘guided more by policymakers and politicians than by scientists’. What was also remarkable about the ‘hockey stick’, as was again widely observed, was how it contradicted all that mass of evidence which supported the generally accepted picture of temperature fluctuations in past centuries. As was pointed out, tree-rings are not the most reliable guide to assessing past temperatures. Scores of more direct sources of proxy evidence had been studied over the years, from Africa, South America, Australia, Pakistan, Antarctica, every continent and ocean of the world. Whether evidence was taken from lake sediments or ice cores, glaciers in the Andes or boreholes in every continent (Huang et ai, 1997), the results had been remarkably consistent in confirming that the familiar view was right. There had been a Little Ice Age, across the world. There had similarly been a Mediaeval Warm Period. Furthermore, a mass of data confirmed that the world had been even warmer in the Middle Ages than it was in 1998. The first comprehensive study to review this point was published in January 2003 by Dr Willie Soon and his colleague Dr Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They had examined 140 expert studies of the climate history of the past 1,000 years, based on every kind of data. Some had given their findings only in a local or regional context, others had attempted to give a worldwide picture. But between them these studies had covered every continent. The question the two researchers had asked of every study was whether or not it showed a ‘discernible climate anomaly’ at the time of (1) the Little Ice Age and (2) the Mediaeval Warm Period; and (3) whether it had shown the twentieth century to be the warmest time in the Millennium. Their conclusion was unequivocal. Only two of the studies they looked at had not found evidence for the Little Ice Age. Only seven of the 140 studies had denied the existence of a Mediaeval Warm Period, while 116 had confirmed it. On the crucial question of whether or not the twentieth century had been the warmest of the past thousand years, only 15 studies, including that of Mann himself, had unambiguously agreed that it was. The vast majority accepted that earlier centuries had been warmer. The conclusion of Soon and Baliunas was that ‘Across the world, many records reveal that the twentieth century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.’ But if Mann and his colleagues had got the picture as wrong as this survey of the literature suggested, nothing did more to expose just how this might have come about than a remarkable feat of analysis carried out later in the same year by two Canadians and published in October 2003. (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick, 2003, ‘Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) proxy databse and northern hemispheric average temperature series’, Energy and Environment, 14, 752-771. In the analysis of McIntyre and McKitrick’s work which follows, reference will also be made to their later paper, McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005b, ‘The M & M critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere climate index, Update and applications’, Energy and Environment, 16, 69-99, and also to McKitrick (2005), ‘What is the “Hockey Stick” debate about?’, op. cit.) Stephen McIntyre, who began their study, was a financial consultant and statistical analyst specialising in the minerals industry, and was later joined by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at Guelph University. Neither made any pretensions to being a climate scientist, but where they did have considerable expertise was in knowing how computers could be used to play around with statistics. They were also wearily familiar with people using hockey sticklike curves, showing an exaggerated upward rise at the end, to sell a business prospect or to ‘prove’ some tendentious point. Intrigued by the shape of the IPCC’s now famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, in the spring of 2003 McIntyre approached Mann and his colleagues to ask for a look at their original data set. ‘After some delay’, Mann ‘arranged provision of a file which was represented as the one used’ for his paper. But it turned out not to include ‘most of the computer code used to produce their results’. This suggested to McIntyre, who was joined later that summer by McKitrick, that no one else had previously asked to examine it, as should have been required both by peer-reviewers for the paper published in Nature and, above all, by the IPCC itself. (This account of the ‘hockey stick’ saga is based on several sources, in particular Ross McKitrick’s paper already cited , ‘What is the “hockey stick” debate about?’ (2005), and his evidence to the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs, ‘The Economics of Climate Change’, Vol. II, Evidence, 2005. See also David Holland, ‘Bias and concealment in the IPCC Process: the “Hockey Stick” affair and its implications’ (2007), op. cit.) When McIntyre fed the data into his own computer, he found that it did not produce the claimed results. At the heart of the problem was what is known as ‘principal component analysis’, a technique used by computer analysts to handle a large mass of data by averaging out its components, weighting them by their relative significance. One of the first things McIntyre had discovered was that the ‘principal component analysis’ used by Mann could not be replicated. ‘In the process of looking up all the data sources and rebuilding Mann’s data set from scratch’, he discovered ‘quite a few errors concerning location labels, use of obsolete editions, unexplained truncations of various series etc.’ (for instance, data reported to be from Boston, Mass., turned out to be from Paris, France, Central England temperature data had been truncated to leave out its coldest period, and so forth). But the real problem lay with the ‘principal component analysis’ itself. It turned out that an algorithm had been programmed into Mann’s computer model which ‘mined’ for hockey stick shapes whatever data was fed into it. As McKitrick was later to explain, ‘had the IPCC actually done the kind of rigorous review that they boast of they would have discovered that there was an error in a routine calculation step (principal component analysis) that falsely identified a hockey stick shape as the dominant pattern in the data. The flawed computer program can even pull out spurious hockey stick shapes from lists of trendless random numbers. ’ (McKitrick, House of Lords evidence, op. cit.) Using Mann’s algorithm, the two men fed a pile of random and meaningless data (‘red noise’) into the computer 10,000 times. More than 99 per cent of the time the graph which emerged bore a ‘hockey stick’ shape. They found that their replication of Mann’s method failed ‘all basic tests of statistical significance’. When they ran the programme again properly, however, keeping the rest of Mann’s data but removing the bristlecone pine figures on which he had so heavily relied, they found that the Mediaeval Warming once again unmistakably emerged. Indeed their ‘major finding’, according to McKitrick, was that Mann’s own data confirmed that the warming in the fifteenth century exceeded anything in the twentieth century.44 One example of how this worked they later quoted was based on comparing two sets of data used by Mann for his second 1999 paper, confined to proxy data from North America. One was drawn from bristlecone pines in western North America, the other from a tree ring chronology in Arkansas. In their raw state, the Californian series showed a ‘hockey stick’ shape; the other, typical of most North American tree ring series, showed an irregular but basically flat line with no final upward spurt. When these were put together, however, the algorithm emphasised the twentieth-century rise by giving ‘390 times as much weight’ to the bristlecone pines as to the trees from Arkansas.45 In other words, although Mann had used hundreds of tree ring proxies from all over North America, most showing a flattish line like that from Arkansas, the PCAs used to determine their relative significance had given enormously greater weight to those Californian bristlecones with their anomalous ‘hockey stick’ pattern. Furthermore, McIntyre and McKitrick found that Mann had been well aware that by removing the bristlecone pine data the ‘hockey stick’ shape of his graph would vanish, because he had tried it himself. One of the files they obtained from him showed the results of his own attempt to do this. The file was marked ‘Censored’ and its findings were nowhere mentioned in the published study. What, however, concerned McIntyre and McKitrick as much as anything else about this extraordinary affair was what it revealed about the methods of the IPCC itself. Why had it not subjected Mann’s study to the kind of basic professional checks which they themselves had been able to carry out, with such devastating results? Furthermore, having failed to exercise any proper quality control, why had those at the top of the IPCC then gone out of their way to give such extraordinary prominence to ‘the hockey stick data as the canonical representation of the earth’s climate history. Due to a combination of mathematical error and a dysfunctional review process, they ended up promoting the exact wrong conclusion. How did they make such a blunder?’ Continue reading The Real Global Warming Disaster by Christopher Booker (Continuum, 2009), available at BN.com, Amazon.com and Audible.com. What all this reveals, of course, is that the global warming “hockey stick” is fake science. As Booker documents in his book, data were truncated (cut off) and software algorithms were altered to produce a hockey stick trend out of almost any data set, including random noise data. To call climate change “science” is to admit your own gullibility to science fraud. The IPCC, it turns out, used science fraud to promote global warming and “climate change” narratives, hoping no one would notice that the entire software model was essentially HACKED from the very beginning, deliberately engineered to produce the alarming temperature trend the world’s bureaucrats wanted so they could terrorize the world into compliance with climate change narratives. The Russians didn’t hack the 2016 election, in case you were wondering. But dishonest scientists really did hack the global warming modeling software to deceive the entire world and launch a whole new brand of climate change fascism that has now infected the minds of hundreds of millions of people across the planet. Everything they’ve been told about climate change, it turns, out, was all based on a software hack. Courtesy of Natural News

Allah's decrees enshrine inequality. Although Allah allows a husband to beat his wife, there is no provision in the Qur'an for a wife to beat her husband. Nor can she initiate a divorce. Only men can do so, and with relative ease. In "Heretic," Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains the shackles of sharia for women, including "the right of men to have unfettered sexual access to their wives, the right of men to practice polygamy, and the restriction of women's legal rights in divorce cases, in estate law, in cases of rape, in court testimony, and in consent to marriage." According to Sharia, women (and little girls) who are captives of war can be raped by their Muslim captors. But girls who have sex outside of marriage are flogged, and women who commit adultery are stoned. Two incidents almost 14 centuries apart show just how deeply the exploitation of women is ingrained In Sharia. In August 2014, after Muslim fighters captured Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, they executed the men and adolescent boys by spraying them with automatic-weapons fire. What happened to women and children might truly have been worse. As chronicled in the Islamic State on-line magazine "Dabiq," "After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharī'ah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State's authority to be divided." Captives were sent "to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex." According to a report in The New York Times, one of the captives, a 12-year-old Yazidi child, was raped by a devout Muslim fighter who "took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her - it condoned and encouraged it." Sadly, the victim was just one of countless thousands in the history of Islam. In 627, Muhammad and his fighters invaded the villages of the prosperous Banu Mustaliq Jewish tribe on the shores of the Red Sea. As with the Yazidis, the Jewish men and boys murdered by Muhammad and his Muslim hordes were spared the unthinkable atrocities their loved ones were about to suffer. In accordance with the law of Allah, many were raped, others sold as chattel. Muhammad, revered by Muslims the world over as the founder of their religion, took a Jewish woman as booty after having her husband and hundreds more men beheaded. Then he forced her on his bed and added her to his stable of wives and concubines. Though the Yazidi and Mustaliq atrocities bookend nearly 1,400 years of Islamic history, their treatment of female captives was virtually identical. Why? Because, as chronicled in "Dabiq," what the Islamic State does in the 21st century is an authentic application of the teachings and practices of Muhammad. Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells the horrifying story of a 13-year-old girl in Somalia who was found guilty of adultery after reporting that she had been raped by three men. Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow - named after Muhammad's 9-year-old wife - was dragged, screaming and flailing, into a sports stadium in Kismayo to be stoned. "It took four men to bury her up to her neck in the hole," Hirsi Ali wrote. "Then fifty men spent ten minutes pelting her with rocks and stones. Then she was dug out of the ground and two nurses examined her to see if she was still alive. Someone found a pulse and breathing. Aisha was returned to the hole and the stoning continued." After she died, "a local sheik told a radio station that Aisha had provided evidence, confirmed her guilt, and 'was happy with the punishment under Islamic law.'" When will equality-minded Americans stand up for women's rights around the globe? Hank Hanegraaff is the author of "MUSLIM: What You Need to Know about the World's Fastest-Growing Religion" and the host of the "Bible Answer Man" radio broadcast and the "Hank Unplugged" podcast.

By FoxNews: City officials in Los Angeles have been trying to legalize street vending for years — L.A. is one of the few major cities where the practice is still illegal — but their efforts are finally gaining ground with local lawmakers. The reason for this hasty change of heart? Lawmakers are trying to stick it to President Trump and his immigration policies. According to NPR, many of the 50,000 street-vending operations in L.A. are currently run by immigrants, some of whom may be in the country illegally. So, in order to prevent U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials from having another reason to detain, arrest or deport vendors, the Los Angeles City Council is moving to legalize vendor operations across the city. To read rest of article visit FoxNews. No compatible source was found for this video. By Stephen Owsinski; OpsLens: Ever wake up and go on about your day as you please, without complying with laws or having to pay your fair share of taxes? Although a tax-free life is enticing, I firmly adhere to my patriotic duty as an American citizen investing in the United States by paying taxes. However, “sovereign citizens” do not feel that way and opt to make up their own rules which, basically, refrain from playing by the rules whatsoever. A man in Washington County, Oregon did just that. He ignored our laws and thought he’d be Scot-free of responsibility…until a deputy sheriff got behind his pickup truck and saw his license plate. It read “No driver license or insurance required.” You know how license plates have unique characters identifying the vehicle/owner, like ABC-123? Well this sovereign citizen’s vehicle license was to the point, displaying the special characters “PRIVATE” below which were the words “Not for Commerce Use – Private Mode of Travel.” Craftily, the license plate also had a logo depicting our shared planet, encircled by the words “Peace on Earth…Good Will Towards Men.” No color scheme was used, only a black-on-white graphic design. Frankly, because it was so well designed, I am led to believe it was mass-produced for other sovereign citizens to tool around in their cars or trucks, doing as they please. Entitlements come in all shapes and forms; just ask any cop about the bizarre culture they encounter on the streets. For his role, Richard Leroy Garrison, 63, was arrested and charged with failure to carry and present a valid license and interfering with a peace officer. His vehicle bearing a fake license plate was impounded by Washington County cops. Why impounded? Since Garrison’s vehicle was involved in the commission of a crime, law enforcement authorities reserve the right to tow said mode of transportation. Besides, every state’s motor vehicle laws require that only properly registered cars be permitted to drive upon its public thoroughfares. Invalid license plates equates to an immobilized car, so towing is the remedy. It is customary protocol throughout the United States as it pertains to motor vehicle statutes and compliance with same. Like pay-to-play, only legitimate. Motor vehicle registration fees, surcharges and taxes fund the actual public roads motorists drive upon. So, a so-called sovereign citizen like Mr. Garrison is traversing roadways we paid for, exempting himself from highway maintenance. In his mind, it’s that simple. This is not the first time a self-professed sovereign citizen motoring down a tax-payer funder public roadway was stopped by police and arrested for his/her vehicle’s attached license plate. I’m not referring to a state-issued, legally sanctioned license plate with a minor expiration date violation. In most cases, that is a civil infraction resulting in nothing more than a ticket or warning to get it updated. I am referring to an artificial DIY license plate clandestinely manufactured by anti-government groups whose membership believes it does not have to comply with our nation’s laws. These folks are not only anti-police—although it is law enforcement officers who get to engage their subversive tendencies—they are opposed to all-things-government. Self-proclaimed sovereign citizens go about their lives fully relinquishing the responsibility of social norms practiced and funded by law-abiding citizens. Adhering to all federal, state and local laws is not their cup of tea. Therefore, the Tea Party –whose “mission is to bring awareness to any issue which challenges the security, sovereignty, or domestic tranquility of our beloved nation, the United States of America”– is definitely not in the cards for this bunch. So what exactly is a sovereign citizen and what are the philosophies, objectives, and membership all about? According to the FBI, sovereign citizens can be violent extremists. The FBI defines “sovereign citizens” as “ domestic terrorism” made of members who are deemed “anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.” The perils are palpable. Our nation has experienced instances whereby some proclaiming sovereign citizenship had no pause before going up against and horrifically murdering police officials, exacting full-on gun battles. The FBI reports that sovereign citizens are a “ growing domestic threat to law enforcement,” capable of violence and government subversion. At its core, sovereign citizenship holds jurisdictional indifference and believes the US operates without care or concern for its citizens. Hence, they go it alone, albeit illegally. Sovereign citizens can poke holes in our national security defenses as well as our country’s stability. Be not fooled by statistics and verbiage claiming sovereign citizens are a loosely-knit group informally conducting their lives without any recognized leadership. In fact, federal intelligence agencies do not bill them as neither an anarchist group nor a militia, “although they sometimes buy and use illegal weapons.” However informal they may be as a demographic, their belief system fuels the dangers they present. Spontaneous outbursts when stopped by police have culminated in volleys of bullets. Police training now includes how to deal with sovereign citizens, and law enforcement trainers indoctrinate street cops in optimal ways to handle these particular encounters. FBI reports indicate these folks are engaged in and finance themselves with white collar crimes such as mortgage fraud, counterfeit currency and money orders, credit fraud, identity theft, and false tax filings. Just as it is often said “Driving is a privilege, not a right” accorded by law, the allowance is never free. And that is the pulse of “sovereign citizen” philosophy, that they do as they please without abiding by government…to include (exclude) paying a fair share otherwise known as taxes. Given Mr. Garrison’s age, I presume he listened to Frank Sinatra croon “I Did It My Way.” He may also have had the experience of listening to lyrics such as “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.” I bet getting his vehicle out of police impound will be an interesting feat for Mr. Garrison and others embracing the sovereign citizen belief system. Must be legal to roll on down the road, no ifs, ands or buts. Back to square one: “May I see your registration, please?”

On November 7, starting around midnight Eastern Time, Twitter.com went down. The outage only lasted around 30-45 minutes, but users believe it had to do with WikiLeaks, the U.S. election, and a DDoS attack. Before the outage, WikiLeaks tweeted about #DNCLeak2, a release of 8263 new emails from the DNC. It seems to be true that #DNCLeak2was trending on Twitter before the blackout, but has since been removed from the trends list. A bit after the outage, the hashtag was added to the trends list once again. Many are connecting the #DNCLeak2, which implied the Clintons were responsible for the killing of Vince Foster — whose death was ruled a suicide. Here are some twitter users’ ideas on the subject: DDOS ATTACK BY GOV IN PROGRESS! THEY WILL DO THIS THRU ELECTION NIGHT! THEY DONT WANT US COMMUNICATING! STEALING ELECTION UNDER BLACK OUT! — Deplorable Jack! (@risetoflyy) November 7, 2016 Do you think Twitter was in on the outage? Do you think the NSA was involved? Leave your thoughts below!

Mr Sanders challenged Mrs Clinton in the Democratic primary campaign, gaining massive support from disenchanted Democrats who were not willing to support Mrs Clinton. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Mr Sanders, a senator from Vermont, was asked whether he would have fared better against President-elect Trump than Mrs Clinton. “There are polls out that suggest that but the answer is you don’t know, you really don’t know,” he told the Today programme. “I would have loved to have had the opportunity. I think it is possible [that he could have won]. “Hindsight is 20/20. I don’t know.” Pressed again on whether he would have proved a tougher challenge for Mr Trump, Mr Sanders continued to dodge the question. He repeated: “I don’t know.” The 75-year-old then said it was important to note Hillary Clinton actually won the popular vote ahead of Mr Trump. While more people voted for the former Secretary of State, Mr Trump triumphed in the all-important electoral college, winning 290 electoral votes to Mrs Clinton’s 232. In his new book, ‘Our Revolution’, Mr Sanders has called for a fundamental reassessment of the Democratic Party – which he believes has lost sight of its basic principles. Speaking to NPR Mr Sanders said: “I think it’s time for a fundamental reassessment and I think what that reassessment has got to entail is to understand that we cannot have a party that will win if we continue to become dependent on big money interests and campaign fundraisers all over this country.” Discussing the shift of voters from Barack Obama to Donald Trump , Mr Sanders added: “I think a lot of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, voted for Barack Obama in 2012, and who like Barack Obama, said ‘You know what, I am going to go for Trump because he has been clear about feeling the pain of working families.” Speaking to donors in a conference call following her defeat, Mrs Clinton said FBI Director James Comey had played a crucial role in her defeat. She said the FBI’s investigations into emails linked to her had halted momentum she had built up following numerous sexual assault allegations which had been levelled against Mr Trump. Mrs Clinton also claimed the investigations “fired up” Trump supporters.

With a tumultuous and long-standing feud between Reza Farahan and Golnesa “GG” Gharachedaghi finally resolved, the Shahs of Sunset can get back to more important things, like peace in the Middle East. Just how does a Shah go about tackling the task that has eluded generations of people worldwide? By throwing a politically incorrect party, of course! Reza and Mike Shouhed nurse their hangovers at lunch, while they recover from Shervin Rpoohparvar’s Malibu party the night before. Mike never went to bed and when Mercedes “MJ” Javid shows up, it looks like she hasn’t either….for days. Talk turns from being hungover to how much Mike’s family means to him and that includes family in Israel that he hasn’t seen in over ten years. Hey, wouldn’t it be “the dope-est” if all of the Shahs went to Israel too? Apparently so, according to Reza. He is looking to connect with the Jewish side of his life via a posh vacation with his friends. When they try and get MJ on board, she initially balks, saying she doesn’t want to leave her father while he is sick. But she quickly realizes that she needs a break from her stressful life and I guess another cast trip with this bunch of hooligans is something she might find relaxing. She thrives in chaos after all! A very pregnant Asa Soltan Rahmati takes a break from talking about her pregnancy to go kaftan boutique hunting with her family. Just kidding, she is still talking about it, saying that her family business is even more important now that there is another family member on the way. And everyone knows you can only sell kaftans out of a non-working refrigerator for so long before you have to upgrade to a ramshackled store front, which is exactly what Asa is doing. The landlord (and old friend of Asa’s) shows up in his landlord-y best, which includes a sundress, pink tights, rainbow wig, and nipple eyelashes, that he immediately shows off to everyone. Is this included in the rent? Never mind that, Asa has some sage to burn and twirls of happiness to make around the space so that it is cleansed and ready to sell kaftans. GG and thousands of her hair extensions are putting good things out in the universe and you know what that means – good things are coming back. Things like walking in a tacky sequined romper down a runway for some designer no one has ever heard of, I guess? Clearly, she must be friends with this designer and clearly, there is a shortage of eligible models for fashion week in L.A. because why else would someone risk having their clothes ripped off incredible hulk style, mid-catwalk if something doesn’t go Lochnessa’s way? I guess only time (and one fashion show) will tell. Reza is shopping for his “Gaza Strip, Israeli, Palestine, Peace in the Middle East” party and guys, I cannot stress for the life of me the importance of quotations in this recap. These are Reza’s words, not mine. With that disclaimer out of the way, back to culturally insensitive shopping, y’all! Destiney, who is off the People’s Couch and a supporting cast member now, shows up to help with the decorations. If this is anything like Mike’s party, Reza should know this isn’t a good idea but then again, Reza isn’t known for being classy when it comes to décor. He also isn’t known for being culturally sensitive but he explains that being a refugee from a war-torn country, where you can be hung for being gay, leaves him with a desire to poke fun at it as a way of coping with his feelings. He invites Destiney to the Israel trip since husband Adam Neely can’t come due to better judgment work. Destiney also likes “dope” things and taking a trip to Israel is one of them, so she happily accepts. MJ, despite not being married, has some marital advice for all of us: you must date your husband until the day you die. I have some marital advice for MJ: you must marry a man for him to qualify as your husband. But my advice aside, MJ saying date nights are about romance and making sure your man knows that you still want to have sex. And how does one send up a smoke signal that you want to have a baby with said man? If you’re MJ, you simply tell him “eff it, I want to get ovulation strip and get pregnant.” If you’re fiancé Tommy Feight, your response is something along the lines of surprise, then a brief mention of being more responsible adults before bringing a child into this world, then saying let’s go for it. MJ reasons that Salma Hayek and Halle Berry did it, so why can’t she? I don’t have the answer to that but my guess would be that neither Salma nor Halle lived in a dirty, one bedroom apartment with no running water. That certainly wouldn’t preclude you from having a baby but it might make child rearing a little easier, don’t you think? With a big bite into a Korean BBQ rib, Tommy says he’s in and vows to stop and get ovulation test strips on the way home. At L.A. Fashion Week, GG (not to be confused with Gigi, an actual supermodel), has arrived to the show and is already swigging champagne and ordering around hair and makeup like she’s been a horrible person all her life. Oh, wait…she has! Shervin comes to support her but can’t manage to even have a conversation, thanks to all the naked models in the room. Within minutes of arriving, GG’s mood gets darker than her raccoon eye makeup after seeing Janice Dickinson, one of the world’s first supermodels, wearing the tacky sequined romper SHE was supposed to be wearing! GG is about to throw some murderous vibes into the universe and snaps at the designer to get “that old a** b**ch another outfit”. Reza and Adam arrive just in time to see this and obviously, can’t get enough. Shervin is oblivious because, boobs. Finally, GG takes a deep breath and says “fine” to another equally ugly sequined outfit and the team puts the finishing touches to her glamorous roadkill look. With Lochnessa contained, Reza decides to invite Shervin on their trip to Israel and Shervin takes a pass, saying it would negatively affect some of his business relationships. Reza is confused and doesn’t understand why everyone just can’t join him in feeling “Jew-y,” while GG can’t understand why she would want to go somewhere where they want to bomb Palestinians. Reza waives off her statement and a symbolic champagne bottle pops loudly in the background, startling them all. Reza is still trying to get everyone on board and thinks exclaiming “eff Iran” out of frustration will do it. GG is offended but doesn’t really have time to discuss it further since she has a catwalk to go trip down. MJ has escalated pretty quickly on the baby fever scale and is already making Tommy pinky swear he won’t masturbate anymore. Her plan is to get knocked up and then have a legal wedding ceremony so her babies won’t be “bastards.” Oh MJ, if only anyone could take your idiotic morals to heart, but it’s so hard when you can’t even figure out how an ovulation test works. I know, it’s hard to read directions and pee on something without your fiancé standing over you to help, but I promise, it’s not nearly as hard as taking care of a baby, married or not. Maybe Salma and Halle are just better at reading directions. Despite almost clawing Janice Dickinson’s face off at the fashion show, GG is transitioning to a calmer, happier person and that means clearing the toxic energy out of her life. Or, what normal people would call, moving. Shervin and Annalise come over to help and thankfully, there are no naked models in the room so Shervin can remain focused. They quickly find out that GG isn’t just harboring toxic energy in her apartment but boxes of old blow up donuts she used to sit on after her butt implant surgery. Mike arrives and it turns out, his moving company is in charge of moving all the furniture and butt donut boxes. Yes, Mike opened a moving company and he says it’s not sexy but it’s a solid investment in a business because you can’t replace movers with robots. I didn’t know you could replace shoes with robots either so not sure why that business got tossed aside but whatever. Mike doesn’t even bother to wear his own shoe line to help move and is quickly complaining about scuffing up his new Adidas. The night of Reza’s big party and everyone is going all out in costume. MJ gets ready eating fried rice in her bathroom while getting her makeup done. At the party house, Reza and Adam arrive, dressed in full Orthodox Rabbi costumes. Reza muses that since he is more in tune with the Jewish side of his religion, he hopes he can wear the outfit without being disrespectful. In his next breath, he is showing off his “sexy burqa bitches,” who are there to entertain and serve the party goers in headscarves and sequined bikinis. Mike arrives as Moses, Asa arrives as…pregnant, but claims she is world peace, simply because she draped a white scarf that’s painted with a peace sign around her stomach. MJ is in a skin tight skeleton costume with side boob and Shervin comes in an orange suit, saying he’s an immigrant from the seventies. GG arrives in a full burqa and dark sunglasses, all which make it impossible for her to get drunk quickly. GG still isn’t sold on going to Israel and when Reza asks, Shervin also expresses concerns about being welcomed. Mike promises that Israel is very accepting, but GG pushes back again, saying they are not of Muslims. It starts to get a little heated but GG’s real issue is Reza’s comment to “eff Iran.” In a surprising twist, Reza immediately apologizes, explaining that he loves everything about Iran but the government. Asa tries to bring resolution to the conversation by reminding everyone how important it is that they respect each other’s journey. That’s enough for GG to fully get on board and agree to go to Israel so she celebrates by grinding on Mike, proving that all you need is love and a little dry humping to make the world a better place. TELL US – WERE YOU OFFENDED BY REZA’S COMMENTS? Photo Credit: Bravo Sponsored Sponsored

Vic We Have No Party: "We are missing something from that hospital bill f ..." LeftCoast Dawg: "What is said at Bruce Ohr's behind doors testimony ..." Case Zzyzx: "Max Kellerman. ESPN still has an asshole to d ..." Sponge: "[i] One simply has to ask for how long was Juan t ..." Laughing in Texas: "Good morning, horde! ..." Mikey NTH - McCain Funeral Blowout! Senator Maverick Action Figures at the Outrage Outlet!: "It is always more fun minding other people's busin ..." MAGA: "Daily Caller has an article up that the Chinese pu ..." Eric Hartman: "I see PDT had to restore the White House flag to h ..." Blutarski: "The Romanian twitter is awesome. Also, Kathy Ir ..." Forgot My Nic [/i]: " [i]The plastic straw myth was a class project of ..." Krebs v Carnot: Epic Battle of the Cycling Stars (TM) [/b][/i][/s][/u]: "[i] 28 This just in, John McCain is still dead. ..." illiniwek: "A few more Rs in the Senate might help a few thing ..." One Handed Typing Morning Report Monday Overnight Open Thread (8/27/18 ) Could This Possibly Be Real? Get Woke, Get Fired: ESPN Severs Ties With Jemele Hill Jacksonville Madden Tournament Shooter Had a History of Being Hospitalized for Mental Illness; Prescribed Anti-Psychotic Medication Eli Lilly Pulls Sponsorship of Conor Daly's NASCAR Team, Due to Racist Slur His Father Used a Decade Before He Was Even Born Kurt Schlichter: It's Time to Purge the #FakeNews Conservatives Official Twitter Ruling: Saying That Dana Loesch's Children Must be Murdered to "Make Her Understand" Does Not Violate Twitter's Rules Trump Strikes Preliminary Deal with Mexico on Trade; Stock Market Jumps Pope Francis: No Comment About Whether I Reinstated a Cardinal Had I Been Warned Was Guilty of Serious Sexual Improprieties; Let's Talk About The Trip I'm Taking Primary Document: The Audio Paul Anka Haiku Contest Announcement Integrity SAT's: Entrance Exam for Paul Anka's Band AllahPundit's Paul Anka 45's Collection AnkaPundit: Paul Anka Takes Over the Site for a Weekend (Continues through to Monday's postings) George Bush Slices Don Rumsfeld Like an F*ckin' Hammer Democratic Forays into Erotica New Shows On Gore's DNC/MTV Network Nicknames for Potatoes, By People Who Really Hate Potatoes Star Wars Euphemisms for Self-Abuse Signs You're at an Iraqi "Wedding Party" Signs Your Clown Has Gone Bad Signs That You, Geroge Michael, Should Probably Just Give It Up Signs of Hip-Hop Influence on John Kerry NYT Headlines Spinning Bush's Jobs Boom Things People Are More Likely to Say Than "Did You Hear What Al Franken Said Yesterday?" Signs that Paul Krugman Has Lost His Frickin' Mind All-Time Best NBA Players, According to Senator Robert Byrd Other Bad Things About the Jews, According to the Koran Signs That David Letterman Just Doesn't Care Anymore Examples of Bob Kerrey's Insufferable Racial Jackassery Signs Andy Rooney Is Going Senile Other Judgments Dick Clarke Made About Condi Rice Based on Her Appearance Collective Names for Groups of People John Kerry's Other Vietnam Super-Pets Cool Things About the XM8 Assault Rifle Media-Approved Facts About the Democrat Spy Changes to Make Christianity More "Inclusive" Secret John Kerry Senatorial Accomplishments John Edwards Campaign Excuses John Kerry Pick-Up Lines Changes Liberal Senator George Michell Will Make at Disney Torments in Dog-Hell The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny More Margaret Cho Abuse Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed" Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means Wonkette's Stand-Up Act Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report! Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet The House of Love: Paul Krugman A Michael Moore Mystery (TM) The Dowd-O-Matic! Liberal Consistency and Other Myths Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate "Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long) The Donkey ("The Raven" parody)

Hours after the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted a statement attacking the NRA. Clinton asked followers to “put politics aside” and “stand up to the NRA”. Her message came shortly after the devastating Las Vegas massacre that left more than 50 dead and 200 injured. Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 2, 2017 Clinton wrote, “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.” A bill introduced earlier this year by Republican Jeff Duncan, frames the issue as a public health matter, saying that gun owners risk suffering hearing damage without access to silencers. Her response, which also called for a change in access to firearms, contrasted President Donald Trump’s response: My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2017 Gun rights was a major issue between the two candidates during last year’s election. Trump called himself a defender of gun rights and the Second Amendment, while Clinton called for “common sense” regulations on who was able to buy weapons and the need for background checks. The NRA endorsed Trump in the election. Former Vice President Joe Biden also called on Congress to “act now to save lives.” How long do we let gun violence tear families apart? Enough. Congress & the WH should act now to save lives. There's no excuse for inaction. — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 2, 2017 Connecticut’s senators, who have pushed for tighter gun control ever since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, were also quick to issue statements Monday. “Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen with this degree of regularity,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement. “This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren’t public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It’s time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.” The primary suspect, Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nev., was found dead in his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino, where he had at least 10 rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Join over 240,000 people who get the most important news stories and the best shopping deals from Heavy – Delivered right to your inbox.

THURROCK Muslim community gathered to show their solidarity with victims of Manchester attack. A large number of Muslims gathered in Grays from around Thurrock to pray for the victims of this vicious attack. Mr. Abu Khayor and Qaisar Abbas on behalf of Thurrock Muslim community said “We strongly condemn this coward attack on innocent people. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. The Thurrock Muslim community stands united in the face of those who seek to harm and divide us. We also pay tribute to our emergency services, police, and volunteers who worked tirelessly to save lives.”

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When the constitution was being forged, there was much discussion about what exactly the nation was to be. Some wanted only the loosest of connections between the states, with states being more like individual nations and the Federal Government being little more than a common union, agreeing to join together to protect from outside forces that would attempt to harm any state. When the northern states decided that slavery was to be illegal, southern states were concerned about how they would continue to run their plantations. The issue of "states rights" was one of the largest concerns during the time before the civil war broke out. Southern states wanted to decide for themselves if slavery was to be legal, not letting northern states make such decisions for them. People from the north found the practice to be so reprehensible that they wanted to force the south to stop the practice. While slavery was a significant reason for the civil war, States Rights divided the nation and the defeat of states rights was a significant blow to the efforts of the original founders of the constitution. 19 people found this useful

Former President Barack Obama has reportedly been called to serve jury duty next month, according to The Chicago Tribune. On Friday, Chief Judge Tim Evans reportedly told county commissioners during a budget hearing that Obama had not only been called for jury duty in Cook County, but that he was also planning on serving it, according to the Tribune. “He made it crystal-clear to me through his representative that he would carry out his public duty as a citizen and resident of this community,” Evans later told the newspaper. “Obviously, we will make certain that he has all the accoutrements that accompany a former president,” Evans continued. “His safety will be uppermost in our minds.” Last week, Obama joined forces with the four other living former United States presidents to host a relief concert to aid victims of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. The event, “Deep From the Heart: The One America Appeal,” was held at Texas A&M and featured performances by Sam Moore, Yolanda Evans, Lyle Lovett and a special guest appearance from Lady Gaga — and it apparently also featured a little comedy from George W. Bush. After all five former presidents took the stage at the event, Bill Clinton stepped to the mic to deliver remarks. Meanwhile, behind him, the younger Bush made an unknown comment to Obama out of the corner of his mouth, prompting his predecessor to break into laughter. Obama quickly stifled his laughter as Bush smiled and shot him a couple of sideways looks. While Bush’s remark was sadly inaudible to the rest of us, Stephen Colbert stepped up to offer some guesses at what he said during Monday’s episode of The Late Show. Cueing up a clip from the concert and doing his best Dubya impression, Colbert quipped, “Hey, were you born in Kenya?” Another option: “Twenty bucks if you pants Clinton right now.” Or perhaps Bush said, “Yo, real quick — where’s Puerto Rico?”

By Tom. During the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi on Friday, former President Barack Obama threw some expert-level shade President Donald Trump's way. As the world knows, Trump can't tear himself away from Twitter. He seems to thrive on approval, especially on social media.

Steve Bannon is on the warpath, continuing his mission to drain the swamp. This is hardly a new revelation. Long before President Trump was a glint in the Tea Party’s eye, the Breitbart News chairman was hard at work laying the foundation to what would be a dominating force in Republican politics at the intersection of Conservatism, Libertarianism and Populism – promoting the likes of Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to national prominence. The former Chief White House Strategist is fresh off stumping for firebrand jurist Roy Moore, who claimed a decisive victory against Sen. Luther Strange – a swamp varmint appointed under dubious circumstances to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vacated Alabama Senate seat. Bannon’s influence in the Alabama blowout has many wondering what’s next for the populist rabble-rouser. CNN’s Dana Bash reports the political tactician is setting his sights on the 2018 midterms, crisscrossing the country in search of populist candidates to remake the Republican Party, and blackballing swamp creatures who refuse to be drained. From CNN: “The populist movement is going to do a house cleaning of all those individuals that made a living off the conservative grassroots while stabbing them in the back,” a source familiar with Bannon’s thinking tells CNN. Bannon is beginning that effort by trying to blackball GOP campaign strategist Jeff Roe, who worked for Sen. Luther Strange, who lost Tuesday’s primary to Roy Moore. Bannon is spreading the word that he believes Roe is responsible for dirty tactics against Moore, and alleging that Roe worked with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner to mislead Trump about the state of the race in Alabama in and around Trump’s endorsement of Strange. Following his speech at Moore’s victory rally Tuesday night where Bannon credited “the people” with the victory, he vowed to help the populist wing of the GOP win other Senate battles in 2018. To that end, he flew from Alabama to Colorado to begin recruiting western candidates to run against Republican incumbents…. Bannon also plans to head back down south to have meetings with those who may want to run in Tennessee for the seat Sen. Bob Corker announced he will vacate, and in Mississippi, to challenge sitting Republican Sen. Roger Wicker. Bannon’s rage against crony capitalism has already electrified the base, striking fear in the hearts of the ivory tower establishment who have enriched themselves on the backs of average Americans. As a former Goldman Sachs banker who grew disillusioned with their strong-arm tactics, Bannon witnessed the decimation of the working middle class, as Wall St. firms facilitated the largest betrayal of Americans in history while creating a looming debt bubble which could still lead to systemic collapse. Bannon’s unique purview of high-level greed is potent, and his disgust towards establishment is fueled in large part by the incestuous revolving door between DC and Wall Street. Bannon witnessed first hand how Goldman Sachs, once a monastery to the ambitious investment banker, became The Black House. As President Trump and Steve Bannon, two of the Right’s most influential figures today continue to remake the Republican Party, an important question arises; In whose image will the future of the Conservative movement be cast? At first glance, Trumpism and Bannonism bear many similarities. Rooted in right-wing populism and traditionalism alike, both ideologies seek to shift the center of power from Corporate America back to the American worker. Both men believe the elite have benefited disproportionately from globalization, while hallowing out a once prosperous middle class in the process. And both Trump and Bannon have furiously railed against a swamp that has profited handsomely from endless spillage of blood and treasure abroad, while cities at home suffer from racial and economic tensions stoked by the Obama administration. In short, both Trump and Bannon see that the world is suffering from systemic division orchestrated at the highest levels, and Western cultures are actively being destroyed under the false pretense of humanitarianism and open-border politics. Finally, in order to preserve America’s borders, language and culture, both men believe an impenetrable wall must be built to prevent illegal aliens from breaching the nation’s geography. That’s where the similarities between Trumpism and Bannonism end. A key difference, if not the difference between Trump and his former chief strategist, is the President’s penchant for compromise and dealmaking, while Bannon is far less malleable in his beliefs. Where Trumpism fails the ideological purity test – which risks alienating his base, Bannonism is brimming with the very civic nationalism that led to Trump’s win. Herein lies the rub for Trump voters – the commander-in-chief has demonstrated a very ‘swamp-like’ flexibility on matters ranging from healthcare to immigration, leaving Trump’s most oft-repeated campaign promises on the cutting room floor. In September, for example, President Trump shocked Washington by announcing a tentative framework to work with Democratic leadership on DACA and the looming budget crisis. Washington Times reports: President Trump and Democratic leaders on Wednesday did what Washington does best: striking a bipartisan deal to boost borrowing and spending, keeping the government running into the next fiscal year and speeding disaster relief to Texas and Florida. Mr. Trump accepted the deal offered by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer at a White House meeting, seeing it as a chance to get ahead of a series of pressing fiscal problems that needed to be fixed this month. But the agreement blindsided Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who just hours earlier called Democrats’ proposal “ridiculous and disgraceful.” For some reason, however, Trump’s most vocal opponents on the right didn’t seem to be caught off guard by his “deal,” with a smirking Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, as ‘Never-Trumpers’ have long warned that the President was nothing more than a chameleon who couldn’t be trusted to prosecute the Republican agenda. According to Schumer, President Trump even suggested against building the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico – a move which would be seen by Trump’s loyal base as the ultimate betrayal. Breitbart News reports: This week on the “Pod Save America” podcast, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) detailed the debt ceiling and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy negotiations he had with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President Donald Trump earlier in the month. Schumer said, “On DREAMers, he said, you know, that he understood that they didn’t come in through any fault of their own, that they’re good Americans, good kids. And then he said he wants the wall in return. And we said ‘No. No wall, Mr. President.’ And he tried that for about 15 minutes, but he’s not going to push me around verbally or any other way.” He added, “And he finally said, “OK, we won’t do the wall. We’ll do some other kind of border security.” Was such an offer ever made by Trump? One may never know, and thus exists the problem. Under Bannon’s more hard-line economic nationalism, claims of Trump wavering would have been branded as nothing more than propaganda from the left. Instead, an increasingly malleable Trump is disappointing even his most ardent supporters. Bannon’s endgame Steve Bannon’s refusal to bend the knee to deep-state establishmentarians would betray his mission; elect enough Populist Conservatives to Congress to successfully implement the MAGA agenda in earnest – reshaping the country to such a degree that even if a Democrat manages to win the presidency, Populism and Economic Nationalism continue to dominate the political spectrum – restoring faith in government among the abandoned middle class. Bannonism, by its very nature, views compromise with the establishment as a last resort. This approach appeals to Trump’s base, who went to the polling booths to actively resist threats to National Security, the economy, and the American way of life. Alas, it’s clear that the desires of American conservatives have fallen on tone-deaf ears. One need look no further than the Alabama Senate race – which saw Trump flagrantly abandon his base by supporting deep-state candidate Luther Strange over Bannon-supported economic nationalist Roy Moore. And instead of rallying behind the MAGA candidate, traditionally pro-establishment conservative outlets were more concerned with optics than substance. National Review’s Reihan Salam, for example, seemed to be disproportionately concerned that Moore would provide CNN with endless soundbytes and fodder. “When I look at Roy Moore, I see someone who is clearly apocalyptic, and I don’t see anything else to him, and I think that it’s bad news for the GOP. It’s great, great news for CNN, the Washington Post and every big mainstream news media outlet that will cover every single one of his utterances,” complained Salam in the latest edition of The Editors, a podcast led by National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke and Rich Lowry. The concern is embryonic of the neurosis plaguing the establishment (and like it or not, a powerful subset of the Conservative movement). They actually care what the talking heads on CNN think. Meanwhile, every-day American conservatives have stopped trusting the Very Fake News network. Perhaps it’s high time Republican elites follow suit. Sponsored Sponsored

While President Donald Trump is attempting to fulfill his campaign promise to reduce illegal immigration, some young adults who were raised in America are fearing deportation. Among those who could be deported is Jesus Contreras, a 23-year-old paramedic who worked six-straight days last week, rescuing fellow Houston-area residents from the flooding left behind from Hurricane Harvey. Contreras told NBC News last week that his family came to the United States when he was age 6. His family wanted to escape what he described as a "violent situation" in his hometown of Nuevo Laredo. After six exhausting days of saving lives, Contreras learned on Friday that Trump was considering ending DACA. DACA protects a group of 800,000 American residents from deportation. Those 800,000 young undocumented immigrants were those who entered the United States as a child and have been in the United States since 2007. Those who qualify under DACA are given two-year work permits, which allows them to stay in the United States with some legal status. "We just got hit by a hurricane here — and now we're getting hit by another storm, an even bigger one," Contreras told NBC News on Friday. The threat of getting deported made it more challenging for first responders during Harvey, Contreras told the Houston Chronicle. "People were scared that boats from U.S. immigration services were out there," Contreras told the Chronicle. "People weren't sure if they were trying to round up people from the water and take them straight to the immigration center." On Tuesday, Trump is expected to announce that DACA will come to an end in six months. The six months give a deeply divided Republican-held Congress an opportunity to do something it has struggled to do: Immigration reform. While Trump was on the campaign trail, he promised to end DACA. But since being elected, Trump said that those under DACA "shouldn't worry." In the meantime, people like Contreras continue to go to work not knowing how many days they have left in America. "These are families just like anybody else," Contreras told NBC News. "We're as American as can be." Copyright 2017 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Print this article Back to Top

Donald Trump defended past disparaging remarks about women during Thursday’s GOP debate, saying he doesn’t have time for “total political correctness” and that oftentimes he’s just kidding. “You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals,” Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly told Trump. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president,” she added. Trump said those comments were directed at TV personality Rosie O’Donnell, who has publicly feuded with Trump in the past. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people and I don't frankly have time for total political correctness and to be honest with you this country doesn't have time either,” Trump shot back to cheers. “Frankly what I say and oftentimes it's fun, it's kidding, we have a good time,” Trump added.

POLK COUNTY, Fla. - People with active warrants in one Florida county might want to think twice about heading to a shelter for Hurricane Irma. HURRICANE IRMA | Real-time tracking maps, Hurricane supply kit info & Hurricane Center IMPORTANT LINKS Hurricane Supply Kit Checklist | Things to know before the storm | Preparations for your pets | Power outage maps & resources | Know your evacuation zone | Price gouging: How to protect yourself and report it | Insurance protection: Video tape home inventory | Tampa Bay sandbag locations | Find a hurricane shelter near you | Hurricane Irma Emergency Phone Numbers Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd posted on his official Twitter account Wednesday that deputies will be checking identification at the county's shelters, and anyone with a warrant will be arrested and taken to "the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail." Judd also posted that sex offenders and sex predators would not be admitted to the shelters. Sheriff's spokeswoman Carrie Horstman says they're trying to educate the public before the storm hits this weekend. She says they're hoping people with warrants will turn themselves and use the next few days to deal with their legal issues. If you go to a shelter for #Irma and you have a warrant, we'll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail https://t.co/Qj5GX9XQBi If you have a warrant, turn yourself in to the jail - it's a secure shelter https://t.co/UFNGNafJh8 We cannot and we will not have innocent children in a shelter with sexual offenders & predators. Period. https://t.co/DlhqjqFrkM

(Newser) – If his TV was tuned to Fox News on Tuesday, President Trump surely didn't like what he heard. Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Trump ally and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, appeared on the network to poke holes in Trump's claim that the FBI planted a spy in his 2016 campaign. According to memos from James Comey, "President Trump himself … said, 'If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it,' and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did," Gowdy said, referring to reports that FBI informant Stefan Halper reached out to Trump advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page before the 2016 election. Gowdy added that a Justice Department briefing last week convinced him the move had "nothing to do" with Trump. What Politico calls Gowdy's "significant pushback against the president" then received backing from another Trump supporter, Fox News commentator Andrew Napolitano. "There is no evidence" to support Trump's claims that a spy infiltrated his campaign in order to pass information to the Obama administration and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and "I'd want to see evidence before I made an allegation that outrageous," he said, before describing Halper's actions as "standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations." Despite anchor Shepard Smith later saying much the same, Trump stuck to his "Spygate" theory at a Tuesday rally in Nashville, asking the crowd, "How do you like the fact they had people infiltrating our campaign?" per the Post.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that Donald Trump’s ban on travellers from six Muslim-majority countries and two others can go into full effect, even as legal challenges against the executive order continue in several states. The ban means that the US can refuse entry visas to travellers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as North Korea and Venezuela. “The ruling does not mean that the Supreme Court has accepted the ban as constitutional, but that it finds persuasive the Trump administration’s argument that an emergency injunction against the ban was unnecessary,” The Guardian reports. US Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the ruling "a substantial victory for the safety and security of the American people". “The Constitution gives the President the responsibility and power to protect this country from all threats foreign and domestic, and this order remains vital to accomplishing those goals,” Sessions said. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project said he was disappointed by the court’s decision. “President Trump’s anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret - he has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter,” Jadwat told The Washington Post. “We continue to stand for freedom, equality, and for those who are unfairly being separated from their loved ones.”

YORK, PA — A video circulating on Facebook has some residents in York city crying foul, while the York City Police Department is encouraging residents to not jump to conclusions. CBS21 News' Brandi Proctor spoke with York City Police Chief Wes Kahley who explained the video showed only a small portion of what happened and that his officer was defending himself. Watch the video here: Chief Kahley stated he does believe the 10-second video is disturbing, but added that it's the events leading up to the video that caused the officer to react. The video showing 23-year-old Melissa Penn, being punched by an unidentified police officer surfaced on social media early Monday morning. Police allege Penn caused a disturbance inside the popular bar on the 400 block of East Market Street in York before attacking the office and kneeing him several times. -- All of this happened before the cameras started rolling. Residents CBS21 News spoke with say seeing a woman being punched is hard to watch, regardless of the circumstance. "One thing we want to make sure of, is that our officers are doing their jobs correctly. We want to make sure they are treating people with respect. Again, I don't expect any officers to be punching bags," Chief Kahley said. Police say there is more video that may be released in the future. In the meantime, they are asking the public to not draw any conclusions. Police said the woman depicted in the video has been arrested, but did not release the charges pending against her.

A Hillary Clinton campaign staffer responded to an interview with a Black Lives Matter activist with one word: “yuck.” Clinton staffers circulated a radio interview in January with one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Alicia Garza. Clinton herself flagged the interview, according to a new batch of hacked emails released by Wikileaks. In an email, Clinton’s research director Tony Carrk asked his team to find the interview because “HRC said there was a segment with a woman from BLM who said HRC/WJC ruined black lives.” Another staffer then sent a transcript of an interview on the New Yorker radio hour with Garza, who said Hillary “shunned and lectured” Black Lives Matter during a “ tense” meeting with the group in August 2015. At the end of the interview Garza said she would not vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Sara Solow, a domestic policy adviser to Clinton, responded to the transcript saying, “yuck.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence agencies provided advanced warning to Russia about a major terrorist plot in St. Petersburg, allowing Moscow to thwart an attack that could have killed “large numbers of people,” the White House said on Sunday. “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia called President Donald J. Trump today to thank him for the advanced warning the United States intelligence agencies provided to Russia concerning a major terror plot in Saint Petersburg, Russia,” the White House said in a statement.

Hurricane Harvey reveals an America that many in the media seem not to know exists: a multi-ethnic, multiracial country where people, for the most part, get along. For those who claim that President Donald Trump "coarsened" our politics and "set back race relations," Hurricane Harvey was pretty bad optics. Only weeks ago, some Democrats were counting the days toward Trump's impeachment and an early departure from the presidency. But last week they saw Trump, in Texas, looking quite presidential in his role as comforter in chief. They saw photos of a president soothing and embracing survivors, no matter their race or gender or sexual orientation. If he is a germaphobe, his fear must be in remission, as he hugged adult survivors and held kids in his arms. Texans, including black ones, appeared pleased by Trump's visit even as Democrats like Maxine Waters have denounced him as "racist," calling for his impeachment as Harvey was bearing down on Texas. Imagine this: neighbors helping neighbors, irrespective of race. But really, this is an old American story. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to this fascinating new country called the United States of America in the 1830s. He wrote about what he considered an astonishing number of "mutual aid societies," or charitable organizations and clubs set up to help a community's needy. Tocqueville wrote: "Americans group together to hold fetes, found seminaries, build inns, construct churches, distribute books, dispatch missionaries to the antipodes. They establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method. Finally, if they wish to highlight a truth or develop an opinion by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. ... "The love and respect of your neighbors must be gained by a long series of small services, hidden deeds of goodness, a persistent habit of kindness, and an established reputation of selflessness. ... I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support." Tocqueville considered Americans' remarkable spirit of charitable giving a matter of enlightened self-interest: "American moralists do not claim that one must sacrifice oneself for one's fellows because it is a fine thing to do but they are bold enough to say that such sacrifices are as necessary to the man who makes them as to those gaining from them. ... They do not, therefore, deny that every man can pursue his own self-interest but they turn themselves inside out to prove that it is in each man's interest to be virtuous. ... Enlightened self-love continually leads them to help one another and inclines them to devote freely a part of their time and wealth to the welfare of the state." America just elected and re-elected a black president. Still, President Barack Obama famously said racism is "still part of (America's) DNA." Well, America's DNA clearly changed, and dramatically so. In 1958, when Gallup asked whether Americans would vote for a black person for president, 54 percent said, "No." A 2006 Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found just 3 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said they would not vote for a black presidential candidate. In fact, more Americans (14 percent) said they would not vote for a Mormon or a 72-year-old than the number who refused to vote for a black president. In the 1950s, interracial black-white marriages were extremely rare. Today, intermarriage of all races and ethnicities accounts for 17 percent of all marriages. This is why sane observers of O.J. Simpson's 1995 murder trial considered its defense a joke: that LAPD officers, including an Asian-American criminalist, seething at Simpson for having married a blue-eyed blonde, leaped at their opportunity to frame him. In liberal Los Angeles, where intermarriage is common? In the 1950s over 90 percent of Americans disapproved of black-white marriages, while recent polls say about 90 percent approve. If America were as racist as many in the media think, why do blacks excel in two of the most competitive fields -- sports and entertainment? On Forbes' list of highest-earning celebrities, blacks occupy seven of the top 25 slots, including Sean Combs, who clocks in at $130 million annually; Beyonce at $105 million; and Drake at $94 million. On Forbes' list of highest-earning athletes, blacks occupy 13 of the top 25 spots, including LeBron James at $86 million; Kevin Durant at $60 million; and Stephen Curry at $47 million. Watch out, Trump-hating media. As more blacks recognize that Republicans are not out to get them, and they look at cities like Detroit under Democratic leadership, Trump can potentially tip the black vote in his party's direction more than any Republican since Abraham Lincoln. COPYRIGHT 2017 LAURENCE A. ELDER DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Mrs Clinton had courted the so-called alien disclosure community for the past year after it emerged she and campaign manger John Podesta were keen to release any top-secret files held by the US Government about the subject of aliens and UFOs. Their pledge was closely followed by the Paradigm Research Group, a campaign organisation set up by Steve Bassett, the only registered lobbyist on the UFO issue in the US. Mr Bassett has been calling for an end to an alleged "truth embargo" that he and other UFO enthusiasts believe was put in place by global government to hide the truth about aliens visiting earth from the public since the infamous 1947 Roswell UFO incident in New Mexico. But, now Mr Bassett is hoping Hillary Clinton and Mr Podesta can still influence incumbent President Barack Obama to disclose the files and reveal the truth before he leaves office in Janaury. A statement on the PRG website says: "There are 70 days left to persuade Secretary Clinton, John Podesta and President Obama to engage the media on the extraterrestrial issue leading to a White House/Pentagon rapprochement and Disclosure under President Obama." In January, Mrs Clinton said she also wanted to open up on what is happening at the mysterious Area 51 military base in Nevada, where UFO conspiracists believe evidence of alien technology is hidden away. Clinton claimed she would “get to the bottom” once and for all of questions and controversy over what the US Government does or does not know about the mysterious subject. Responding to questions about UFOs from a reporter during an election interview in New Hampshire, she said: “Yes, I am going to get to the bottom of it.” Clinton even admitted that she realises Earth may have actually been visited by extraterrestrials. Clinton and husband former president Bill Clinton have allegedly tried to force disclosure of UFO files before, but even when the latter was in the White House it did not fully happen. Bill Clinton met billionaire Laurance Rockefeller at his ranch in Wyoming in 1995 where they held discussions on the “Rockefeller Initiative” to secure release of all previously classified UFO files. In 2007, Mrs Clinton acknowledged that among the top freedom of information (FOI) requests her husband received as president were requests related to UFO and alien disclosure. She added in the new interview: "I think we may have been visited already. We don’t know for sure.” In 2014 her Mr Podesta said his biggest regret during his time as top adviser to President Obama was not securing release of classified UFO files. Other alien hunters are now banking on President elect Donald Truth to unlock the files. UFO blogger Scott C waring said: "Will Trump reveal UFO info to the public, or will he skirt this issue?"

that's hot I mean, it worked in Brazil, where Gisele Bündchen — supermodel, World Wildlife Federation representative, and behind-the-scenes shaper of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s political consciousness — tweeted at Brazilian President Michel Temer: It's our job to protect our Mother Earth. @MichelTemer, please say NO to reducing protection in the Amazon! https://t.co/KkKF4MrhGg Bündchen’s tweet concerns legislation that would have removed protection from some parts of the Amazon rainforest. Temer’s administration has been remarkably anti-conservation, threatening indigenous lands in favor of new agricultural, mineral extraction, and hydroelectric developments. And lo! Temer responded: That means, “I vetoed those bills, because you are extremely beautiful.” NO! It just means, “I vetoed those bills.” This seems like a good approach to try in America. Can someone please text Kendall Jenner to ask if she feels like doing something substantive for the greater good? The EPA is really hot right now.

In March 2016, Trump tweeted: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz just used an image of Melania from a GQ shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” Trump followed up his initial comment by retweeting an unflattering photo comparing Heidi Cruz with his wife, Melania, stating, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It was reported in the same story that a friend of Diana, Selina Scott, said the princess felt stalked after her divorce from Prince Charles; Trump “bombarded Diana at Kensington Palace with massive bouquets of flowers.” In a tweet that Trump later deleted, he wrote on April 16, 2016: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” In December 2015, Trump said Clinton “got schlonged” by President Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential primaries. In doing so, he turned the Yiddish word for penis into a verb. According to CNN, Yiddish scholars were shocked by the word’s use in a “filthy” context. Trump condemned Clinton for “shouting” during her appeal to female voters. In an MSNBC interview, he acknowledged that he was using gendered terms when referencing Clinton’s decibel level. Trump has also criticized her credentials for president by saying, “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card.”The Republican candidate followed that remark up by calling Clinton an “enabler” of her husband’s infidelity. California: Say Goodbye To Your Mortgage If You Have No Missed Payments Forget Skinny Jeans. These Are What You Should Be Wearing This Summer. Thinking About Solar For Your Home? Read This First "Gesture of love": Photo of police officer breastfeeding malnourished baby goes viral Members of Amazon tribe never seen by outsiders filmed by drone Natasha Aponte, woman who tricked thousands of men on Tinder, explains purpose behind dating competition Ivana Trump worked for the Trump Organization after they were married. She was president of Trump’s Castle casino resort and the Plaza Hotel. According to the New York Times, she was only paid an annual salary of $1. He wrote in his book “The Art of the Comeback” that he regretted taking Ivana out of the role of being his wife and making her a businesswoman, because business then dominated their personal lives as well. Ivana has praised her ex-husband, telling the New York Post that his trust in her business skills was proof of his respect for women. She said, “He loves women. But not a feminist.” When she filed for divorce from Trump, instigated by his affair with Marla Maples, she stated in a deposition that her husband had raped her. However, she later said that “it was all the lawyers,” adding, “I was never abused.” It was Donald Trump’s affair with Marla Maples that led to his divorce from Ivana Trump. The couple married in 1993 and divorced six years later in 1999. It was Trump’s relationship with Maples that also provided fodder for recently resurfaced allegations that Trump posed as his own public relations rep in interviews with various publications. In a 1991 phone interviewwith People magazine reporter Sue Carswell, a recording of which was released in May 2016, a rep who identified himself as “John Miller” explained why Trump had left Maples for Italian singer-model Carla Bruni. In the interview, “Miller” bragged that Trump was constantly pursued by famous women and that “he’s living with Marla and he’s got three other girlfriends.” According to Carswell, Trump later apologized for the ruse, saying it was a “joke gone awry,” though he currently denies he ever posed as his own rep. In the recording of the phone conversation, “Miller” -- whose tone, cadence and style of speaking are all remarkably Trump-like -- gave intimate details of Trump’s encounters with celebrities like Italian singer and model Carla Bruni and pop star Madonna. Of stories that Trump dated Bruni, the woman now married to former French President Nicolas Sarkozy told London’s Daily Mail, “Trump is obviously a lunatic.” She stated Trump dreamed up the match for publicity sake. “It’s so untrue and I’m deeply embarrassed by it all.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is recommending to the Justice Department that no charges should be brought against Hillary Clinton for her use of private email servers as secretary of state, FBI Director James Comey announced Tuesday. "Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case," Comey said after detailing the FBI's findings in its investigation of Clinton's use of personal email servers. "No charges are appropriate in this case." Comey announced that the FBI has completed its investigation of Clinton's use of a personal email server and is now referring the matter to the Justice Department to decide whether to prosecute. Comey made clear he didn't coordinate his statement with the Justice Department or any other part of the government. The FBI assessed whether classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on Clinton's personal email server or whether classified information was mishandled intentionally or in a grossly negligent way -- which is a felony -- or whether people knowingly removed classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities, which is a misdemeanor, Comey said. He added that the FBI also investigated whether there was computer intrusion by nation states or hostile actors. Comey said that the FBI found that Clinton actually used "several different servers" and administrators of those servers during her four years as secretary of state as well as "numerous mobile devices" to send and receive email on her personal domain. When one of the servers was decommissioned in 2013, the software was removed, but millions of email fragments remained in a "slack space of the server" which the FBI had to use to piece the puzzle of her emails back together. "We searched through all of it to understand what was there and what parts of the puzzle we could put back together again," Comey said. From the group of approximately 30,000 emails that Clinton provided to the State Department, the FBI found 110 emails in 52 email chains that "have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received," Comey said. Eight of those chains contained top-secret information, Comey said, 36 chains contained information that was considered secret at the time and eight were considered confidential. Comey said that the FBI "found no evidence that any of the additional work-related emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them in some way." Therefore, Comey said the FBI has "reasonable confidence" that there was "no intentional misconduct" in connection to the sorting of Clinton's emails. The FBI director, however, slammed Clinton for her general use of the email server. "There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said, adding that anyone in Clinton's position or in the positions of people she communicated with "should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation." Comey said that the FBI did not find "direct evidence" that Clinton's personal email domain was hacked successfully, but cautioned that the government is "unlikely to find such direct evidence." At the same time, he warned that "hostile actors gained access" to private email accounts with which Clinton was in regular contact. He also said that because Clinton sent and received work emails in territories of sophisticated adversaries, Comey said, "It is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." The conclusion of the investigation comes after Clinton met with FBI officials in Washington for three and a half hours Saturday about her use of the private email server she used while she was secretary of state, her campaign said. Federal investigators also interviewed Clinton's top aides, including Huma Abedin, who was questioned in April. Clinton had turned over her email server to the FBI in August, and at the time she turned it over, it had been wiped clean. In May, Clinton told CBS News that she expected a quick conclusion to the FBI probe into whether she mishandled classified information on her server, which Clinton used exclusively to send and receive State Department correspondence. "I always took classified material seriously," she told "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson. "There was never any material marked classified that was sent or received by me. And I look forward to this being wrapped up." There has been increased scrutiny of the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch after she had a spontaneous half-hour-long meeting with former President Clinton early last week.The attorney general said Friday of the meeting with Clinton that she "certainly wouldn't do it again," a sentiment seconded by the former president and by Hillary Clinton, who told MSNBC in an interview that "hindsight is 20-20." Lynch confirmed Friday that she would be accepting the recommendations of the career prosecutors in the email case, though she stopped short of formally recusing herself from the matter. CBS News' Paula Reid contributed to this report.

U2 has cancelled its September 16 concert in St. Louis, Missouri after a night of unrest over a police officer’s acquittal that saw rocks thrown at officers, injuries, and arrests. The mayor’s house was damaged, and a public library’s windows smashed, among the other developments. In the midst of all of this, U2 wrote on Saturday morning on Twitter: “Tonight’s St. Louis Show Cancelled ‘We cannot risk fans’ safety.” The iconic band released a lengthy statementexplaining the decision to no longer play at The Dome America Center. It was posted to U2’s website and reads: Live Nation and U2 regrettably announce their St. Louis show scheduled for tonight, September 16, 2017 has been cancelled. “We have been informed by the St. Louis Police Department that they are not in a position to provide the standard protection for our audience as would be expected for an event of this size. We have also been informed that local crowd security personnel would not be at full capacity. In light of this information, we cannot in good conscience risk our fans’ safety by proceeding with tonight’s concert. As much as we regret having to cancel, we feel it is the only acceptable course of action in the current environment.” – Live Nation and U2 Fans who purchased tickets online will receive a refund on the credit card tickets were ordered on. Refunds for non-internet purchases will be available starting Monday at 10am at point of purchase. Here’s the band’s tweet on the cancellation: Here’s some of the reaction on Twitter. Some people expressed sadness, others said they were angry (at those causing the unrest, at U2), and others wanted the band to make a social statement. The concert being cancelled upset fans on social media, but it was just one of multiple closings in St. Louis because of riots and protests over a judge’s acquittalof a white police officer in the shooting death of an African-American man, Anthony Lamar Smith. Prosecutors had argued that the former police officer, Jason Stockley, planted a gun after the shooting, something he denied.

Only seven months into his puzzling presidency, Donald Trump has accomplished an odd achievement: He’s made Sigmund Freud relevant again. Although the father of psychoanalysis is no longer fashionable, the Freudian concept of psychological projection is alive and well. “I think he’s crazy,” said Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, speaking into an open microphone about Trump. J. Brien Comey, father of fired FBI director Jim Comey, thinks Trump belongs “in an institution.” Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin has questioned the president’s “mental stability.” These aren’t isolated examples. Many prominent liberals, conservatives, moderates, and libertarians have concluded that the president is off his rocker. The tangible evidence for that proposition is thin, and Trump seems to be enjoying himself more and more. Maybe we’re all just projecting. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is the phrase used by those sympathetic to the president to explain liberals’ hair-on-fire response to anything Trump says or does. TDS is also an occupational hazard of being a member of the Republican establishment or a movement conservative who cares about such trite concepts as political principles. This became clear again last week in the hysteria over Trump’s approach to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. In response to the administration’s original announcement rescinding DACA, liberals came unglued. Not content to call the decision dumb and racist, which they did, they played the sanity card. “It is lunacy,” opined Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton. The president, added HBO comedic pundit John Oliver, is out of his mind. “Utter insanity,” proclaimed Susan Hay, a co-founder of a Florida-based pro-immigrant and refugee nonprofit. That was then. A few days later, after dining on Chinese food (you can’t make this stuff up) at the White House with Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Trump reversed field on DACA. In the real world, such a development is called processing new information. In modern U.S. politics, it’s considered treason -- or insanity. This time, it was conservatives who melted down. Ann Coulter pronounced it the death of the GOP brand; Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, an immigration hardliner, claimed it would “crack” Trump’s core base of support; various commenters on conservative news sites theorized that Trump had been taken over by aliens. Not the illegal kind, the kind from outer space. Since before Trump’s inauguration, Democratic attorneys in the nation’s capital have contemplated replacing Trump under the 25th Amendment’s requirement that the president is able to “discharge the powers and duties of his office,” i.e. impeaching him on grounds he’s intellectually incapacitated. Although this idea itself is bonkers, Coulter alluded to it—not unfavorably—Friday. “At this point,” she tweeted, “who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?” Fellow conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, more measured in her criticism, noted that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough had spent most of the year speculating that Trump is “mentally unstable [but] is praising him today.” Ordinary civilians are getting into the psychology racket, too. “Jody,” an Arizona conservative who dialed in to Ingraham’s radio show, said she was suffering from a new strain of the disease: “Pelosi Trump Schumer Disorder,” she called it. “I am done if they don’t build the wall.” Jody was kidding, or at least half-kidding, but stressing out to this degree over politics is becoming a national obsession. It can’t be healthy. And as for labeling as cuckoo those with whom we disagree, well, that’s an old KGB tactic. We can’t let Vladimir Putin do that to us. Unfortunately, the psychology racket is full of those with no sense of history. A new book arrived, unsolicited, in the mail recently with a long title: “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” The cover gives the game away, but the publisher also included a foreword from 91-year-old psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who offers the melodramatic view that clinicians who don’t warn the world about Donald Trump’s shortcomings are akin to Nazi doctors who worked at Auschwitz. At the risk of practicing medicine without a license, I’d suggest that this historical comparison is de facto evidence of TDS -- and paranoid grandiosity. A better title would have been “27 Angry Democrats With Advanced Degrees Who Voted Against Trump and Say He’s Crazy Although They’ve Never Met Him.” Lifton and others associated with this project are part of something called the “Duty to Warn” project. The word “duty” is a term of art, given that since 1973, the American Psychiatric Association had cautioned its members against diagnosing patients they’ve not personally evaluated. Although this seems like common sense, it’s more than that: It’s a hard-earned lesson. It’s called the “Goldwater Rule,” and it comes from the 1964 presidential campaign. In October of that year, when educated elites were just as unhinged over the idea of a Republican populist in the White House as they are today, provocative left-wing pamphleteer Ralph Ginzburg published an article in his “Fact” magazine with an incendiary headline: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!” For those too young to remember, Barry Goldwater was a conservative Arizona senator and the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nominee. Key in the creation of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Goldwater was also a decorated World War II pilot, a fiscal conservative, a fierce anti-communist, and friends in the Senate with John F. Kennedy. As Donald Trump would do 52 years later, Goldwater wrested the GOP nomination away from the Establishment, creating a fissure in Republican politics that exists to this day. Unlike Trump, Goldwater did not become president. He lost to Lyndon Johnson in a historic landslide. I’ve never heard any political observer blame the Fact magazine article for that defeat, but it was so nasty and gratuitous that when the campaign was over Goldwater filed a libel suit in federal court. Of the 12,356 psychiatrists queried by Ginzburg, 2,417 responded – and only 657 pronounced Goldwater psychologically fit to be president. Some 1,189 of these quacks diagnosed the senator -- on the record, with their names attached – as unfit, offering such dubious diagnoses as “megalomania,” “paranoid personality, “emotionally unstable,” “immature,” “grossly psychotic,” “mass murderer,” “immoral,” “chronic schizophrenic,” “dangerous lunatic” and – stupidest of all -- “cowardly.” Goldwater won his case, despite the high bar public officials face in such matters. When he testified in federal court, he came across as rational, composed, normal, and emotionally healthy. His critics were the ones who were unhinged. Is that happening again? Donald Trump seemed almost happy last week. Sure, he wants good coverage in the New York Times. Doesn’t everyone? And, yes, he’d rather spend time with Chuck Schumer than Mitch McConnell. Who wouldn’t? He wants to build a wall to prevent future waves of illegal immigration, but has a soft spot for “Dreamers.” He was in his element comforting hurricane victims. These traits make him crazy? He could be the sanest politician in Washington right now.

President-elect Mr Trump outlined his tough stance to root out the millions who are in the country illegally, particularly criminals. Mr Trump said that once the border was “secure”, immigration officials would take a decision over what action to take with remaining migrants. But he also said deportations would take place “immediately” after he entered the White House. He said: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. “But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.” He said a “determination” would be made about remaining illegal immigrants. He said: “After the border is secure and after everything gets normalised, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that. “But before we make that determination… it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.” Last night, Ukip MEP Gerard Batten called on Britain to take tougher action on illegal immigrants and said it would be easier to do so after having left the European Union. He said: “Donald Trump is absolutely right. By their very nature, illegal immigrants are in the country illegally. “Why wouldn’t you deport them? We should do the same. “People who come here illegally should be sent back home and those who have committed crimes expressly so. “Donald Trump isn’t constrained by the Human Rights Act and the European Court of Human Rights so he can get rid of them. When we leave the EU we can do that too. We have something like a million illegal immigrants here.” Paul Nuttall, also a Ukip MEP, said: “I fully support and agree with Trump’s stance… and I wish Britain was better at deporting foreign criminals. “Not only are they in the country illegally, they have broken their obligation to live by the rules of the host country. “Why should we spend our hard-earned money, that could otherwise be spent on the NHS or education, on keeping people that shouldn’t even be in the country in our prisons? They should be sent back.” Tue, December 13, 2016 Conservative MP Peter Bone said: “What Donald Trump is tapping into is the deep frustration that people here have, that people come here illegally, commit crime and then can’t be deported because of their human rights. “We also need to be robust in returning illegal immigrants. “One of the frustrating things is that when someone comes here and they break the law we seem to be powerless to deport them. “We should not be worried about their human rights. Britons are fed up with people abusing the system.” In June, the Commons’ Home Affairs Committee called for urgent action to “significantly” reduce the number of foreign offenders, estimated to number 13,000. Last week, during an official visit to India, Prime Minister Theresa May suggested she might further streamline visa application processes for Indians if Delhi made it easier for Britain to deport Indian citizens who had over-stayed. At the weekend, during his first recorded TV interview after being elected on Tuesday, Mr Trump was asked whether a wall with Mexico would be built and said: “Yes,” but he appeared to backtrack suggesting it would be partly “some fencing”. Mr Trump said: “For certain areas… a wall is more appropriate… I’m very good at this, it’s called construction.” Following Mr Trump’s win, Mexico has reiterated that it would not fund any wall. A wave of protests continued yesterday afternoon in New York and Oakland in California as demonstrators took to the streets for the fifth consecutive day. Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets since the results from Tuesday showed Mr Trump had secured enough votes in the 538-person electoral college to clinch the presidency. In the main. the protests have been peaceful and have decried Mr Trump for his campaign promises to clamp down on immigration and register Muslims along with claims the former reality TV star had sexually abused women. So far, arrests have been in the dozens and a number of police have been injured. Slogans including “not my President” and “love trumps hate” were chanted by campaigners on the march in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. Protesters say Mr Trump threatens their civil and human rights. The protests come as it emerged that Hillary Clinton could receive two million more votes than Mr Trump when the final tally is made. The latest findings show Democrat Mrs Clinton has received 400,000 more votes than the President-elect – 60.4 million compared with 60 million. Millions of votes are yet to be counted in the pro-Democrat state of California and experts believe Mrs Clinton’s win of the popular vote could be extended to two million. Campaigners are fighting for reform as they suggest the US electoral college system is outdated. The result is similar to the situation which arose in the 2000 election when Al Gore lost having defeated George W Bush in the popular vote.

Hundreds marched against a scheduled (but then canceled) "Dixie Freedom Rally" in Austin, Texas, on Saturday. Public pressure against the event was immense, and after receiving threats of violence, the Texas Confederate Militia decided to postpone the event to a later date. That didn't stop the counter march the Austin chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America had planned. Chanting their way through downtown Austin, the capital of Texas, demonstrators denounced Confederate symbolism and called for the dismantling of public works and streets that bear the name of Confederate icons. At the end of the march, fights broke out both between protesters and between protesters and police. Two people were arrested. Event organizers reached out to lawyers and are fighting the charges. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, only Virginia has more Confederate symbols (which include roads, schools, statues and county names) than Texas. Austin has already been taking steps to remove public reminders of its history as part of the Confederacy. Just last week Texas House Speaker Joe Strauss called for removal of a plaque near the Capitol that asserts slavery was not the underlying cause of the Civil War. And finally after years of resistance, administrators at the University of Texas Austin decided to take down Confederate statues on campus. Related stories The University of Texas is removing its Confederate statues Workers removed a statue of Robert E. Lee from a Dallas park under police guard Retailers say Confederate flag sales are surging after Charlottesville

When the removal of a sign becomes a sign of the times… In the open border utopia ushered in by President Barack Obama, it’s no longer socially acceptable to think Americans speak English and thus, down comes a famous sign at Geno’s Steaks in South Philly. More from Fox News: Geno’s has held its prominent location at South Philadelphia’s ‘cheesesteak junction’, at the diagonal meeting of 9th and Passyunk–and across from cheesesteak originator “Pat’s”, since 1966, but Vento’s contentious sign set it apart from the rest. Joey Vento, who died in 2011 at age 71, drew regional and national attention over his “This is America, When Ordering Speak English” sign posted to the walk-up window at ‘Geno’s’. After Vento’s death, his son Geno, named for his father’s shop, apparently decided to take the sign down. SEE ALSO: Dana Perino Erupts ‘Like Mount Vesuvius’: ‘After 20 Years Of Defending These Guys … Done!’ Turns out, the descendant of Italian immigrants never refused service to anyone and said he posted the sign as political commentary on illegal immigration, according to Fox News. Geno’s Steaks released a statement on the removal of the sign, saying it’s time to move on. “While Geno continues to honor his father’s traditions of good quality food, cleanliness and giving back to the community, he has decided that after 10 years it is time to move on,” the statement said. “It’s not about the sign. It’s about what you do and what your mark in life is, and Geno wants to change that mark in life.” Geno’s was in the news recently when GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who is strongly opposed to illegal immigration, came by for a cheesesteak while campaigning.

All in all, the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards was a pretty good Emmys. Stephen Colbert didn't make a single racially insensitive joke, Lena Waithe gave an incredibly inspiring acceptance speech, the gay episode of Black Mirror won twice, and there was not a Modern Family win in sight. But there was one dark cloud over the evening: the surprise, supposedly comedic appearance by disgraced former press secretary Sean Spicer. Judging by the Sean Spicer Emmy reactions on Twitter, viewers were not pleased to see this angry little man joking around with his pal Stephen Colbert on their television screen. Maybe it's a good thing the 2017 Emmys got this questionable political stunt out of the way early. The Former White House Press Secretary to President Trump was brought out on stage by host Stephen Colbert at the end of his opening monologue. The real Spicer rolled out on a mobile podium, famously used by Melissa McCarthy in her impressions of him on Saturday Night Live. The real Spicer got a few jokes in. He referenced his famously inaccurate judgment of the inauguration crowd size by saying, Ha ha. Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Get it? It's totally fine that he spewed blatant lies to the American public, because now we can all laugh about it together! The audience laughed and cheered for this former face of the Donald Trump presidency, and then later in the night gave all the Emmys to The Handmaid's Tale, you know, that show about how a dystopian, oppressive government is a bad thing. Yay, cognitive dissonance! Anyways, I'm not the only one who found this particular political stunt to be in fairly bad taste. The reaction on Twitter to Sean Spicer's Emmy appearance was overwhelmingly negative — from both regular viewers and celebrity viewers. Former SNL player and actress Jenny Slate tweeted that she was "so grossed out" by the decision. She said, Similarly, actor Zach Braff tweeted, Filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner, known for his role as Max Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, tweeted, And of course, though she didn't share her opinion on Twitter, Melissa McCarthy's reaction when the camera cut to her during the real Spicer's bit said a thousand words: She did not approve. Many non-celebrities also shared their disapproval on Twitter, some viewer lamenting the double standard for 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and this small angry liar. Others critiqued the Television Academy for its hypocrisy. Again, though the night was filled anti-Trump sentiment, inspiring speeches about political activism, and supposedly subversive post-Trump television, Spicer was still invited onto that very same stage where that all took place. And according to journalist Chris Gardner of The Hollywood Reporter, who attended the show, Spicer had no lack of fans and attention after the Emmys. Gardner tweeted, Don't you just love it when lying politicians — who are so terrible at their job even Donald Trump has to fire them — become beloved, whacky celebrities? Thanks for that one, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Despite being around for more than a century, suppressors aren’t really used in crimes. In fact, it seems like the only time you see a crime committed with a suppressor, it’s where having the suppressor itself is illegal for whatever reason. They’re just not used that way very often. However, if the Hearing Protection Act passes as part of the SHARE Act, suppressors will likely become far more common. That has the hysterical tribe at The Trace worried about criminals getting their grubby little paws on them via theft. Congress could vote as soon as this week to repeal part of an 80-year-old law that has forced owners of silencers to register the devices with the federal government. Supporters of removing restrictions on silencers have dismissed the concerns of opponents by pointing out that suppressors, as they’re also known, are today rarely used in crimes. The more pertinent public safety question, however, is what could happen if many more silencers enter circulation. Even with the hurdles that silencer buyers must deal with, demand for the items is already increasing, fueled by a new generation of suppressors and some slick marketing. There are now more that 1.3 million of them registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, up from about 360,000 just five years ago. There’s also evidence to suggest that as silencers have gained a foothold with gun owners, some are winding up in the black market. We’ve written before that as goes the legal gun industry, so goes the criminal arsenal. Firearms and related tools like extended magazines that are initially sold legally end up in criminals’ hands in several ways: unregulated private transactions, straw purchases and, of course, theft. To be sure, theft is a legitimate concern. It’s impossible to keep things out of criminals’ hands because they’re often acquired via theft, either directly or indirectly on the black market. I’d like to applaud The Trace for at least acknowledging that criminals are unlikely to walk into a gun store and buy suppressors. Good for them. Make no mistake, criminals will get their hands on suppressors via theft. It’s going to happen, unfortunately. Of course, criminals can make suppressors in their garage right now. All the information is on the internet for anyone and their brother to look at if they so choose. It’s been that way for years. Yet they’re still rarely used in crime. Why is that? Take a look at this photo of a suppressed pistol, since handguns are the preferred weapon of the average criminal. Note that the suppressor extends well beyond the weapon. In fact, it doubles the overall length of the weapon. Guess what this does? It makes it very, very difficult to hide a suppressed firearm. Seriously, try tucking one of those in the front of your pants sometime and see how quickly you draw. This makes suppressors very difficult to sneak into a convenience store. It’s also difficult to mill about waiting for someone to pull the gun on and rob. While criminals will, no doubt, get their hands on suppressors in the course of their “career,” it won’t really help them much. They’re terrible options for their line of work, and with the internet’s instructions laying the mysteries of the suppressor bare years ago, there’s no reason to fear them getting into any crooks hands. They’re likely already there, and they figure out quickly they’re useless for their purposes.

President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on the "fake" news media in a series of tweets early Saturday morning, lashing out at CNN after the network corrected a story on the Trump campaign and Russia. Trump accused CNN of making a “vicious and intentional mistake” and called on the network to fire those responsible, and also called for ABC reporter Brian Ross, who has been suspended, to be fired for a separate erroneous report. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is introduced during the CNN presidential debate at The Venetian Las Vegas on December 15, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Getty Images "Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday. They were caught red handed, just like lonely Brian Ross at ABC News (who should be immediately fired for his “mistake”)," Trump wrote. "Watch to see if @CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?" Trump continued to taunt CNN in a second tweet. "CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!" the president tweeted. The news media has been one of Trump’s most frequent targets since he took office in January. He derides organizations that publish reports critical of him as "fake news." In July, he was accused of inciting violence against journalists after he tweeted a gif showing himself body slamming a CNN avatar. In the corrected CNN report Trump referred to, it was claimed that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., had received a “heads up” email on September 4, ahead of the release by WikiLeaks of a cache of emails stolen from DNC servers, allegedly by Russian government linked hackers. CNN later corrected its report to state that Trump Jr. had in fact received the email on September 14, subsequent to their public release by WikiLeaks. The network has said it will not discipline the reporters responsible for the story, because they followed company procedure and used multiple sources to verify the claims, and does not believe they acted with malicious intent. ABC’s chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross had mistakenly reported on-air that Michael Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump had ordered him to make contact with Russian officials before the 2016 presidential election. The network later corrected the report to state that Trump had made the request as president elect, prior to taking office in January. Fox News, whose coverage Trump has praised and contrasted with CNN's, also issued a correction for a story Friday in which it was claimed that one of the women who has accused Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual assault forged his signature in a high school yearbook. At a rally in support of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore Friday night, Trump had attacked news networks. “CNN apologized just a little while ago,” Trump said, referring to the error correction. “They apologized. Oh, thank you, CNN. Thank you so much. You should’ve been apologizing for the last two years.” More from Newsweek

We have over 74,000 city photos not found anywhere else, graphs of the latest real estate prices and sales trends, recent home sales, a home value estimator, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, demographic data (race, income, ancestries, education, employment), geographic data, state profiles, crime data, registered sex offenders, cost of living, housing, religions, businesses, local news links based on our exclusive technology, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government finances, employment, weather, natural disasters, hospitals, schools and libraries. In addition to our huge collection of data, we have also created our Top 100 City Lists and Top 101 City Lists. These lists rank cities in hundreds of categories, including income, crime, most gay couples, most cars, shortest commute, biggest houses, best educated residents and many more. We also have thousands of random city pictures submitted by our users.

In Chicano history, the women who formed a vital part of social justice movements have often been swept aside; forgotten or ignored as their male counterparts receive the bulk of the praise for their collective work. Their visibility is imperative as Chicanas continue to work in social justice, fighting the good fights within various movements. The book documents the experiences of 61 Chicanas from the ’60s to the present who have paved the way in the fight for human rights as educators, attorneys, activists, artists and more. Some of the women featured have passed, while others remain active. Each of their stories were written by an author of their or their loved ones’ choosing, creating beautiful pieces that bring together women for the purpose of honoring women. The project came about by the Chicano Archive Committee at San Diego State University, which works to document the people and historical events that have occurred around the Chicano movement. Committee members and co-editors Sonia Lopez and Rita Sanchez selected the women featured in “Chicana Tributes” to document what they believe is missing from the history books. Lopez, a longtime activist and educator, was the first person to teach a Chicana history class at San Diego State back in 1972. Back then, she found a need to address Chicana issues, and still sees the need today. “There’s still not enough information on Chicanas that have contributed to history, society and the community,” she says. “They need to be recognized.” Among the women featured are ACLU leader Norma Chavez, Laura Rodriguez, matriarch of the National Historic Landmark Chicano Park, Charlotte Hernandez Terry, the first woman to paint a mural at Chicano Park, and Delia Moreno, who along with her daughters form Trio Moreno, which played protest trio music during important events in the Chicano movement. “It’s amazing that these women still had the courage and resilience in spite of all their hardships,” Lopez says. “We’re trying to teach people this is life. Life is a struggle. Part of becoming who you are is a struggle. And for us, especially, as Mexicanas on this side of the border. We chose the word ‘chicana’ to define our own identity, tell our history, tell our story and tell our roots. By reading this story people will learn, people will appreciate and feel inspired.” “I think young women today are looking for role models,” she adds. “I don’t feel that we have enough role models out there of people that are doing things or have done things to inspire, to motivate. With this book, young women can see that it’s possible to do. The groundwork has been laid by the women featured in this book.” READ: This Chicana Is Taking Over The Instagram Page Of A Major Art Museum To Show Off Chicano Art

An FBI agent was reportedly injured when a flash grenade detonated Wednesday in a New York City parking garage. Officials told NBC's local affiliate in New York that one person was taken to Bellevue Hospital to receive treatment for burns on his hand. The agent was handling the device when it went off, officials said. Witnesses told the New York Daily News that they called 911 after hearing a small explosion and seeing smoke coming from the back of a federal building that houses the FBI and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that his administration “will be taking strong action today” to address what he complained are especially weak border security protections that must be addressed by Congress and the construction of a border wall. “Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “The Democrats stand in our way - they want people to pour into our country unchecked....CRIME! We will be taking strong action today.” Trump’s online post, which did not come with further details as to what steps his administration would take, came one day after he announced that he would deploy U.S. troops to guard the southern border with Mexico until his promised border wall is completed. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later Tuesday that Trump’s plan would mobilize the National Guard, which his two immediate predecessors had also done along the U.S.-Mexico border, and also press Congress to take steps to close “loopholes” in the nation’s immigration laws. Sanders did not say when or how many troops Trump would mobilize or where they would be deployed. The president has been especially preoccupied with border security this week, seemingly agitated by a group of migrants, mostly from Honduras, that was making its way north through Mexico, past immigration checkpoints and military bases, en route to the U.S. Trump said Tuesday that that group had been broken up by Mexican authorities, who he said did so only after he demanded they act. More broadly, Trump has struggled to get traction in Congress for his border security priorities, namely that the border wall he promised during the 2016 campaign would be paid for by Mexico. Democrats have thus far been largely unwilling to go along with plans for the president’s wall. Trump has complained loudly about what he has called their obstructionism and has urged the Senate GOP leadership to do away with the chamber’s legislative filibuster, something Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed never to do.

ISIS is "dreaming that Hillary Clinton becomes President. ISIS, their number one dream, Hillary Clinton, let her become President. She's the one that allowed it to form, she's the one that watched it go, now they say it's in 32 countries, worse than ever." A dozen interviews with ISIS extremists and a review of their social media networks by Foreign Affairs magazine found that the terrorist group has a strong preference in the 2016 election: they'd like to see Donald Trump elected, not Clinton. Fact checkers have also reviewed Trump's repeated claim that ISIS' rise is directly Clinton's fault and declared it to be false.

(CNSNews.com) - Continuing a series of tweets on lax border security Wednesday, President Donald Trump promised quick action: "We will be taking strong action today," he promised, without getting specific. His full tweet, coming shortly after 7 a.m., read: "Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW! The Democrats stand in our way - they want people to pour into our country unchecked....CRIME! We will be taking strong action today." On Tuesday, Trump said he plans to send the U.S. military to guard the border with Mexico: “We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going to be doing some things — I’ve been speaking with General Mattis — we’re going to be doing things militarily,” said Trump at a White House meeting with leaders of the Baltic nations. “Until we can have a wall and proper security, we’re going to be guarding our border with the military," he said. "That’s a big step. We really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.” Since Easter Sunday, when Fox News and The Drudge Report featured news about a caravan of Central Americans making their way to the United States through Mexico, Trump has issued a dozen tweets on border security. On April 3, he tweeted: The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our “Weak Laws” Border, had better be stopped before it gets there. Cash cow NAFTA is in play, as is foreign aid to Honduras and the countries that allow this to happen. Congress MUST ACT NOW! WE WILL PROTECT OUR SOUTHERN BORDER! On April 2: As ridiculous as it sounds, the laws of our country do not easily allow us to send those crossing our Southern Border back where they came from. A whole big wasted procedure must take place. Mexico & Canada have tough immigration laws, whereas ours are an Obama joke. ACT CONGRESS Honduras, Mexico and many other countries that the U.S. is very generous to, sends many of their people to our country through our WEAK IMMIGRATION POLICIES. Caravans are heading here. Must pass tough laws and build the WALL. Democrats allow open borders, drugs and crime! DACA is dead because the Democrats didn’t care or act, and now everyone wants to get onto the DACA bandwagon... No longer works. Must build Wall and secure our borders with proper Border legislation. Democrats want No Borders, hence drugs and crime! Mexico is making a fortune on NAFTA...They have very strong border laws - ours are pathetic. With all of the money they make from the U.S., hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours, at least until Congress changes our immigration laws! Mexico has the absolute power not to let these large “Caravans” of people enter their country. They must stop them at their Northern Border, which they can do because their border laws work, not allow them to pass through into our country, which has no effective border laws. Congress must immediately pass Border Legislation, use Nuclear Option if necessary, to stop the massive inflow of Drugs and People. Border Patrol Agents (and ICE) are GREAT, but the weak Dem laws don’t allow them to do their job. Act now Congress, our country is being stolen! On April 1: Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. “Caravans” coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL! Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL! These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act! Read More Please support CNSNews today! (a 501c3 non-profit production of the Media Research Center) DONATE

LAS VEGAS — Warning: Videos that appear in this article may include graphic content Despite rumors, Las Vegas authorities still believe only man was responsible for killing at least 59 people and injuring 527 after he opened fire on an outdoor concert late Sunday. It is now the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Around 10 p.m. local time, a gunman opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest Festival from inside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino across the street. SWAT teams quickly surrounded the concert and the casino, and officers used explosives to get into the hotel room where the suspect was inside, authorities said. The gunman, identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, was found dead. Police believe he killed himself prior to their entry. Overall 23 guns, including a number of long rifles, were found in his room, Las Vegas Police Undersheriff Kevin McMahill told CNN. Paddock is from Mesquite, Nev., about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo says Paddock first checked into the hotel on Sept. 28. Authorities obtained a search warrant for the home of Stephen Paddock in Mesquite, Nevada. Authorities stormed the house, which is in an upscale neighborhood, on Monday afternoon. They closed a two-block stretch around the house in a neighborhood that has a community clubhouse with a tennis court and a billiard room. Las Vegas police say they found 19 firearms in the house. Three SWAT team trucks and a bomb squad truck accompanied police. Authorities are asking that anyone with possible photos or video from the incident call 1-800-225-5324. Police say they located 62-year-old Marilou Danley, who was initially wanted as a person of interest in this incident. Danley, who was out of the country at the time, is not believed to have been involved in the shooting. Paddock's brother Eric told reporters that Danley is his brother's girlfriend. There was no immediate word on the motive for the bloodbath. Lombardo said authorities believe it was a “lone wolf” attack. Without providing evidence, the Islamic State claimed the attack, saying the shooter converted to Islam months ago. FBI officials later disputed this report, saying that there is no known link between the suspect and any international terror group. Mesquite police also searched the suspected gunman's home. At a press conference, authorities say they seized in excess of 18 additional firearms, in additional to some explosives and several thousand rounds of ammo. Another residence in Northern Nevada is about to be searched by SWAT teams, police said. Eric Paddock, who lives in Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel: “We are completely dumbfounded. We can’t understand what happened.” Eric Paddock told WESH that "it's like an asteroid has hit the family," and that the family has "no reason, rhyme, rationale" for the attack. They say he had no criminal past and no group affiliation. The Paddock family says the alleged shooter was a multi-millionaire real estate investor. Eric shared an image of himself with Stephen, pictured below, from 15 years ago. Two Las Vegas police officers are being treated at a local hospital for injuries they sustained during the shooting, Lombardo said. In addition, the sheriff stated that there were off duty officers attending the concert who died, including a LVMPD officer. Country music star Jason Aldean was performing at the end of the three-day festival when the gunman opened fire. Video of the shooting then showed Aldean stopping and the crowd getting quiet as if they were unsure of what had just happened. The gunman paused and then fired another volley of muzzle flashes from the gold glass casino as more victims fell to the ground while others fled in panic. (Warning: Viewers may find the video below upsetting.) Terrifying video from the scene shows people panicking at the sound of rapid gunfire and screaming as they scrambled to escape. Some hid behind concession stands, while others crawled under parked cars. As the 22,000 fans in the crowd began to flee, witnesses reported seeing flashes of light coming from the Mandalay Bay tower high above. A witness, only identified as Christine, describes the horrifying moment: "We saw Jason run off stage, and people all over on the floor the grassy area in front of the stage, someone falling, someone screaming and running," she said. "The shots just kept coming, and so we were going down and when we got down, there was a man that was shot right there, he was all bloody and unconscious." Monique Dumas said that everyone instantly crouched when they heard the shots. "It seemed there was a pause in the gunfire and the people in the yellow shirts were telling the people to 'go, go, go, go' ... the gunfire never ended, it seemed like it went on and on and on," she said. A nurse who was off-duty witnessed the scene described it. Storme Warren described watching the chaos erupt once people began to run for their lives, saying: "We stepped over the bodies, we saw the people, we saw the heart-wrenching sadness from relatives grabbing hold of their loved ones." Flights in and out of Las Vegas' McCarran Airport were also held because of the situation. Aldean took to social media to say he and his crew are safe, adding: "Tonight has been beyond horrific." President Donald Trump tweeted: "My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!" Later in the day Monday, President Trump called the shooting "an act of pure evil," and praised first responders. He said he will travel to Las Vegas on Wednesday. The Mayor of Las Vegas Carolyn Goodman tweeted: "Pray for Las Vegas. Thank you to all our first responders out there now." "While the sun is shining in Las Vegas, it is a very dark and black day," Goodman said at a Monday press conference. The mayor also confirmed that a city hall employee was among the dead. A prayer vigil is scheduled for 5:00 p.m. local time in front of Las Vegas City Hall. Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval tweeted, calling the attack a "heinous act of violence." Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchinson told reports that all victims who had been transported to University Medical Center of Southern Nevada survived the injuries sustained in the shooting. "If you were alive and went into UMC hospital last night, you are still alive," said Hutchison. UMC is the only Level I trauma center in the state of Nevada. MGM Resorts, the owners of the Mandalay Bay Casino, tweeted: "Our thoughts & prayers are with the victims of last night's tragic events. We’re grateful for the immediate actions of our first responders." Facebook has set up a crisis response page to help people establish whether their loved ones are safe. One distraught witness told reporters "this kind of stuff cannot happen in America." "We need to come together and fight for America, because this is our country, this is our nation, this is our people, we need to stand together to fight this thing out," he said. 49 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016. Orlando Police Chief John Mina tweeted condolences for all those affected by the mass shooting in Las Vegas, saying in part: "This community, and the men and women of OPD, know all too well the anguish that is gripping the residents, visitors and law enforcement community in Las Vegas." The U.S. Homeland Security Department says there is no “specific credible threat” involving other public venues in the U.S.

Through their bullying demands for submission to their dogma they are destroying the very liberties on which our democratic society is based. A disturbing example of this trend can be seen in the case of British gymnast Louis Smith, who was punished this week by officialdom for showing insufficient reverence towards Islam. The action against him by his professional body British Gymnastics arose after a video emerged of Smith and fellow gymnast Luke Carson joking about the religion at a private wedding in a Northamptonshire hotel. In the footage which caused the furore Carson mimicked the Islamic prayer practice and shouted “Allah Akbar”, while Smith laughed at his antics. For this behaviour Smith has been turned into a pariah. He has received death threats from jihadists and vilification from the media. On Tuesday a disciplinary panel at British Gymnastics suspended him from competition for two months and warned him that the reprimand will stay on his record for two years. Smith committed no legal offence. He did not physically hurt anyone but in today’s Britain he is guilty of a thought crime by daring to indulge in religious satire. It is like a modern version of the Cromwellian regime that existed in the 17th century with its determination to crack down on any signs of heresy, only now the faith held to be sacred and inviolable is not Protestantism but Islam. In this new climate of creeping totalitarianism any mockery of the Muslim faith, even in private, will not be tolerated. The anachronistic law against blasphemy was meant to have been swept away in 2008 but the offence has returned with a vengeance due to the accelerating Islamification of Britain. Louis Smith has effectively been treated as a blasphemer against Islam and is now forced to undergo public penitence for his sins. He was hauled up in front of ITV’s Loose Women, who had decided to appoint themselves as the guardians of the new official orthodoxy. One panellist, TV presenter June Sarpong, was ferocious in her condemnation, accusing Smith of racism, xenophobia and prejudice. But this goes to the heart of the problem with this case. His critics pretend that any kind of criticism of Islam is a form of racism or bigotry. In the same vein Muslim leaders constantly talk of “Islamophobia” if any of their religious sensitivities are challenged. But Islam is not a race, it is a belief system, and like all faiths it should be open to questioning, censure or humour. The idea that any religion, especially one as controversial as Islam, should be above debate is repugnant. Religious freedom is one of the cornerstones of our civilisation. The alternatives are absolutist theocracy and violent sectarianism, precisely the characteristics of too many Muslim societies in the Middle East and Asia. In the wake of the Louis Smith incident the Muslim Council of Britain predictably bleated about “Islamophobia”, arguing that British society must “realise the need for people to follow their faith with dignity”. The council should also recognise the need to abide by the values of our country, one of which is open discourse free from clerical tyranny. It is disgraceful that British Gymnastics, like so many other craven public authorities, is eager to do the work of the zealots. By punishing Smith they are effectively endorsing the hardliners. The chief executive Jennie Allen said that competitors such as Smith and Carson should “use their profile to have a positive impact on sport and communities”. The implication is that athletes must suspend their own opinions and instead act as evangelists for the ruling doctrine of political correctness. Equally offensive are the grotesque double standards. British Gymnastics and the media would have never worked themselves up into such a froth of phoney indignation if Smith had mocked Catholic prayer rituals. In fact Christianity is subject to constant attacks and satire without any demands for disciplinary action. Joking about the Christian faith has long been a key ingredient of British comedy from Dave Allen to Father Ted. Nor does the state show much respect for Christian sensibilities, as highlighted by the case where a firm of devout bakers in Belfast was fined for refusing to make a cake with a political slogan in favour of gay marriage. The reason for this hypocrisy is simple: Islamic grievances and demands for special treatment come cloaked with the menace of violence. “Our religion will not be mocked” is a threat, not a plea. Tue, July 31, 2012 The intimidation is real, as shown by the relentless catalogue of global slaughter against those deemed to have offended Islam. But instead of defending our freedoms, Western rulers wallow in desperate appeasement dressed up as tolerance. The determination to punish Louis Smith is the flipside of officialdom’s impulse to surrender, as shown in the growing acceptance of sharia courts. As for Smith himself, he has embarked on a tour of abject repentance, visiting a number of mosques where he claims to have discovered “the true meaning behind the religion of peace”. In those words there is a chilling echo of the end of George Orwell’s novel 1984: “He had learnt to love Big Brother.”

Imagine spending your life not only in a cage but in a dark recess of someone’s basement. This was a reality for a poodle named B.B., who was rescued from a North Carolina puppy mill by animal workers with the Humane Society of the United States. When she was found last September, B.B. was tiny and had clearly been impregnated over and over again. “She was very tiny, and she looked like this helpless creature,” said Jessica Lauginiger, animal crimes manager at HSUS. Upon being rescued, B.B. was transported to Cabarrus Animal Hospital along with the animals. However, she captured the attention of Brenda Tortoreo, the establishment’s receptionist. Tortoreo told The Dodo: “B.B. was in a corner. She looked pitiful. She was scared to death… And I said, ‘That’s the one I’m going to take home.’” Because B.B. spent her entire life in a tiny cage, she didn’t know what to make sense of freedom at first. “I put B.B. down on the floor, and she kept going in circles — not running, but walking,” Tortoreo said. “I guess that’s all she knew to do. I put her in the living room, and to go into the hallway, she would not cross that border [between rooms]. I have two granddaughters who live with me, so I would put her in one of my granddaughters’ rooms, and she was terrified of rugs. She just wanted off the rug.” The puppy had never seen the sun, so that was new, as well. “She never knew what sun was,” Tortoreo explained. “She didn’t know what grass was, and she was terrified of it.” However, space, plenty of cuddles, and an excess of love have resulted in B.B. slowly understanding that her life before was anything but normal. “She runs around the house,” said Tortoreo. “She’s eating like crazy — she was originally about 3 and a half pounds, but I think she’s maybe about 10 pounds now. She loves the grass now, and she loves playing with the other dogs in the backyard.” “About three weeks ago she started licking me — she’d never done that before,” Tortoreo added. “She’s really come out of her shell. She’s my little princess.” What are your thoughts? Please comment below and share this news!

Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned Tuesday that sanctuary cities in the U.S. will lose millions in grant money if they do not comply with federal agents' efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. Sessions issued a statement announcing new requirements for local governments that wish to receive money from a federal grant program called the "Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Programs." The rules require local governments to alert the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at least 48 hours before releasing inmates from local jails who are wanted by DHS agents. It also requires local governments to allow DHS agents to enter local jails and interview inmates suspected of being undocumented immigrants. "So-called sanctuary policies make all of us less safe because they intentionally undermine our laws and protect illegal aliens who have committed crimes," Sessions said in his statement. "These policies also encourage illegal immigration and even human trafficking by perpetuating the lie that in certain cities, illegal aliens can live outside the law." "We must encourage these 'sanctuary' jurisdictions to change their policies and partner with federal law enforcement to remove criminals," Sessions added. Sessions has been a fierce advocate for cracking down on illegal immigration. "These long overdue requirements will help us take down MS-13 and other violent transnational gangs, and make our country safer," he said. The new requirements will apply to cities seeking grants starting in September.

SEATTLE - The Las Vegas Metro Police Department (NVMPD) released new body camera video on Friday from its investigation into the encounter with officers and Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett. Bennett in early September accused Las Vegas police of racially motivated excessive force, saying he was threatened at gunpoint and handcuffed following a report of gunshots at an after-hours club at a casino hotel. Bennett, who has recently remained seated during the national anthem prior to football games, posted a statement to Twitter detailing his side of the story. >> See photos here frame-by-frame from when Michael Bennett was put in the back of a police car The NVMPD first gave a news conference in early September about the accusations, saying there was no evidence Bennett was detained because of his race. On Friday, the sheriff reported no evidence of excessive force, and he showed the controversial interaction between Bennett and officers. According to the department, officers were investigating an active shooter call — which turned out to be false — and Bennett running quickly prompted a chase. The chase ended with the controversial encounter. Scroll down below to read expanded sections on what happened. Related coverage The Las Vegas Police Department has shared body camera video during a news conference of the scene that unfolded outside and inside the casino-hotel, The Cromwell and Drai Nightclub, leading up to the incident with Bennett on August 27. The video shows officers responding to an active shooter call, which turned out to be false. According to police, a stanchion was knocked over during a fight, which prompted reports of a shooting. As officers investigated, patrons panicked as they tried to leave the building. Video shows people screaming and scrambling to get out of the casino and others trying to hide. See video of when chaos unfolded, and scroll down to keep reading. In the body camera video, officers can be heard telling people to leave casino. Thousands of people were in the area at the time of the active shooter call, according to police. Bennett was crouched down as officers approached, and then he quickly ran, and jumped over a ledge onto busy Flamingo Boulevard. This led officers to chase him and order him to the ground, police said. Watch the video of his interaction with officers while in the back of a police car below. Scroll down to read Bennett's letter. After digging into 861 tapes, police released new body camera video on Friday that showed officers putting Bennett in the back of the police car. Bennett is panicked, asking what he did wrong, and pleading to be let go. Sheriff Joe Lombardo said the video shows some claims that Bennett made were not true, such as a gun being held to his head. Lombardo said that while officers had a gun in hand while putting Bennett in cuffs, it was not directed at his head. As for the claims officers said they would, "blow his ******* head off," Lombardo reports his department found no evidence of that. Bennett wrote in his letter that he was visiting Las Vegas to watch the Mayweather-McGregor fight, and he was on the way to his hotel when he was detained. According to Bennett's statement, police ordered him to the ground at gunpoint, jammed a knee into his back and handcuffed him so tight that his fingers went numb. According to Bennett, one officer placed a gun near his head and warned him if he moved his would "blow his ******* head off." In his letter, Bennett called it an excessive use of force, simply because he was a "black man in the wrong place at the wrong time." Read his full letter below, and scroll down to watch video of part of the encounter. A brief video obtained by TMZ Sports surfaced just hours after the letter. It showed part of the encounter between police and Bennett, where he lay on the ground as an officer puts him in handcuffs. “I wasn’t doing nothing, man,” Bennett is heard saying in the video. “They told us to get out and everybody ran.” Bennett's attorney, John Burris in Oakland, California, said he believed the TMZ 30-second video clip showed some of how his client was treated. "We think there was an unlawful detention and the use of excessive force, with a gun put to his head," Burris told The Associated Press. "He was just in the crowd. He doesn't drink or do drugs. He wasn't in a fight. He wasn't resisting. He did nothing more or less than anyone in the crowd." Burris said Bennett waited to make public his account of the incident until after Burris contacted Las Vegas police last week by letter and email, seeking police records of Bennett's detention. In addition to explaining the events leading up to the encounter, police commented on social media commentary that the detention was motivated by race. “Many of the folks ... have called this an incident of biased-based policing … police officers focused solely on the race of an individual … I can tell you as I stand here today I see no evidence of that,” said NVMPD Undersheriff Kevin McMahill. "In fact as you may have noticed, while officers were searching the casino they were able to evacuate many patrons of all races. It’s also important for me to note to you both of the officers involved in this incident in question are of Hispanic origin," McMahill said. McMahill invited Bennett and his legal team to make a formal statement to the officers. According to McHill, after his detention, Bennett told officers that he understood the events that led to the incident. He did mention to police that he had an issue with the officer who held a gun to his head. In their second news conference, Lombardo commended the officers for following their training, and he called them heroic for running into a possible active shooter situation. One of the officers involved in the incident did not have his body camera activated. Bennett is one of the 200 NFL players who didn’t participate in the national anthem over the weekend in the wake of President Donald Trump suggesting the NFL bar players from kneeling in protest. The entire Seahawks team also didn’t participate during the anthem and sat out in the lockerroom before their game against the Tennessee Titans. Over the last year, Bennett has been a leader of the national anthem protests started by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Before President Trump’s comments on the NFL, Bennett gave this reason for his protesting: “I have always held the strong conviction that protesting or standing up for justice is just simply the right thing to do. This fact is unequivocally, without question, why before every game, I sit during the national anthem – because equality doesn’t live in this country, and no matter how much money you make, what job title you have or have much you give, when you are seen as a ‘n*****,' you will be treated that way." Pete Carroll supports his players and Bennett. At a news conference on Monday, Carroll told reporters he understands why people are upset with the protests, but he hopes that they listen. "It is not about denigration of the flag or our country," Carroll said. "We all can learn what we want to learn out of this, but I hope we learn about empathy." © 2018 Cox Media Group.

This question is entirely rhetorical because the BBC and its crew of analysts and right-on comedians have told us already: America will be engulfed by a tidal wave of sexism, racism and xenophobia; the dollar will collapse and with it the global economy; by the end of his first week Trump will be so drunk with power that he’ll make a clumsy pass at some White House intern, miss and accidentally press the red button which triggers a nuclear war… Call me an optimistic fool but I don’t believe any of this nonsense. Not only do I think that a Donald Trump presidency would be far less disastrous than a Hillary Clinton one but I’d even suggest – albeit cautiously – that the world might become a better, safer, more prosperous place. Let me stress that Donald Trump is by no means my dream candidate for the post of the next leader of the free world. I perfectly well accept that he is a vulgar, rude, bullying, ignorant, sexist chancer who entered the presidential race on a whim and may end up getting the job only by default. But Donald Trump has at least two massive qualities in his favour. The first is that he is not Hillary, a corrupt, ailing serial fibber with a dubious track record (from the Whitewater financial scandal to Benghazi, where her negligence may have resulted in the murder of the US ambassador) and a snooty contempt for the law demonstrated most by the FBI investigation into her hidden emails. And the second is that he is not a paid up member of the Washington DC establishment. Trump, not unlike Nigel Farage, is the voice of the ordinary bloke or woman who has had just about enough of the remote, spoilt, anti-democratic political elite. Yes, America is a very different place from Britain but there are definitely echoes in the US presidential campaign of the tensions which led so many of us to vote for Brexit. While America’s rich have got richer, living standards for its working folk have remained stagnant for decades. This is at least in part because of a cosy stitch-up between the governing elite – lawyers, corporations, politicians and the overmighty US central bank the Federal Reserve – which has entrenched its own power by making it almost impossible for those lower down to climb the ladder. Adding to these financial pressures are the frustrations caused by mass illegal immigration and also by the liberal elite’s obsession with political correctness, which has led to a woefully bad state education system, an increase in Islamist terrorism and a burning sense of injustice, especially among blue-collar Americans that they can’t speak their minds and that their country is no longer their own. Trump’s proposed solutions – build a wall on the Mexican border to stop immigration, ban Muslims(!), protect American jobs with tariff barriers on imports, hammer the Federal Reserve, stop wasting gazillions of dollars pretending to “combat” climate change – may be impetuous and in some cases extreme. But the point is here at last is a politician bold enough to address the real and pressing problems that most of his contemporaries have preferred to brush under the carpet. While Obama has fiddled during his eight years as president the world has burned: the Middle East crisis has worsened; terrorism has proliferated; Russia and China have flexed their muscles; the eurozone has stagnated; the refugee problem has got out of control; and almost nothing has been done to address the underlying economic problems that led to the 2008 crash. If Hillary gets in, it will be more of the same. Trump on the other hand is a radical who might actually press the reset button. Tue, November 8, 2016 Take Russia: for the Washington establishment it’s the world’s biggest geopolitical threat with Putin being painted as the new Stalin. But Trump just isn’t interested in prolonging the Cold War, let alone provoking a Third World War. He sees Putin as a flawed man with whom he can nonetheless do business. This will appal those who just want to focus on Putin’s human rights record but may come as a relief to those who would prefer to have Russia as an awkward ally rather than as a belligerent, chippy basket case on Europe’s doorstep. Let’s hope this strategy works because one of the bigger worries about Trump is his view on Nato: he has even suggested – against Nato policy – that if one of its member states were attacked, America wouldn’t necessarily go to its defence. This is one of those areas where you have to hope that the wiser counsels of his advisers will prevail. That said, it would be no bad thing if Trump’s remarks about Nato members failing to pull their weight were to concentrate the minds of European governments, ours included, on the woeful neglect of our defence budgets. No one is pretending that Trump is the dream presidential candidate but then we’ve just had eight years of the “dream” one – or so the slavish liberal media kept telling us – and he was useless. Maybe the time has come for someone who really does want to make America great again. And if we’re lucky perhaps a little bit of that optimism will rub off on the rest of us too.

After another week of violence and mayhem, it's clear Hillary Clinton's controversial assessment of Trump's fans was, well, generous.

The NFL‘s position after commissioner Roger Goodell‘s news conference Wednesday was clear: The league wants its players to stand for the national anthem. However, it appears there will be no rule passed to force that issue. Goodell had a news conference at the NFL’s fall meetings that lasted about 20 minutes and almost every question was related to the anthem and player protests. Goodell’s main talking point was that the NFL also will listen to its players about social issues and wants to be a part of the solution. Everyone was focused on what will happen at NFL games with the national anthem, which has become the most divisive issue among fans that the league has seen in a long time. “We believe everyone should stand for the anthem,” Goodell said. “That’s an important part of our policy, it’s also an important part of our game that we all take great pride in. It’s also important for us to honor our flag and our country and we think our fans expect us to do that.” The best outcome for the NFL would be for the players to stop protesting without the league making a rule change. Goodell sounded like the league hopes that if it keeps working with its players to help with their issues, with racial equality and law enforcement reform, then perhaps the protests will end. “The fact is, we have about a half a dozen players that are protesting,” Goodell said. “We hope and we’re going to continue to work to try to put that at zero. That’s what we’d like to do. But we want to make sure we’re understanding what the players are talking about, and that’s complex.” The number Goodell cited seems low, considering seven San Francisco 49ers players alone took a knee for last Sunday’s anthem, and as many as 30 49ers players were taking a knee two weeks ago. But it appeared he wanted to make it a point that it’s not as widespread of an issue as it is being made out to be. Goodell was asked why the NFL wouldn’t make it a rule to stand. New York Giants owner John Mara told the Daily News that the league has no plans to make a rule about standing for the anthem. “We believe our players should stand for the national anthem. That’s an important part of our game and our moments, and we believe in that,” Goodell said. “I think we also have to keep focus on this: We have about six or seven players involved in this protest at this point. This is something, what we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried to deal with the underlying issue and understand what it is they’re protesting and try to address that matter. The important thing for us is to be able to do that and take that opportunity to make real differences in our community. That is really what’s ultimately going to be the important aspect for us long term. Because this is a long-term issue. “I understand the way our fans feel about this issue, and we feel the same way about the importance of our flag, the importance of patriotism, and I believe our players feel that way. The will state to you and they have stated to everyone publicly, they’re not doing this in any way to be disrespectful to the flag, but they also understand how it’s being interpreted.” Goodell was also asked about the latest tweet from President Donald Trump about the NFL. The NFL has decided that it will not force players to stand for the playing of our National Anthem. Total disrespect for our great country! Goodell said he has not talked to Trump about the anthem issue. “We respect our country, respect our flag, respect our national anthem,” Goodell said. “I think you look at our clubs and what they do on a daily basis, look at our players and what they do and how they participate in that, we all feel very strongly about our country and our pride.”

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President Donald Trump is calling on NFL players once again to stand during the national anthem. He tweeted Saturday that players should stand on Sunday, saying they should respect the U.S. flag and country. More than 200 players either knelt or used other means as expressions of unity last weekend. NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said such actions are not a protest against the anthem or the flag. The players knelt last weekend in response to social injustice. Full teams, along with some team owners, linked arms either before or during the anthem. Three teams — Pittsburgh, Seattle and Tennessee — did not take the field until after the anthem. Very important that NFL players STAND tomorrow, and always, for the playing of our National Anthem. Respect our Flag and our Country! Trump had earlier called on NFL owners to fire players who didn't stand for the anthem. Previously, Trump also said National Football League team owners are "afraid of their players." Earlier this week, he called for action against those who kneel during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. Trump said he began criticizing the players because he has "so many friends that are owners." He added: "I think they are afraid of their players, if you want to know the truth, and I think it's disgraceful." The president spoke in an interview that aired Thursday on "Fox and Friends." He says "most people agree" with him. NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart called the president's statements "inaccurate." "I believe there was a statement our owners are afraid of our players and owners requested intervention by political leaders to kick this off," Lockhart said. "Those statements are not accurate." Trump has spent days attacking players who kneel during the anthem. He insists the NFL should require players to stand. Responding to Trump, hundreds more players have been sitting, kneeling, locking arms or remaining in locker rooms. If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL,or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect.... ...our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU'RE FIRED. Find something else to do! "The owners are clearly united in a sense that the attacks on the game, on the NFL, on the players were unfair and unfounded, and that there was unity among the group," Lockhart said, noting that about two-thirds of the 32 team owners were at league headquarters this week for committee meetings. "I think there was also a sentiment ... that the issues are being obscured and distorted by people with political agendas," Lockhart said. "I think they made it clear they support our players, but also support our country, the national anthem, the flag—all of the things some have suggested we don't." The Associated Press contributed to this report.

It will be only a matter of days before the Democratic Party press in America starts taking up the suggestion of Chancellor Merkel of Germany that we seek with North Korea a pact of appeasement like the one the Obama administration engineered with the ayatollahs at Iran. “I could imagine such a format being used to end the North Korea conflict,” Frau Merkel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Were Germany asked to participate, the chancellor warned, she would say yes “immediately.” This is a devilish demarche, coming, as it does, at a time when the American administration is seeking to demonstrate its resolve against North Korea’s atomic bomb program. Frau Merkel’s interview is calculated to short-circuit any refusal on President Trump’s part to certify Tehran’s compliance with the Obama-Khomeini pact. It is dog-whistling to the New York Times, which is no doubt scrambling to get aboard the Merkel appeasement. Let’s see if it can bring aboard Mr. Trump’s newest pal, Senator Schumer. New York’s senior senator, now the minority leader, played a double role in the drama on the Iran appeasement. Ostensibly he opposed the pact. Yet he refused to take a leading role in the fight against it, even when opponents sought to have have the pact itself put to a proper vote. In other words, he took a powder. That was all the more disappointing because it was clear that if the pact had been put to the Senate it would have been rejected. This point is acknowledged even by the Times, which concedes that the Iran pact was opposed in the Congress “overwhelmingly.” The Gray Lady suggests that “many critics now see its value,” though its editorial fails to name any such critics. Germany, of course, never gave a fig about what the Congress thought of the pact. And why should it have? The Obama administration took the unratified deal straight to the United Nations, where Ambassador Power voted against the Congress of her own country. “It’s presumptuous of some people to suspect that France, Russia, China, Germany, Britain ought to do what the Congress tells them to do,” Secretary of State Kerry snickered. President Putin must have loved that line. Frau Merkel, in any event, isn’t waiting for any formal nod in respect of what President Trump wants to do about the Iran deal — or about North Korea. She’s prepared to leap right into a negotiated settlement with Pyongyang that would, if Iran is any guide, leave its communist camarilla not only entrenched but richer to boot. This is a moment for President Trump to remember the 30 American states that lofted him to office. The platform on which he stood described the Iran deal as a “personal agreement” between President Obama and his negotiating partners. It described it as “non-binding on the next president.” Mr. Trump himself promised to “rip up” the agreement. That he has grounds to do so was underscored last week at Washington by his envoy at the United Nations, Governor Haley. She is a better tribune of American interests than Chancellor Merkel. receive the latest by email: subscribe to the new york sun's free mailing list

Some time back it was reported that an alert Maryland police officer saw an Islamic woman in an SUV videotaping a bridge’s support structures. He arrested the driver, Ismail Elbarasse—a Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood operative. An FBI raid on Elbarasse’s home unearthed a trove of Islamic doctrinal books and key Muslim Brotherhood documents—which became evidence in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history. Islam’s books are “the real bomb,” Muslim reformer Islam al-Behery said. Its ideology is “its blueprint” for world domination. A document from the Elbarasse raid outlines the Muslim Brotherhood’s phased plan to destroy Western civilization from within: Phase One: Secret establishment of leadership. Phase Two: Gradual public profile by infiltrating government, the judiciary, finance, intelligence, police, prisons, military, education and religious institutions. Phase Three: Escalation prior to conflict and confrontation with rulers using mass media. Phase Four: Publically confront the government using political pressure. Weapons training domestically and overseas in anticipation of zero-hour. Phase Five: Seize power to establish the Islamic state. Other documents outline the plan to replace the U.S. Constitution with sharia (Islamic law). Sharia is based on the Quran and other Islamic writings. Moderates see it a spiritual struggle, or outwardly observe it for fear of reprisal. But for radicals, sharia is the legal and political foundation for jihad and global rule, a power play to force Islam on the world. The D.C. based Center for Security Policy calls it a “totalitarian ideology” controlling all legal, political, military, economic and social life. No other laws or governments may coexist with sharia. It’s primarily political, not religious; though in America it masks itself as a religion to manipulate the First Amendment as a front for seditious activity. The Quran requires all Muslims to wage jihad (holy war) against infidels (non-Muslims). Jihad calls for multiple stages and platforms—violent and pre-violent. An Elbarasse memorandum calls the pre-violent “settlement process” in North America “civilization jihad” to destroy the Western way of life. In jihad’s final, violent stage, non-Muslims convert or die. Though jihad is obvious in North America and Europe, it’s not limited to the West. The phased plan is a template for radical Muslim subjugation. Indonesia, a secular, mostly moderate Muslim-majority democracy, is a case in point. Its motto, “Unity in Diversity” reflects its six religions and 300 ethnicities. Though religious parties’ gains in national elections have been paltry, locally elected Islamists passed more than 400 sharia ordinances, according to economist.com. Christian incumbent Basuki Tjahaja “Ahok” Purnama lost a recent governor’s race when radical Islamists told Muslim voters that Islam forbids voting for Christians. A video of Ahok’s rebuttal was edited to appear he was insulting the Quran. Charged with blasphemy, he lost the election and was sentenced to jail. Ahok’s conviction—accompanied by violent rallies and death threats, shows the chilling influence on pluralism by “hardline Islamism that the government and judiciary are reluctant to oppose,” said Time reporter Nicola Smith. In Indonesia, radical Islamists have advanced their plan for global dominance to Phase Four. Then there’s Iran, whose visceral anti-Semitism and poisonous ideology infuses jihad and sharia, but with a twist. The late Ayatollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sidestepped Shi’a believe that the Mahdi (12th Imam), a quasi-messianic figure, must return before waging jihad and adopted an ideology promoting a senior Shiite cleric to theocratic political power over Shiites worldwide. Khomeini offered himself as successor to the 12 Imams, thus “inheriting the mantle of leadership directly from Muhammad,” said expert Clare Lopez. Khomeini inserted his doctrine into the 1989 constitution, in which the regime’s objective is global conquest under sharia rule and nuclear dominance is a surefire path to achieve that goal. Iran and its proxies not only menace Israel’s existence and portend regional upheaval, the “bomb” of Islamist ideology threatens the lives and freedoms of every sovereign nation in the world. Reprinted with author’s permission from Jerusalem Post

With the end of his second term on the horizon, President Obama spoke to 60 Minutes this week, reflecting on his achievements -- and on the problems not yet solved. At the top of that list is the protracted crisis in Syria, where more than 250,000 people have died, according to UN reports, and some 12 million have been forced from their homes. Correspondent Steve Kroft asks President Obama about the lack of progress in Syria, but Obama says improvement takes time. "In a situation that is as volatile and with as many players as there are inside of Syria, there aren't any silver bullets," he says. One of those players, Kroft points out, is Russia, which recently stepped up airstrikes and naval bombardments in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. President Putin "is challenging your leadership, Mr. President," Kroft says. Obama disagrees. "Steve, I've got to tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally, is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership," he says. Kroft and Obama discuss domestic issues as well, including gun violence. At a press conference after last week's mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, Obama urged the country to do more to prevent these tragedies. In the unaired clip below, Kroft asks the president if he can personally make a difference. Obama acknowledges that his options are limited. "We are running out of administrative actions that could really move the needle in reducing gun violence in this country," he says. At the same time, he adds, "it is not realistic to think that this Congress will pass any common sense gun safety legislation." But that doesn't mean a public outcry can't effect change, Obama says. "The most important thing I can do right now is just to keep on lifting up the issue and saying, 'It doesn't have to be this way,'" he tells Kroft. "I genuinely believe that." The two-part interview also touches on the 2016 presidential race, and the candidates on both sides of the aisle. Kroft asks the president what he thinks of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. "He is, you know, the classic reality TV character," Obama says. "At these early stages, it's not surprising that he's gotten a lot of attention." As to whether that attention will evaporate, the president declines to speculate. "I'll leave it up to the pundits to make that determination," Obama says. "I don't think he'll end up being president of the United States." At different moments in the interview, the president turns reflective, taking stock of his time in office and eyeing the year ahead. In the unaired clip below, he tells Kroft that, at this point, he's learned to trust his instincts. "The nice thing about being a veteran in anything is your fear kind of goes away," he says. "There's no doubt I'm better at this job now than I was when I started." At the end of the interview, Kroft asks Obama if he's glad he can't run for president again. Obama says he feels a mixture of satisfaction at what he's accomplished and a desire to still do more. "But by the time I'm finished, I think it will be time for me to go," he says, adding that new blood in the White House is essential for a healthy democracy. "Do you think if you ran again, could run again, and did run again, you would be elected?" Kroft asks. "Yes," says Obama, without missing a beat.

“In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…. Today, Christopher Columbus is celebrated as a mythical hero by some – complete with songs, poems, and fictional tales about his great adventure across the Atlantic to explore the majestic land that would eventually be known as the Americas. There are fifty four communities named after the explorer in the United States, including the District of Columbia. “Hail, Columbia” was the United States’ unofficial national anthem until 1931. A federal holiday, “Columbus Day,” is celebrated every second Monday in October. Despite all of this, historians have begun to tear down the Columbus myth: That he discovered America. That he proved the world wasn’t flat. ( That had been well-known for more than a millennium in Columbus’ time. In fact, scholars had a pretty good idea of what the circumference of the Earth was, which was part of the dissent against Columbus making his trip- Columbus thought Asia was bigger than it is and the world much smaller, leading one of the scholars commissioned by the monarchy to investigate the plausibility of Columbus’ journey succeeding to say, it was “impossible to any educated person”). That he came to America in the name of exploration. And, finally, that he came in peace. Quite simply, most of these “facts” are unequivocally false or half-truths. Columbus sailed the ocean blue to look for wealth and, officially, in the name of Christianity. What he mostly did, though, was enslave and rape the natives he met, sold girls (as young as nine by his own account) into prostitution, and committed numerous acts so heinous that he was forcibly removed from power and sent back to Spain in chains. Christopher Columbus was brutal, even by the standards of his age, leading Bartolome de las Casa, who accompanied Columbus on one of his voyages, to write in his The History of the Indies, “Such inhumanities and barbarisms were committed in my sight as no age can parallel… My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature that now I tremble as I write.” In August 1492, Columbus departed Spain with three ships – the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Santa Clara (nicknamed “the Nina”). After two months on the high seas, land was spotted. Now, before they had left, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had promised to whoever spotted land first a reward of a silken jacket and an annuity of ten thousand maravedis. The lookout on the Pinta was Rodrigo de Triana and he was the first to spot land. He shouted to the rest of the crew down below, and the Pinta’s captain announced the discovery with cannon fire. When it came time to receive the reward though, Columbus claimed he actually saw a light in the distance several hours prior to Triana’s shout, “but it was so indistinct that I did not dare to affirm it was land.” The reward reportedly went to Columbus. Upon landing on the island, which he would call San Salvador (present-day Bahamas), Columbus immediately went to work finding gold and enslaving the native populations. Specifically, Columbus, upon seeing the Arawaks (the peoples of the region) come out of the forests frightened of the men with swords, but bearing gifts, wrote in his journal, They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. As other European visitors would observe, the Arawaks were legendary for their hospitality and their desire to share. Again saying Columbus about the Arawaks, “are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.” Columbus quickly took advantage of this. Seeing that they wore gold studs in their ears, he rounded up of a number of Arawaks and had them lead him to where gold was. The journey took them to present day Cuba and Haiti (but Columbus thought it was Asia), where they found specks of gold in the river, but not the enormous “fields” Columbus was expecting. Nonetheless, he wrote back to Spain saying that, “There are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals.” This report earned him financing for a second voyage, this time with 13 ships and twelve hundred men. While he never ended up filling up these ships with gold, he filled them with another “currency” and one that would have a horrendous effect on the world going forward – slaves. In 1495, Columbus arrived back in the New World and immediately took 1500 Arawaks as prisoners. Of those 1500, he picked 500 to be shipped back to Spain as slaves (about two hundred died on the journey back), starting the transatlantic slave trade. The rest were forced to find what little gold existed in the region. According to noted historian Howard Zinn, anyone over 14 had to meet a gold quota. If they didn’t find enough gold, they would have their hands cut off. Eventually, when it was realized there wasn’t much gold in the region, Columbus and his men just took the rest as slaves and put them to work on their newly established estates in the region. Many natives died and their numbers dwindled. In the 15th century, modern historians believe there were about 300,000 Arawaks. By 1515, there were only 50,000 left. By 1531, 600 and by 1650, there were no longer any full-blooded Arawaks left on the islands. The way Columbus and his men treated the women and children of these populations was even worse. Columbus routinely used the raping of women as a “reward” for his lieutenants. For example, here’s an account from one of Columbus’ friends and compatriots, Michele de Cuneo, who accompanied Columbus on his second journey to the New World, on what Michele did to a native “Carb woman.” Michele wrote that, While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of whores… Going further, Columbus wrote in a letter from 1500, A hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand. As illustrated in a recently discovered 48 page report found in the Spanish archives written by Francisco De Bobadilla (charged with investigating Columbus’ rule at the behest of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who were troubled by allegations of some of Columbus’ acts), a woman who verbally insulted Columbus’ family was stripped naked and made to ride around the colony on a mule. After the trip was done, her tongue was cut out by the order of Columbus’ brother, Bartolomé, who Columbus then congratulated for successfully defending the family’s honor. Needless to say, these and numerous other such acts ultimately resulted in De Bobadilla having Columbus removed from power and sent back to Spain in chains. After Columbus came, and was forced out, the Spaniards continued his policy of enslavement and violence. In 1552, the Spanish historian and friar Bartolome de las Casas published multiple volumes under the title The History of Indies. In it, he described the collapse of the non-European population. Casas writes that when the men were captured and forced to work in mines looking for gold, rarely if ever returning home, it significantly impacted the birth rate. If a woman did give birth, she would be so overworked herself and malnourished, that she often could not produce enough milk for the baby. He even reported that some of the women “drowned their babies from sheer desperation.” There are lot more examples, writings, and research that points to one fact – Christopher Columbus was a lamentable individual. Nobody’s perfect- if we restricted celebrated individuals to those who didn’t have any major flaws, we’d have few humans to celebrate- and it’s extremely important to view things in the context of the time individuals lived in. But even in his age, many of his acts were considered deplorable by his peers, which is in no small part why Columbus was arrested for his conduct in the New World. Combined with his truly historic and widespread impact being incidental to what he was actually trying to do (so a little hard to celebrate him for even that side of his life), maybe it is time that we let go of the myths we learned about Christopher Columbus in elementary school and stop celebrating Columbus, the man. If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show ( iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as: Bonus Fact: Expand for References

As seen on Fox & Friends Former FBI Asst. Director: Original Clinton Probe 'Not a Real Investigation' Fmr CNN Executive Reacts to Donna Brazile-Hillary Debate Question Leak On "Fox & Friends" this morning, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) reacted to the "unbelievable tragedy" of two Iowa police officers being gunned down in their squad cars. "The assault on our law enforcement professionals in this country is out of control," Flynn said. He said that the leadership in our country needs to come out and say, "This has got to end." Flynn, a Donald Trump supporter, said that the law enforcement community is reaching out to the Republican presidential nominee because he's willing to speak up on their behalf. "This is just another tragedy, another example of the lack of safety that we have in our streets and in our country for these police officers." What do you think? Let us know in the comments. What Did Clinton Campaign Chair Mean By 'Dump Emails' Before Subpoena? Krauthammer: Clinton 'Drowning in Cumulative Effect' of WikiLeaks, FBI Probe Gutfeld on Clinton 'Sexism': Hillary 'Looks Out for Only Herself'

Mike Vanderjagt's brief run as a middle-school soccer coach is on the ropes. The former Indianapolis Colts kicker has been suspended from that role after a March incident in which Vanderjagt allegedly grabbed a student by the throat at Charter Middle School in Marco Island, Fla. The Naples Daily News reported Thursday that Vanderjagt, a school parent, was investigated by police for attacking a student who taunted him with cries of "wide left, wide left" through a rolled-up piece of poster board doubling as megaphone. Flashback: Vanderjagt missed a game-changing field goal attempt at the end of the Colts' AFC Divisional playoff loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in January 2006. According to police, Vanderjagt was crossing the school's parking lot when he heard the taunts. The student told authorities the former kicker "walked up to him, grabbed him by the throat and started cursing at him." Vanderjagt told police he simply placed his hand on the child's shoulder. He claimed a mouthy band of students had been issuing the insults for months. Vanderjagt admitted growing tired of the taunts. Police went so far as to file the incident with the State Attorney's office, which ruled that no charges would be issued against Vanderjagt. He has apologized to the student and currently awaits word from the school's principal about his coaching future. In the meantime, this former NFL kicker is running a pizza joint on Marco Island. Strange days, indeed.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KCRA) — California is now one step closer to becoming sanctuary state. The Assembly Judiciary Committee approved Senate Bill 54 on Wednesday along party lines -- with eight Democrats voting in favor and three Republicans opposed. Under the proposed bill, ICE agents would be prohibited from entering county jails unless they have a warrant. Get the full story in the video above.

Much of the ugliness we see on the Left today is embodied in groups like Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA. Both groups think they are oppressed, both are obsessed with identity politics, and both are steeped in Marxist ideologies. You’d think that they would get along just fine but that’s not the case. People who have their identities wrapped up in victimhood are narcissistic by nature. They want the spotlight at all times, and can’t stand to see someone else hog it. So it was probably just a matter of time before these two groups clashed.

Remember when we told you how an injured officer sued the Black Lives Matter movement and DeRay McKesson after getting shot by Gavin Long in the infamous July 17, 2016 attack in Dallas? The cop, who only goes by John Doe Smith, was shot in the head and through the intestine during the attack that claimed two police lives and wounded several others. He blamed Black Lives Matter for their presence on the scene “inciting violence” to cause Gavin to snipe the cops, and sought damages to the tune of $75,000 for his surgery bills. The thing is… Black Lives Matter is a movement, not a specified group of people or a business. So there’s really no one in particular to sue. According to TMZ, the judge ultimately dismissed the case due to the fact that BLM is a social movement, and McKesson as an individual was only using his first amendment right by appearing at the protest — not inciting anyone to commit any acts of violence. It’s truly unfortunate what happened to his officer, but you can’t blame the peaceful protestors on the scene exercising their rights for the reckless actions of one disturbed individual. WENN/Getty

Sex-trafficking is happening in nearly every city and in every state in the U.S. In an all-new Crime Watch Daily in-depth investigation, we take you inside the epidemic that has exploded in recent years. Human trafficking is defined in the simplest terms as the exploitation of another person through force, fraud or coercion. The average age of trafficking victims entering the sex trade world is 13 years old. According to Mary Mazzio's documentary I Am Jane Doe, there are more than 1.6 million homeless or runaway kids on the streets of America, and up to 15 percent of them have fallen victim to sex-trafficking. "That's hundreds of thousands of children every day, and that's only the homeless and runaway population," said Mazzio. HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN LOS ANGELES Crime Watch Daily rode along with a group of undercover deputies from the L.A. County Sheriff's Department as they busted men looking to hook up with underage girls. TRAFFICKING IN HOUSTON In Houston, Texas, one woman is tackling the problem from a very different angle. She's not a sex worker -- not anymore. "I know what it's like to be more afraid to go home than you are to get in a car with a stranger," said former trafficking victim Rebecca Bender. Bender become a victim for nearly six years, traded between three different traffickers in all. She says it was only after police busted her trafficker for tax evasion that she was able to finally break free. But it would take years to get her life back on track. After a decade free from the life, Rebecca Bender is about to go back on the streets, posing as a sex worker to expose just how big the problem may be in your town. TRAFFICKING DELUNA Much like the heroin epidemic we are now facing, sex-trafficking is a massive problem in the United States. These are not just women being brought in from other countries. We're talking about teens, or even younger, being recruited from middle schools and high schools in just about every city in America. So far we've taken you undercover on sex-trafficking stings and you've see some cities that have become sex-slave hubs. Crime Watch Daily interviews a young woman lured into the sex-trade world and how it's now landed her in prison doing serious time. Lizette Deluna ran from abuse at home into the arms of a sex-trafficker. Now she's in prison in Texas, convicted of trafficking herself. How did she get there? She share her journey exclusively with Crime Watch Daily. TRAFFICKING IN DEKALB COUNTY Crime Watch Daily teams up with law enforcement agencies all over the country who are cracking down on the illegal sex trade business. On the streets of Georgia, we encountered an alleged pimp that was more than happy to talk to us. TARGETING ONLINE CLASSIFIED ADVERTISING No matter where we went, there seemed to be one name that kept coming up: Backpage.com. Operating in more than 900 cities worldwide, the online classifieds website commands, by some estimates, more than 80 percent of all online sex ad revenues. And it's through those ads that many allege the company has knowingly permitted the sale of underage children. "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has stated that at least 73 percent of all reports to them, of online sex trafficking, where does it happen? Backpage.com," said I Am Jane Doe filmmaker Mary Mazzio. Just recently, under pressure from the U.S. Senate, Backpage did shut down its adult section in the United States. The company itself may be worth more than $500 million, and by some estimates, 99 percent of that global income comes from illicit ads. For their part, Backpage claims no responsibility for what they call third-party content. But in a series of new civil suits brought by former victims, attorney Erik Bauer claims Backpage actually helped edit the ads to make them appear more legitimate. Not long ago, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer, along with former owners Michael Lacey and James Larkin were actually brought up on pimping charges by former California Attorney General and current U.S. Senator Kamala Harris. Crime Watch Daily Correspondent Melissa McCarty was there during their latest arraignment. They ignored our questions, but considering the serious nature of the charges, we had to keep trying. The judge granted Crime Watch Daily exclusive access inside the courtroom for the proceedings, where ultimately the defense requested a delay. While they wait for the next hearing, Carl Ferrer is released on a $500,000 bond, while Larkin and Lacey get out on $250,000 bonds. "We have lost all common sense," said Mary Mazzio. "If you had a site that said 'Murder for Hire,' do you seriously think the American public would stand for that, that a federal jurist would stand for that? But because it's prostitution, it's 'Pretty Woman,' it's the victimless crime, it's the world's oldest profession, you know what -- not that big of a deal." So is there a solution? Can awareness alone help stop the problem? And just how many more lives will be stolen for sex? RESCUING A TRAFFICKED DAUGHTER The parent and the pimp. How far will one dad go to rescue his girl from the clutches of a criminal? "Say no to drugs. Stay in school." These are the things brad smith thought to teach his daughter. But there was one threat that never even crossed his mind. This is not a victimless crime. And to all the "johns" out there feeding the illegal sex trade, you can be sure that law enforcement and Crime Watch Daily will not stop until you are in handcuffs. RESOURCES The National Child Traumatic Stress Network has resources for mental health professionals, law enforcement personnel, health care professionals, and survivors on the signs of trafficking and services for human trafficking survivors. Children of the Night is a privately funded non-profit organization established in 1979 and dedicated to rescuing America’s children from the ravages of prostitution. GenerateHope provides a safe place for survivors of sex trafficking to be restored through long-term housing, healing, psychotherapy and education. Since recovery from sexual exploitation is a long-term process, GenerateHope provides individualized support to work through past trauma until the women reach the ability to live independently and become a positive influence on their communities and future generations. Help fight trafficking by uploading photos of your hotel room. These photos will be used to determine where perpetrators of sex trafficking are committing their crimes. #HumanTrafficking #SexTrafficking #SexCrimes #SexualAssault #Prostitution #Rape

President Donald Trump's nominee for federal judge in Alabama was just approved by every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee — even though he was unanimously rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association. Brett J. Talley is 36 years old, has only practiced law for three years and made a series of partisan comments on his blog in 2016 that would normally be considered unbecoming of a judge, like referring to the Democratic presidential candidate as "Hillary Rotten Clinton," according to the Los Angeles Times. Although Talley does have degrees from the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School and clerked for two federal judges, he has never argued a motion, making it nearly unprecedented for him to be considered as a candidate for a lifetime appointment. One of Talley's most controversial statements was a blog post in which he claimed that President Barack Obama was "about to launch the greatest attack on our constitutional freedoms in our lifetime." He added, "The object of that war is to make guns illegal, in all forms." After a commenter wrote that Americans would "resort to arms when our other rights — of speech, press, assembly, representative government — fail to yield the desired results," Talley said he agreed with him. When asked about these statements by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Talley said he was merely "trying to generate discussion. I wanted people to be able to use my blog to discuss issues, to come together and find common ground." The president has directly praised Talley as being an "untold story" that "nobody wants to talk about." "When you think of it, Mitch [McConnell] and I were saying, that has consequences 40 years out, depending on the age of the judge," Trump said in October. "But 40 years out." One other factor that may have contributed to Talley's nomination: He was mentored by Sen. Luther Strange of Alabama and worked in the Justice Department office that chooses judicial nominees. Talley isn't the only Trump judicial nominee who has been the subject of raised questions. Charles Goodwin, who was nominated to the federal bench in Oklahoma, was the first judicial nominee since 2006 to receive a "not qualified" label from the American Bar Association. Jeff Mateer, who was nominated to the federal bench in Texas, aroused controversy by referring to transgender children as proof of "Satan’s plan" and denounced the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage as "disgusting." John Bush, who was confirmed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote a blog post arguing that slavery and abortion were the "two greatest tragedies in our country."

And the Trump chronicles continue. Presidential hopeful Donald Trump said he supports creating a mandatory database to track Muslims in the United States. “I would certainly implement that. Absolutely,” Trump, 69, told NBC News between campaign events on Thursday in Newton, Iowa. “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems.” When asked by the reporter whether Muslims would be legally obligated to register in the database, the business mogul responded: “They have to be. They have to be. ” He said that the country’s Muslims would register for the database at “different places,” adding, “It’s all about management.” The comments come less than a week after terrorists wreaked havoc on the French capital, taking the lives of at least 129 people and injuring more than 300 others in a series of coordinated attacks. The attacks have prompted calls for new restrictions on accepting Syrian refugees. On Thursday, the House passed a bill to drastically tighten screening procedures on Syrian refugees, requiring key national security agencies to determine whether each Iraqi and Syrian refugee poses a threat, CNN reports. The White House vowed that President Barack Obama would veto the bill. Trump’s recent comments stem from an earlier interview with Yahoo News on Thursday in which he did not reject the idea of requiring Muslims in the U.S. to register into a database or present a special ID that noted their religion. “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” the 69-year-old said. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations criticized the candidate for the comments in a statement on Thursday, and a council spokesman told NBC, “We’re kind of at a loss for words,” adding that the database plan is comparable to that of prewar Nazi Germany. However, when a reporter asked Trump about the difference between Muslim databases and requiring Jews to register in Nazi Germany, Trump replied, “You tell me.” He did not answer when asked what consequences would be implemented for Muslims who refused to register. He later denied responding to questions regarding a potential Muslim database at all, adding that he didn’t “know where you heard that.” Trump isn’t the only Republican to come under fire regarding comments made after the Paris attacks. Ben Carson is facing criticism for comparing blocking Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. to protecting a child from a “rabid dog.” Meanwhile, GOP hopeful Ted Cruz has said that Obama is endangering the safety of Americans by allowing Syrian Muslim refugees to enter the U.S. However, he says, America should provide a “safe haven” for Christian refugees. He added that the U.S. would need to “vet anyone coming in,” a practice the White House called a “religious test,” CNN reports.

Sebastian Gorka, who served seven months as deputy assistant to President Trump, alongside former chief strategist Steve Bannon, sat down with Circa to talk about his time in the White House, the "deep state," the future of Trump's Make America Great Again agenda and the Washington, D.C. "bureaucratic swamp." Question and Answer with Sebastian Gorka: Sara Carter: There's a lot of supporters who are concerned now that with the departure of both you and Mr. Steve Bannon, that the MAGA (Make America Great Again) agenda is gone. Is that true? Sebastian Gorka: No, not at all. I know a lot of people are worried, a lot of people that, from the base felt that November the 8th was politically a revolutionary moment. The fact that Steve left and then a week later I resigned, I always tell people "relax." Count to 10. Take a deep breath. Whether or not the president's agenda succeeds isn't a function of where I sit or where Steve has an office. The president's supporters aren't just individuals who have to be inside the White House. They can be on the outside. And what, what a lot of Steve's critics didn't understand, who celebrated his resignation, Steve today is more powerful than he's ever been. It's like that scene from "Star Wars" when Ben Kenobi gets slain by Darth Vader. I will be more powerful than you can ever imagine. Steve Bannon is now the most powerful man outside of the Oval Office in America. I'm not joking, he is, because there are things you can do, legal things -- OK, relax Huffington Post -- there are legal things that you can do as a private citizen that you cannot do as a government employee. Sara Carter: But then access to the president, that's also very important? Sebastian Gorka: Yes. Sara Carter: So when you're not in the White House, you're outside the White House, how does that affect access? Sebastian Gorka: OK. I'm not gonna give away any inside baseball, but let me give you an example. When I was deputy assistant to the president, I'd walk in and out of the Oval Office and I'd regularly see people like Corey Lewandowski, I'd see Dave Bossie in the Oval [Office] with the President. Now, neither of those individuals had a government ID card, neither of them worked for the White House, but they were in there with the president and I can assure you they weren't talking about the weather. So, one thing to know about the president, he is very loyal to those who have been loyal to him. And the idea that you can isolate Donald J. Trump from people he trusts who don't happen to be inside the building is, of course, absurd. So, the President talks to lots of different people and several of them do not work for the White House. So relax. View the slideshow Sara Carter: This brings me to your resignation letter. Sebastian Gorka: Yes. Sara Carter: In your resignation letter you state that there are people ascendant within the White House that do not support the President's MAGA agenda? Explain that, and who are these people? Sebastian Gorka: OK, so first things first, I'd like to try and explain what was special about November the 8th. And if you remember, there was a film, a great John Milius film called "Red Dawn" in the 80s about the Soviet Cuban invasion of America and the resistance that American patriots put up to it. The president of the United States won against the whole establishment on November the 8th. He was just accidentally the GOP's candidate. He had nothing to do with the swamp, nothing to do with the GOP, nobody took him seriously when he announced and what did he do? He proceeded to wipe the floor with 16 establishment GOP candidates and then defeat a woman who'd officially spent $700 million on a position she thought was owed to her. This is the rank outsider. So what happened on November the 8th? It's like the wolverines from Red Dawn, a scrappy bunch of insurgents defeated the mighty empire that is the swamp. As a result, when we moved into the White House, Steve, myself, the president, it was the most leveraged, hostile takeover in political history in the modern age. Because it was a small group of people that came in to run the largest government in the run. Sorry, if you add the armed forces, millions of employees. So, what happened is a natural event. In the intervening months, the establishment figures reacted to the antibodies that represent the MAGA agenda and boxed us out, tried to cut us out of the policy agenda. Fired a lot of the more junior people in the NSC. That's the point at which Steve and then later I realized look, uh, this is about eight years of President Trump and then eight years of President Pence. We have to think about the long game. And if right now we're being undermined internally, what we do is we go on the outside and we support the agenda from the outside. That's why I became the chief strategist for the Make America Great Again Coalition. That's why Steve is doing all kinds of things right now. That's why I predict that in the near future, before Christmas probably, there will be some very high-level personnel changes in the White House that are driven by the president. It's important to know, apart from [Robert] Mueller -- he's a holdover, ignore him -- every single, high-ranking or, or less than high-ranking firing in the last eight months was not driven by the president. OK? All those people fired from the NSC, [Anthony] Scaramucci, these were people who were fired by people other than the president. I think the president already realizes he's being given bad advice on key issues. The Alabama race tells you everything you need to know. And now he's going to get rid of some people who aren't on message and have nothing to do with the original agenda. Take the quiz! Sara Carter: Would one of those people happen to be Secretary of State [Rex] Tillerson? Sebastian Gorka: The President reached out to me the day after I resigned. He thanked me for my service. He said he is gonna stick to the agenda and he'd like me to support him from the outside. That's exactly what I'm doing. One of the things I promised myself I wouldn't do is attack individual members of the cabinet who aren't part of the agenda. So, I'm not gonna talk about individuals just yet, but I'll talk about principles and the fact is, um, Tucker Carlson had a segment after Steve left the White House that I think is crucial to understanding the reality of what's going on in the West Wing. I don't think Tucker Carlson is a big fan of Steve Bannon or Breitbart, I may be wrong, but he said one very trenchant thing. He said, "Whatever you think about Steve Bannon, there's one thing that's certain. He would not be at home in a White House under Hillary Clinton." There are people in the administration of Donald J. Trump who not only would have been at home in a Hillary Clinton White House, they would have been cabinet members in a Hillary White House. So that's the current problem, but again, relax. It's a temporary state of affairs. Sara Carter: So the president is surrounded, in your opinion, by some people that would have been comfortable in a Hillary Clinton White House and may be pushing those agendas? Sebastian Gorka: The president has this sense, and I guarantee you right now, he knows who around him is now consistently giving him bad advice and sooner or later he will make decisions to remove those people from around him. Sara Carter: Explain the "deep state." Sebastian Gorka: I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the phrase "deep state." I love conspiracy theories but only as entertainment. There's a reason they're called theories. Conspiracy theories kill critical thought. I prefer the phrase "the deep state." The deep state isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a real thing. Let me give you an example. So, I didn't work in the NSC, I worked for Steve. I was a strategist in the office, or the chief strategist to the president. But because of my national security portfolio, I attended regular classified meetings with the NSC on whatever issue it was. The Qatar crisis, the ISIS plan, you name it. And a pattern developed in these meetings which is really disturbing and explains the permanent state. You're sitting in, a White House meeting that is the pinnacle of policy making in the most powerful nation in the world. The NSC makes national security policy. There's nothing above it apart from, you know, the President and his National Security Advisor. You sit there for an hour, an hour-and-a-half, with key members of the NSC, invited guests from the CIA, DIA, outstations from the Pentagon, you name it. And for 90 minutes on a key issue, you didn't hear the name of the president. You didn't hear mention of the president's strategic objectives, and you didn't hear mention of what he said yesterday in Warsaw or Riyadh. And it would be up to me, the guy with the funny accent, after 90 minutes to say, "Uh, hey guys. Did you hear what the President said yesterday in Riyadh about ISIS? Did you hear what the President said about NATO in Warsaw?" This is what the president wants to achieve and we're all gonna be on message, right? So what I saw is that the swamp isn't Capitol Hill. A lot of people think the swamp is the political professional class of congressmen and women. The swamp is much more. The professional bureaucratic class in America that believes that they know better than the president elected by the people of America to run this country. A GS14, a GS15 who's been at State Department or CIA for 20 years and thinks, "Oh, I, I've been doing this for so long. I don't care what the president says about Qatar, we need to do this. I don't care what the President says about X, Y, Z, we need to do this." That undermines American democracy and that's the permanent state, and that's what we have to push back on if democracy is to thrive in America. Related Stories: Former WH strategist, Sebastian Gorka, hit back at the 'fake news industrial complex' Sebastian Gorka resigned from his position in the White House View the slideshow

“They’ve forgotten about us.” I don’t remember where I heard this, perhaps somewhere in the small town of Blacksburg, Virginia, but the context was definitely political. The IRS is always out to get our money – of course the government hasn’t forgotten about us, right? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the meaning behind that statement. Since the founding days of the United States, a problem has always been the power balance between small states and big states. Presently, this has evolved into the local balance between rural areas and urban areas. I remember hearing in government class how just a dozen or so of the largest cities in the United States could swing the popular vote to one political party and realizing just how valuable the electoral college is to modern politics. There’s no simple alternative to balancing out protecting the interests of the rural minority and forwarding those of the urban majority. From the U.S. Census: “Rural areas cover 97 percent of the nation’s land area but contain 19.3 percent of the population.” This is a huge disparity; how can state governments look out for rural counties when urban counties dominate the political sphere? For many in southwestern Virginia, it seems that politicians are always subverting rural interests in favor of the dense, northern urban areas. Even the President and many other conservatives use this idea of rural areas being left out to win votes. From his always-rambunctious Twitter account, Trump proclaimed: “The Democrats in the Southwest part of Virginia have been abandoned by their Party. Republican Ed Gillespie will never let you down!” In a time of great change and technology around the globe, sometimes it can feel as if rural areas are being left behind. Given this context, I’d like to quickly transition to a discussion about the political frustrations surrounding the Confederate flag. The Civil War was definitely fought over slavery, but does that make the Confederate flag racist? Probably. But I’d also like to consider what the Confederate flag symbolizes to many in the South. Growing up, Confederate flags were never really made out to be a big deal. I remember thinking nothing of the raised Confederate flags on the way to swim meets and camps. I remember the public outcry throughout the region when the school sent out an announcement banning Confederate attire. Even recently, right before I came to Stanford, I was driving home one night and pulled up next to a beat-up pickup truck flying two large Confederate flags at a traffic light. It felt pretty normal, albeit a little strange especially because of the earlier South Carolina flag controversy and the happenings in Charlottesville. This was the norm. The problem is just how commonplace these provocative items are in the region. These rural Southerners, a legislative minority, are painted as villains, outcasts for not seeing these items as strange in such an apparently “progressive” society. This is an issue because first off, no one likes being called a villain, and secondly, to many of these people – who have seen crumbling infrastructure, a stagnating economy and skyrocketing health care premiums (one of my older teachers always complained about his wife’s new insurance bill under Obamacare) – are we really that progressive? And how high should working out our flag issues be on our priorities list? Should we be arguing over a flag when there are places with exactly zero professional medical attention? I remember watching the local news and finding out that in nearby Wise County, Virginia, the only time people can receive medical attention is once a year, when a mobile clinic known as the Remove Area Medical arrives. General health is deteriorating every year as lung cancer and obesity set in. Things really aren’t looking up for the people here. The fact that a colored piece of cloth is generating the most media coverage instead of a terrible healthcare crisis here is a sort of a slap in the face to the coal miner with permanent nerve damage or the diabetic who can’t access insulin. We tend to separate the world into “us” and the “other,” but we fail to realize that the “other” may also be struggling to come to grips with the world too. There are definitely two sides to the argument, and I’m not advocating for any position. There are many parts of the country that need work. Racism is a huge problem that we need to solve as soon as possible. Denigrating an important bloc of people for the sake of making a point will only divide the nation even more. If we are to move forward and be “progressive,” we need to set aside distractions, unify in our actions and put our attention to the big picture. Contact Tiger Sun at tgsun ‘at’ stanford.edu.